This chronic state of lack of
nourishment ... accounts in part for the fact that there are two and
sometimes three persons affected in the same family."[10]
Has mental as well as physical health been affected? Lunacy is
extraordinarily prevalent in Ireland. In the lunacy inspectors' office in
Dublin castle, I was given the last comparison they had published of the
insanity rates in England and Wales, Scotland and Ireland. English and
Welsh insanity per 10,000 people was 40.8; Scottish, 45.4; Irish, 56.2. The
Irish rate for 1916 showed an increase to 57.1.[11]
Emigration, remark lunacy experts, fostered lunacy. Whole families withdrew
from certain districts. Consanguineous marriages became more frequent.
Weak-minded cousins wedded to bring forth weaker-minded children.
And Irish living conditions are a nemesis. They affect those who go as well
as those who stay. Commenting on the fact that the Irish contribute the
highest proportion of the white foreign-born population to the American
hospitals for the insane, as well as filling their own asylums, the lunacy
inspectors write: "As to why this should be, we can offer no reasoned
explanation: but just as the Irish famine was, apart from its direct
effects, responsible for so much physical and mental distress in the
country, so it would seem not improbable that the innutritious dietary and
other deprivations of the majority of the population of Ireland must, when
acting over many generations, have led to impaired nutrition of the nervous
system, and in this way have developed in the race those neuropathic and
psychopathic tendencies which are precursors of insanity.
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