Arabella Kenealy
Extract
(Letter explains why she declined to treat a pregnant woman for syphilis, prevent spontaneous abortion). Nor can mercury by any possibility so affect the evolutionary impulse of an embryo as to carry it beyond the type Mongolian. For it would seem that the effect of syphilis is to retard evolution in such wise that from Caucasian parents an offspring characteristically Mongolian results-and that not a healthy but a maimed Mongolian. . . I could not persuade myself that the prevention of abortion by mercury argues that mercury is capable of bringing an embryonic child up to the desired human standard. I could not hope that its administration would do more than so enfeeble the mother’s physical conscience, and render it so insensate that it would fail to repudiate that which it was the bounden duty of its evolutionary instinct to repudiate.
Kenealy A. (Correspondence) A Question of Conscience. Br Med J. 1895;2(1811):682.