Category: Eugenics, Genetics

(Correspondence) A Question of Conscience

MG Biggs

British Medical Journal, BMJ
British Medical Journal

Extract
The sight of such an unfortunate child could not fail to produce the deepest compassion, and even indignation, when one records the fact that syphilis is a preventable disease, but when this induces Dr. Kenealy to tear up her prescription surely it is mere continentalism, and also a running away from the bounden duty of relieving the unhappy mother and yet unborn child, to save whom she was called in.

Biggs M. (Correspondence) A Question of Conscience. Br Med J. 1895;2(1813):806-807.

(Correspondence) A Question of Conscience

TCA

British Medical Journal, BMJ
British Medical Journal

Extract
A physician is called in to a pregnant woman in whom abortion threatens. The disturbance is found to be due to syphilis. The physician retires to another room . . .to write a prescription. There she sees a child of the same woman which she finds to be diseased. . . . the physician, finding the child an uncomfortable object, deprives the mother of the antidote prepared for her in order that the foetus in utero may abort. . . Miss Kenealy will no doubt admit that it is constructively the same thing as to procure abortion. . .I think Miss Kenealy’s attitude is defective.

TCA. (Correspondence) A Question of Conscience. Br Med J. 1895;2(1812):746-747.

(Correspondence) A Question of Conscience

Arabella Kenealy

British Medical Journal, BMJ
British Medical Journal

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.