Abstract
THIS is a careful and conscientious discussion of a class of statistics that have never been so carefully discussed before, and have in consequence been interpreted by different writers in very different senses. There are two questions, both of which M. Tschouriloff answers in the affirmative, but which perhaps he does not always separate as clearly as could be wished; the one is whether the French and other civilised nations are deteriorating in their physique, and the other whether their deterioration is due to the abstraction of able-bodied men to serve and perish in the army. He has no doubt as to the deterioration in France, Sweden, and Saxony; thus, in the latter country, the number of men too infirm to serve as conscripts has largely increased of late years; in 1832–36, one-third of the men were rejected; in 1850–54, one-half. He quotes numerous medical authorities, whose opinions are printed in the article, “Recrutement,” in the Dictionnaire Médical, to show the evil effects of industrial occupation on the health of factory workmen, and alludes to many other interesting facts of the same nature. But the bulk of the work is occupied in tracing the effects of the conscription on the French race. The statistical examination of the returns of the medical examiners is of a necessity very complex, allowances and corrections having to be made on many grounds. Even so apparently simple a problem as that of determining the amount of vigour abstracted from a population by the absence of a given fraction of them during a limited period, such as that of the great war, is in reality very complicated, and requires the free use of tables of mortality and of fecundity for different ages. The upshot of the author's inquiries is to show that the amount so abstracted is much greater than appears at first sight to be the case. He therefore ascribes a very seriously damaging effect to the vigour of a population by the carrying on of great wars. It is truly sad to read the statistical tables of the increase in France of a long series of such hereditary diseases as scrofula, hare-lip, varicose veins, paralysis, madness, and skin maladies, due in large part to the propagation of the race by men who had been rejected as too infirm to serve in the army, and to so many of the healthy men having been destroyed or displaced. This treatise will become a standard work of reference, both in respect to its conclusions and to the statistical operations by which they have been attained.
Étude sur la Dégénerescence Physiologique des Peuples Civilisés.
M.
Tschouriloff
Par. (Paris: Leroux, 1876.)
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G., F. Étude sur la Dégénerescence Physiologique des Peuples Civilisés . Nature 15, 396 (1877). https://doi.org/10.1038/015396b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/015396b0