Abstract
LORD DAWSON OF PENN, like Sir Arthur Keith, is one of the few scientific men who have the rare courage of forcing the public to listen to unpopular truth. Just as Sir Arthur Keith has repeatedly pointed out that war is not due to a perversion of human nature but is the inevitable result of increasing population and race pressure and is the means by which Nature decides which race shall “inherit the earth”, so Lord Dawson, in his recent address to the York Medical Society entitled “Medical Science and Social Progress”, has?not for the first time? raised the question of whether our philanthropic efforts to save the lives of all babies, however weakly, may not serve as actual hindrances to the future well-being and progress of our race. Lord Dawson asserts that, in the sixty-four years between 1870 and 1934, the infant death-rate has sunk from 156 to 60 per thousand, and of children under five years of age from 68 to 18 per thousand. The population during this time has increased by about fifty per cent, and the fact that there has not been a more spectacular increase is solely due to the concomitant fall in the birth-rate.
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M., E. Cultivation of the Unfit. Nature 137, 44–45 (1936). https://doi.org/10.1038/137044a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/137044a0