Morel
"Discovers" Degeneration
France, 1857. Benedict
Augustin Morel (1809-1873), a French doctor, published Traite des degenerescence
physique, et intellectuelles et morales de l'espece humaine in which he argued that
disparate illnesses, physical, intellectual, and moral, are all caused by a single
process: degeneration. Morel's diagnosis quickly became popular in Continental
Europe, though his new theories were less successful in England and the United States.
Origins of Degeneracy Theory
Morel finished his medical studies after a late start - he was thirty
years old when he finally earned his degree. He hoped to develop a private practice
so he opened an office, but it never flourished because he never developed the wealthy
clientele that would have made it a success. Fortunately for him, he made some
professional connections in important places and he was introduced to one of the senior
physicians at Salpetriere, France's largest and most famous asylum for the mentally ill.
Morel was offered a residency at Salpetriere and he accepted, relieved to
find a job that freed him from his failing private practice. Psychiatry seems to
have agreed with him, and when he got the chance, he traveled all over Europe to study
that state of the art of psychiatry as it was practiced in asylums in other
countries. He discovered that foreign experts concurred with their French colleagues
about the causes of mental illness. Most agreed that insanity results from
hereditary defects.
The problem that propelled Morel to international fame was a disfiguring
form of mental retardation called cretinism. The science of Morel's day was so
primitive that he had no way to know that cretinism is caused by iodine deficiency and he
concluded that like most mental illnesses, cretins suffer from an incurable hereditary
disorder. Cretins, he reasoned, contribute little to society and they present a
genetic risk. He feared that if they were allowed to reproduce, they would beget
more cretins and damage France's genetic heritage. In his 1857 book he created a new
medical diagnosis to account for Cretin's symptoms and he called it degeneration.
Degeneration as an idea was not new. In fact, many French physicians and
intellectuals feared that France and her people were in a dangerous state of decline.
When the Enlightenment promise of the inevitable progress of rational Western
(especially French) Civilization was called into question by the bloodbaths and mob rule
of the revolution, the defeats of the Napoleonic wars, and the instability of the
government in 19th Century France, many Frenchmen became pessimistic. The most
disconsolate concluded that the progress of French civilization in the 18th Century had
collapsed into a state of devolution in the 19th.
In 1857 when Morel published his Traite des degenerescence physique,
intellectuelles et morales de l'espece humaine, he transformed this broader concept
of national devolution into a medical disorder to account for Cretinism and a
variety of other ills.
The Nature and Causes of Degeneration
The biological mechanics of heredity were poorly understood at
mid-Century, but like most doctors, Morel was convinced that it was the cause of much
illness, mental and physical. What was unique in Morel's formulation was his theory
of the causes of hereditary degeneration.
According to Morel, whose moralistic streak probably dates from his
teenage years in a Roman Catholic seminary, the over-consumption of alcohol, tobacco, and
opium are the leading causes of damage to the human organism that leads to
degeneration. Morel taught that a man damaged by overindulgence in these and other
appetites develops illnesses and weakens his heredity. He passes his weakened state
to his progeny in his sperm. His children are doomed to ill health, and may suffer
from a variety of mental and physical disorders. Worse yet, Morel argued that
degeneracy is cumulative, so the grandchildren of an over-indulging man will be even
weaker than his children. Eventually, after four generations or so, the
degenerate line ends because in this late stage, the children are born sterile
imbeciles.
Degeneracy was a theory that unified diseases that doctors had once
thought were separate disorders. When a patient presented symptoms of tuberculosis,
hysteria, or cretinism, Morel did not see separate diseases, but different expressions
of a single underlying disorder, degenerate heredity.
Morel's Legacy
Morel didn't invent degeneracy, but he did create the medical diagnosis.
One of the effects of his views was pessimism about treatment: the degenerate, suffering
hereditary taint, was best kept in an asylum to prevent the spread of the bad habits that
lead to degeneracy and to inhibit degenerate reproduction. Since it explained insanity and
abnormality, the idea was applied, in its scientific version, by Richard
von Krafft-Ebing in 1877 to "sexual perverts". In his case studies of
"congenital inverts", Krafft-Ebing unfailingly found both hereditary taint and
the "stigmata", or physical signs, of degeneration. In Italy Cesare Lombroso
applied the idea of degeneracy to undesirables of every kind, most notably to the
"born criminal".
Degeneracy didn't fare so well in England where it was viewed as a foreign
idea, and was relegated to the English fringe. The British sex psychologist
Havelock Ellis, though he had a strong hereditarian bent, explicitly rejected the idea of
degeneracy in his Sexual Inversion of 1897 as did Sigmund Freud in his Three Essays
in 1905.
Morel and other degenerationists have been accused of complicity in the
holocaust because of their emphasis on hereditary, incurable, degenerative processes in
families and in races, and their zeal to prevent degenerates from reproducing. While ideas
of degeneracy and racial purity were essential components of the Nazi extermination
campaigns, Morel's contemporaries viewed him as a kind enlightened man. He did
recommend incarceration for degenerates, but he advocated the creation of comfortable
mountain asylums where they could live unrestrained. Eichmannn et al, using the
justification of "racial purity," went well beyond Morel's early vision in their
extermination of Jews, homosexuals, and other "degenerate" minorities during the
holocaust.
References and Further Reading
Drinka, George F., 1984. The Birth of Neurosis. New York: Simon
and Schuster.
Ellis, Havelock, 1919 [1897]. Sexual Inversion. Philadelphia: F.
A. Davis.
Freud, Sigmund, 1905. "Three Essays on the Theory of
Sexuality." in Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of
Sigmund Freud. Vol. VII.
Kennedy, Hubert, 1988. Ulrichs: The Life and Work of Karl Heinrich
Ulrichs. Boston: Alyson.
Pick, Daniel, 1989. Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c.1848
- c.1918. New York: Cambridge University Press.
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© 1999
Andrew Wikholm
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