You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This volume represents the nineteenth series of Salmon Lectures delivered by the author who is a principal research scientist at the N. Y. Psychiatric Institute, and founder and chief of the only department of medical genetics of its kind in this country. In a sense this volume represents a recognition and summary of the author's research on the problems of inheritance of schizophrenia over a period of twenty-five years. In more ways than one, Kallman has been a voice crying out in the wilderness of psychiatry. Despite Freud's interest in constitutionally determined factors in neuroses and psychoses, this aspect has suffered under the general weight of bitter and hostile skepticism and from a “consistent neglect” of genetic factors in mental disorders. Always a shallow lip-service was paid, but no real effort given to reviewing and incorporating these same factors, no matter how well-founded or suggestive. The common myth, carried over from early in the century, has been that hereditary factors in disease must lead to therapeutic nihilism.
Kallman writes (page 238) “Thus genetic concepts are neither incompatible with principles of probative symptomatic treatment, nor apt to detract one iota from active therapeutic proceedures known to be effective under adequately controlled circumstances.” Predisposition is not disease; and if disease does manifest itself, it does not operate in a vacuum. The superstructure of psychological distortion is just as much, or as little, amenable to treatment regardless of genetic factors involved. Prevention and prophylaxis still remain vast unchartered areas in mental disease.
This book is a report of research now in progress, based on the study of thousands of pairs of twins and their families, and sums up the results of past work in this field. After a preliminary review, the general principles and methods of genetics and comparative twin observations on the genetic aspects of physical and mental health, the book divides itself into on