Selective voluntary sterilization was recommended last night by Dr. Abraham Myerson, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, at a Eugenics symposium in the New Lecture Hall.
Such sterilization, Dr. Myerson said, should be limited only to manise depressives and the feeble minded, both of which diseases are largely hereditary. Epileptics and criminals, he stated, should not be sterilized since there is no evidence that either epilepsy or criminal tendencies are hereditary.
He urged caution in the sterilization of both the feeble minded and maniac depressives. Feeble minded persons are often good citizens and quite harmless, he said. They are useful in performing low grade work that a more intelligent person would not undertake.
A wholesale sterilization of maniac depressives might in the long run, he said, do more harm than good, for such a move would undoubtedly rob the world of many artistic geniuses.
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