Medicine: Inbreeding

It is commonly thought that marriage of first cousins is bad for the health of their descendants. On the other hand, students of Eugenics are convinced from the study of such cases that these marriages are not necessarily bad, except when they tend to intensify certain bad traits that may happen to be dominant in both of the persons intermarrying. Dr. Douglas P. Murphy, of Rutherforton, N. C, now describes a case of a family whose earliest known member from Germany settled in Pennsylvania in 1731. His descendants have remained to a great extent in the same locality and have remarried to a large extent. Every member of the family that lived to adult age married and had many children. There were seven cases of marriages between first cousins. This seemed to have no effect on the number of children or on their health. There appeared to be no record of physical abnormalities anywhere in the family, and there was only one case of slightly impaired mentality. The only factor noted which might seem to be unusual was the high infant mortality rate, and it was Doctor Murphy's belief that the exceptionally high infant death rate might have resulted from the constant inbreeding.