The Hard Palate in Normal and Feebleminded Individuals
- Author:
Walter
REVIEWS AND CRITICISM.
Unarming, lYL.iJ., and Ulark Wissier, i n.jj. Anthropological tapers of the American Museum of Natural History. Yol. I, Part V. New York, 1908. Pp. 66 + 9 plates.
Thirty years ago Dr J. Langdon Down, who was then at the head of the Earlswood Asylum for the Feebleminded, in England, advanced a theory which is still rather widely accepted. He declared that a certain peculiarly shaped palate, generally “Y-shaped,” was pathognomonic of congenital idiocy. An able American dentist, Dr Norman W. Kingsley, who was unable to agree with Dr Down’s conclusions, visited the asylum, and together with Dr Down made a careful examination of every inmate. He found that “about two per cent might be said to be pronounced cases of narrowed or Y-shaped arches, and another five or ten per cent might be said to have more or less tendency in that direction; but of the more positive cases (he says) I did not see one so marked as I have seen and treated in private practice and associated with full intellectual development.”
For some inexplicable reason Dr Kingsley’s report failed to receive the attention it deserved, and Dr Down’s conclusions, for what now appear to us equally inexplicable reasons, have survived, gaining strength from the theory that malformations of certain structures, of which the hard palate is one, are to be regarded as “stigmata of degeneracy,” and in return supplying one of the most frequently quoted proofs of the stigmata theory.
Over ten years ago Dr Walter Channing undertook to test Dr. Down’s conclusions and assign to the palate its true value in the diagnosis of degeneracy. He obtained casts of the palates of a thousand feebleminded persons, and five hundred school children, and as a result of his investigation he announced the following conclusions:? “1. Two-fifths of the palates of idiots are of fairly good shape. “2. Palates of normal individuals may be deformed. “3. In the idiot it is a difference in degree, and not in kind. “4. In either case it shows irregular development anatomically. “5. Palates of average children and idiots, under eight years of age, probably do not in the majority of cases markedly differ. “6. There is no form of palate peculiar to idiocy. “7. The statement that a Y-shaped or other variety of palate is a ‘stigma of degeneracy’ remains to be proved.” Dr Channing’s paper was published in January, 1897, and since that time he has had no occasion to modify his views. The present investigation was undertaken in order to apply new anthropometrical methods to a study of the casts collected by Dr Channing and many additional casts of the palates of normal persons, with the purpose of reviewing his conclusions, and proving or disproving them. The measurements on which the study is based were made with an apparatus devised by Dr Franz Boas and so constructed that measurements are made in three carefully determined planes intersecting at right angles, and therefore are not subject to the errors which occur in the freehand use of calipers.
After determining the typical palate form for the normal-minded, the authors proceed to compare with it the measurements of the palates of the feebleminded. They discuss the evidence very thoroughly, and we cannot do better than give their conclusions in their own words,? “Our method reveals evidences of a slight difference in the degree but not in the kind of variability between the normal and feebleminded. … What difference there is shows apparently a slightly greater variability for the feebleminded. This difference, however, is distributed with approximate equality among the minimum and maximum values, thus failing to substantiate the assumption that the palates of the feebleminded are relatively narrow. Finally, all the differences we have discovered in size are too small to be detected by the eye, and hence are of no practical clinical value.”
Dr Channing and Dr Wissler have established beyond the possibility of a doubt the fact that the palate form, taken by itself, is of no weight whatever as a diagnostic sign of degeneracy. We need to be reminded now and again that “One swallow does not make a summer,” and that a single morphological cause produces no significant effect. It is greatly to be hoped that similar anthropometrical investigations will in time be undertaken for other parts of the body.
Disclaimer
The historical material in this project falls into one of three categories for clearances and permissions:
Material currently under copyright, made available with a Creative Commons license chosen by the publisher.
Material that is in the public domain
Material identified by the Welcome Trust as an Orphan Work, made available with a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
While we are in the process of adding metadata to the articles, please check the article at its original source for specific copyrights.