Word: hootons
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...confirmed pessimist as well as a distinguished, patient and learned anthropologist is Dr. Ernest Albert Hooton of Harvard University. Dr. Hooton doubts whether man's evolutionary status has improved appreciably since the end of the Glacial Ages, believes it will get worse unless "the reckless and copious breeding of protected inferiors" is stopped...
That his sardonic mind can also generate constructive ideas, Dr. Hooton proved last week in the leading article of Science, entitled "An Anthropologist Looks at Medicine." Therein he suggested a common ground whereon Anthropology and Medicine might get together for the benefit of mankind...
Medicine and physical anthropology are the only two fields of knowledge concerned exclusively with human biology. Medicine is much more important to the ordinary man, hence is much more lavishly endowed. "Anthropology," explains Dr. Hooton, "reveals many things which most persons prefer not to know, since it harps upon humble and even bestial origins, regards the present status of our species without approbation and can predict for the man of the future no apotheosis but only a multiplication of psychoses, dental caries, malocclusions and fallen arches, together with a full retention of his aboriginal cussedness...
Medicine's store of clinical experience shows gaps which Anthropologist Hooton believes anthropological methods might well help to fill in. "Medical science is nurtured in the fetid atmosphere of pathology and has no chance to breathe pure ozone in the congregation of mentes sanae in corporibus sanis. . . . Doctors are so preoccupied with the sick that they do not know the well and are forced to evolve the normal from their inner consciousness, as the German scholar evolved the camel...
...Pittsburgh last week during the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting (see p. 50) Dr. Hooton delivered a tart ultimatum : "What we must avoid is a progressive deterioration of mankind as a result of the reckless and copious breeding of protected inferiors. We have not the knowledge to breed supermen, but we can limit the reproduction of criminals and mental defectives. Let us cease to delude ourselves that education, religion or other measures of social amelioration can transform base metal into gold. Public enemies must be destroyed-not reformed...