The Mongol in Our Midst. A Study of Man and His Three Faces

London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., Ltd., 1924. First edition.

1924 BRITISH PHYSICIAN'S POPULAR REVIEW OF DOWN SYNDROME BASED ON MID-19TH CENTURY RACIST THEORY--COPY OF CONTEMPORARY FILMMAKER.

11x16 cm hardcover, red cloth binding, maroon paper covered boards with printed paper title on cover and spine. Ink inscription front free endpaper, "Sidney Morgan, Trosnant Villa, Pontypool [Wales] Nov 5th, 1925," frontispiece photo of "Peter, a London child (Mongolian Imbecile)," 128 pages. 29 plates. Light browning to page edges, unmarked and very good in custom archival mylar cover.

FRANCIS GRAHAM CROOKSHANK (1873 – 1933) was a British epidemiologist, trained at University College London, and University College Hospital. He was an enthusiast for both the individual psychology of Alfred Adler and the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche. He committed suicide in 1933, dying at his house in Wimpole Street. His The Mongol in our Midst (1924) aroused publicity with its degenerationist fears about Down syndrome. It advanced the now-discredited idea that so-called "Mongolian imbecility," a form of mental retardation now known as Down syndrome (a genetic disorder), was an atavistic throwback to the more primitive Mongoloid race. In The Mongol in Our Midst, Crookshank argued that "Mongolian imbecility" was the result of the distant racial history of the Caucasian parents, each of whom must also carry Mongol traits. That Caucasians bore this racial history was either the result of those individuals sharing a common Mongoloid ancestor, or of all Caucasians having distant Mongoloid ancestry. "Mongolian imbeciles", then, were atavistic throwbacks to that Mongoloid heritage, the modern emergence of which Crookshank believed was due to their incomplete development in the womb. As a consequence, "Mongolian imbeciles" were "a race apart. These ideas did not originate with Crookshank; the linkage of Down syndrome to the so-called Mongoloid race dated from the mid-19th century. Through The Mongol in Our Midst, however, Crookshank was successful in bringing it to a widespread, popular audience, and his book and thesis were well received at the time. Finding success with a popular audience, The Mongol in Our Midst was republished in two more editions, the third edition in 1931 with expanded anthropological and clinical references.

PROVENANCE: SIDNEY MORGAN (1874 - 1946) was an English film director, screenwriter, producer and actor. He directed 45 films between 1914 and 1937. As an actor he appeared in the Alfred Hitchcock film Juno and the Paycock.