Summary

In the doctor’s home, Mary has her own bathroom and bedroom. Mary tells Jake in a letter that the doctor drinks alcohol. As Mary looks at the doctor’s books, she finds three of interest to her: On the Origin of the Species and Heredity, Relation to Eugenics, and The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeblemindedness. The latter tells of a man who had a baby with a woman he later found out to be feebleminded. He then married another woman and had a baby with her. The first baby had “inherited his mother’s mental defects and became a career criminal who fathered more feebleminded delinquents who begat more and so on” (173). The children from the man’s wife were productive members of society. Dr. Vogel wrote a speech in regards to this family lamenting how...