Mental disease. Among the Jews the proportion of insane has been
observed to be very large. From statistics collected by Buschan
he concludes that they are four to six times more liable to
mental disease than are non-Jews. Lombroso quotes Servi ("Gli
Israeliti di Europa," 1872) to the effect that in Italy there is
one insane among 391 Jews, nearly four times as many as among
the Catholic population of that country. Verga ("Archivio di
Statistico," 1880) shows that in 1870 there was one insane among
1,775 Catholics in Italy, while with the Jews it reached the
alarming proportion of one insane in 384 of population. A
similar phenomenon has been observed in other countries. In the
various provinces of Germany and also in Denmark the percentage
of Jewish insane is very large, as is seen from the figures in
the appended table: |Country.||Year.||Insane to
10,000.||Authority.|
|Prussia||1871||Catholics||8.84||16.79||"Preussische Statistik,"
QI 1883, xxx. 137.| |"||1880||Catholics||12.37||38.9||ib. 1883,
p. xlii.| |"