On his book Genetics in the Madhouse: The Unknown History of Human Heredity
Cover Interview of June 17, 2018
In a nutshell
Genetics in the Madhouse examines the study of human
heredity historically, from the ground up. The gene eventually comes into the
story, as anyone would expect, but in an odd and inglorious role. That is
partly because the story takes off more than a century before anyone ever spoke
of “genes” or “genetics,” about 1789. I focus on problems and places that
mattered for those who first labored to establish rules of hereditary
transmission in humans. Their chief concern, as I have tried to demonstrate,
was the terrible problem of madness. The science of human heredity first took
form in insane asylums.
Then, as now, heredity was a data science. The treatment of
mental illness underwent a radical reform beginning in the 1790s. The new moral
treatment aspired not to drive out demons but to cultivate the elements of
rationality that were retained even by the mad. Old forms of treatment were now
condemned as senseless and cruel. Insanity, the reformers proclaimed, was a
disease, whose victims were not to be blamed. The new asylum, replacing the old
“madhouse,” was to be scrupulously ordered and regulated. The public expense to
support these new institutions demanded scrupulous patient records, as well as
financial ones; annual reports were organized mainly around statistics. The
most important of these numbers, apart from demographic information on
admissions and outcomes, was the statistics of causes: appropriate tables made
heredity visible and even measurable.
It seems that the idea of inherited insanity was not really new,
not even in 1789. The tables of causes, which almost always showed heredity in
a lead role, were based mainly on what family members told the asylum doctors
in an admission interview. Inheritance of insanity was a familiar folk belief. About
1840, passive recording began to give way to determined investigation of family
members similarly affected. Instead of simply tallying the causes supplied to
them, doctors constructed increasingly elaborate tables to link causes with
disease forms and cure rates. By this time, a few doctors were using
institutionalized patients as a point of entry for investigations of insanity
as a family disease. Later in the century, they began calculating probabilities
of mental illness in the offspring based on the health status of the
progenitors. The documentation of causes now took on increasing urgency.
Insanity rates did not diminish in the face of new treatment ideals but
expanded unremittingly right through the nineteenth century and beyond. Soon it
was impossible to believe that medical treatment could turn back the insanity
explosion. Eugenics (as it came to be called), the effort to combat insanity by
preventing its victims from reproducing, arose very early as part of the
program.
All of this took place with very little involvement of scientific academies or universities. About 1900, when Mendelian genetics and a new biological statistics appeared on the scene as rival approaches to the medical and statistical science of heredity, their practitioners looked around and discovered that asylum doctors already commanded the expertise to analyze their unmatched data reserves.
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
In a nutshell
Genetics in the Madhouse examines the study of human heredity historically, from the ground up. The gene eventually comes into the story, as anyone would expect, but in an odd and inglorious role. That is partly because the story takes off more than a century before anyone ever spoke of “genes” or “genetics,” about 1789. I focus on problems and places that mattered for those who first labored to establish rules of hereditary transmission in humans. Their chief concern, as I have tried to demonstrate, was the terrible problem of madness. The science of human heredity first took form in insane asylums.
Then, as now, heredity was a data science. The treatment of mental illness underwent a radical reform beginning in the 1790s. The new moral treatment aspired not to drive out demons but to cultivate the elements of rationality that were retained even by the mad. Old forms of treatment were now condemned as senseless and cruel. Insanity, the reformers proclaimed, was a disease, whose victims were not to be blamed. The new asylum, replacing the old “madhouse,” was to be scrupulously ordered and regulated. The public expense to support these new institutions demanded scrupulous patient records, as well as financial ones; annual reports were organized mainly around statistics. The most important of these numbers, apart from demographic information on admissions and outcomes, was the statistics of causes: appropriate tables made heredity visible and even measurable.
It seems that the idea of inherited insanity was not really new, not even in 1789. The tables of causes, which almost always showed heredity in a lead role, were based mainly on what family members told the asylum doctors in an admission interview. Inheritance of insanity was a familiar folk belief. About 1840, passive recording began to give way to determined investigation of family members similarly affected. Instead of simply tallying the causes supplied to them, doctors constructed increasingly elaborate tables to link causes with disease forms and cure rates. By this time, a few doctors were using institutionalized patients as a point of entry for investigations of insanity as a family disease. Later in the century, they began calculating probabilities of mental illness in the offspring based on the health status of the progenitors. The documentation of causes now took on increasing urgency. Insanity rates did not diminish in the face of new treatment ideals but expanded unremittingly right through the nineteenth century and beyond. Soon it was impossible to believe that medical treatment could turn back the insanity explosion. Eugenics (as it came to be called), the effort to combat insanity by preventing its victims from reproducing, arose very early as part of the program.
All of this took place with very little involvement of scientific academies or universities. About 1900, when Mendelian genetics and a new biological statistics appeared on the scene as rival approaches to the medical and statistical science of heredity, their practitioners looked around and discovered that asylum doctors already commanded the expertise to analyze their unmatched data reserves.