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25 C h a p t e r 1 “Pathologic Archaeology”: An Introduction France is the classic land of military valor. . . . The French of the nineteenth century had not degenerated and, to carry out what is most admirable in audacity, most noble in sacrifice, most sublime in abnegation, they had only to follow the penchant of their generous nature, only to obey suggestions from heredity and instinct.1 Heredity and History The principal nineteenth-century medical theory was hereditarianism, a theory of transmission of characteristics and dispositions in the process of organic reproduction. Hereditarianism was the scientific theorization of the permanence of form, meaning the reproduction of physical and mental traits transmitted over generations of descendants: “the tendency toward the regular transmission of traits . . . a legacy transmitted more or less loyally across an infinitely long chain of generations.”2 Laws of hereditary transmission were also derived from pathological deviations from normal heredity. Hereditary degeneration, which theorized this morbid, or pathological, heredity, thus became the companion theory of hereditarianism. Degeneration was understood as a process of irrevocable deterioration from generation to generation of the “race”—family lineage or lineage of the nation—resulting in degeneracy: sterility in the case of a family lineage and the decline of civilization in the case of a nation, both ending in extinction. Although the concept of heredity, degeneration (process), and degeneracy (result) were scientifically formulated at the very end of the eighteenth century, 26 Chapter 1 hereditarianism and hereditary degeneration began to be theorized as domains governed by laws of their own in the 1850s in publications by Prosper Lucas (Traité philosophique et physiologique de l’hérédité naturelle, 1847), BenedictAugustin Morel (Traité des dégénérescences physiques, intellectuelles et morales, 1857), and Jacques Moreau de Tours (La psychologie morbide dans ses rapports avec la philosophie de l’histoire, 1859).3 The end of the series of revolutions that had shaken France since 1789, and the fading of idealism after the failure of the revolutions of 1848 and the proclamation of the Second Empire by Napoleon III (1851–1870), gave a real impetus to positivism and scientism, making room for materialism. The pressures of psychological problems created by industrialization and social dislocation, along with the economic depression of the 1840s, gave impetus to medicine as the science holding the key to social problems . Medical space coincided with social space as physicians took on the task of social prophylaxis through public hygiene policies and sanitary control.4 Prevention of hereditary degeneration became the raison d’être for medical intervention on the body of the individual and in the body of the nation. By the 1880s and 1890s, hereditarianism and degeneration became highly influential and widespread medical theories in France and most of western Europe. At that time, French doctors began to reorient the debate away from biological , hereditary determinism and fatalism to environmental and sociological interpretation of criminality and degeneracy. Instead of degeneration, they emphasized the possibility of regeneration and rehabilitation, alongside reform of living conditions of population; eugenics, racially positive selection and improvement of the quality of the human race, shifted from negative to positive, that is, from attempts to prevent and eliminate morbid characteristics and pathologies to efforts at encouraging reproduction of healthy and desirable traits with higher birth rates.5 However, throughout the nineteenth century, the precise cause of transformation from normal to morbid heredity remained unidentified and most problematic. Theorists of degeneration were unable to establish the etiology of morbid heredity and how precisely a race— family lineage or nation—degenerates to the point of extinction: Were the causes biological (heredity) or social (milieu)? Was there an (organic) morbid hereditary predisposition and, if so, what was the determinant cause (la cause déterminante) that triggered its physiological or psychological manifestation?6 Consequently, what treatments and methods were possible and necessary for the regeneration of the race? Statements such as “the great question of heredity is far from having been elucidated”7 were repeated in virtually every work written on heredity in the second half of the nineteenth century and the turn “Pathologic Archaeology” 27 of the twentieth century. The insolubility of these questions and theoretical inconsistencies brought an end to hereditarianism in the early decades of the twentieth century. After August Weissman argued in 1885 that the germ cell nucleus (chromosome) is the repository of hereditary material, and Gregor Mendel’s work on the gene as the carrier of heredity was discovered in 1900, hereditarianism was definitively replaced in the...

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