Heredity Explored: Between Public Domain and Experimental Science, 1850–1930 ed. by Staffan Müller-Wille and Christina Brandt (review)

“Studies in Mendelism and Its Multiple Contexts” would be a more plain-speaking subtitle for this outstanding volume. Its sixteen chapters touch on everything from asylums, bachelors, and cousin marriage to Wilhelm Weinberg (of “Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium” fame), X-ray mutagenesis, and Zionist medicine. But the rise of Mendelism or, to use the later and better-known name, “genetics,” is a recurring motif, and toward the end of the volume, it becomes an explicit focus. As the editors explain in their introduction, the overall aim is to enlarge and complicate historical understanding of the diverse, heredity-related ideas, ideologies, practices, and institutions with which Mendelism meshed—or failed to mesh—as its partisans took ownership of the twentieth-century science of heredity.

No brief review can do justice to so rich a collection of scholarship. One chapter that is in every sense exemplary is Theodore M. Porter’s about asylums. By the end of the nineteenth century, Porter shows, psychiatrists internationally took it for granted that insanity, “feeble-mindedness,” and other forms of mental defect were wholly or partly hereditary; indeed, they increasingly conceptualized those defects and their hereditary causes along atomistic, proto-Mendelian lines. Throughout the same period, the recording of data, including family-history data, about the unfortunate people housed in the growing numbers of asylums became part of the standard, bureaucratized, statistically informed management of those institutions and, by extension, of the state. Officials became ever more alarmed by the statistical signs of widespread degeneration, and the more eager for expert counsel. Far from Mendelism transforming the study of human heredity, heredity, writes Porter, “had already evolved within psychiatric classification and statistics in such a way that many aspects of . . . Mendelism could be assimilated without threatening its basic structure” (95). The subsequent integration of asylum statistics and Mendelism with eugenics became the mission of the Eugenics Record Office—founded in Cold Spring Harbor, New York, in 1910—which quickly became the progenitor of claims for the Mendelian nature of insanity, criminality, and other undesirable traits.

If, on the ample evidence provided in this book, Mendelism was a thoroughly interdisciplinary affair, the same cannot be said for the historical study of Mendelism. To be sure, the chapters vary considerably in scope and style. Some of them take whole fields of wide-ranging, transnational endeavor as the unit of analysis and others concentrate on particular scientists or achievements. Some of them cover topics that became the stuff of textbooks, and others consider only marginalized and unfamiliar matters. Agriculture and medicine receive their due, along with “the public domain”; so does a debate on the meaning of regression for evolution. Literary studies have their moment, as do gender studies. Nevertheless, broadly speaking, the volume is recognizable as a cultural history of scientific ideas, based on the interpretation of selected texts, mostly published but also unpublished.

The sole chapter co-authored by a scientist—Diane B. Paul and Hamish Spencer (an evolutionary geneticist), “Eugenics without Eugenicists? Anglo- American Critiques of Cousin Marriage in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries”—offers minor but intriguing exceptions. A graph charting the increase over time in American states outlawing cousin marriage is a small gesture toward more systematic approaches to evidence gathering (51). So, in a different, digital-humanities mode, is a footnote reporting newspaper database searches to test a possible explanation for why Europe went a different way from the United States regarding cousin marriage (73, n. 74). Diversifying the methods used for making historical sense of Mendelism—and developing the disciplinary alliances needed to make it happen—are tasks whose prospects this volume makes tantalizing.