Tuberculosis was clearly one of the most predominant diseases of the early twentieth century. At this time, Americans involved in the eugenics movement grew increasingly interested in methods to prevent this disease's potential hereditary spread. To do so, as this essay examines, eugenicists' attempted to shift the accepted view that tuberculosis arose from infection and contagion to a view of its heritable nature. The methods that they employed to better understand the propagation and control of tuberculosis are also discussed. Finally, the essay explores the interpretative analyses of data that the Eugenics Record Office used in an attempt to convince contemporaries of the hereditary transmission of tuberculosis.
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Notes
Coker, From Chaos to Coercion, 4–5.
Richard Coker cites World Health Organization estimates that 8 million individuals contract tuberculosis every year and that 3 million die of this disease annually. For a recent comprehensive account of tuberculosis from a United States perspective, see Friedman.
See Bloom and Murray, Chowder, and Dye, et al.
Galton, “Probability the Foundation of Eugenics,” 81.
Eugenics, a term literally denoting ``pure breeding,'' has spawned considerable interdisciplinary scholarly interest over the past decade. Monographs that focus primarily upon eugenics in the United States include Kevles, Reilly, Trent, Larson, Noll, Paul, Maranto, Hasian, Pernick, and Selden. See also the special issue of Science In Context (Autumn-Winter 1998) vol. 11 devoted to eugenics and the thematic issue of Patterns of Prejudice (2002) vol. 36 that explores ``The Old Eugenics and The New Genetics.'' For a history of the questionable hereditary aspect of one type of tuberculosis during nineteenth-century Europe, see Lomax. For a discussion of tuberculosis as viewed by British eugenicists, see Worboys (1999 and 2001)
Davenport, ``Mendel's Law,'' 307–310.
Wilson, ``Some Recent Studies in Heredity,'' 200–222.
Davenport, ``Eugenics & the Physician,'' 6.
Ibid., 7.
Allen, “Eugenics Record Office,” 225–264.
Bix, ``Experiences & Voices of Eugenics Fieldworkers,'' 625–668.
Collins, ``Progress of Eugenics,'' 459.
Laughlin, ``The Socially Inadequate,'' 68.
Wilson, ``Eugenicist Harry Laughlin's Crusade,'' 49–67.
See Trent, Inventing the Feeble Mind, and Noll, Feeble-Minded in Our Midst.
Laughlin, Background material.
Ott, Fevered Lives, 69–71.
DeSalle, ``Epidemics,'' 86.
Lewis, The Relation of Heredity to Tuberculosis, 178.
Pearson, Tuberculosis, Heredity and Environment, 3.
Jacobs, The Campaign Against Tuberculosis in the United States.
Dubos & Dubos, The White Plague, 59.
Hayes, The Burdens of Disease, 154–177 and Triumphant through Tuberculosis, 77 discussed the connection that Moorman and others have drawn to tuberculosis by documenting its particular wrath among the poor, undernourished individuals during the nineteenth century.
Ott, 128.
Davenport, Eugenics & the Physician, 11–12.
Fisher, ``The Cost of Tuberculosis,'' 32–33.
Laughlin, Background material.
Feldberg, Disease & Class, 106. A closer scrutiny of the sources provides significant data to refute Feldberg's claim that ``neither logic nor epidemiological evidence supported the hereditarian argument.''
Ackernecht, “Diathesis,” 317–325.
``Tuberculosis,'' Encyclopedia Britannica, 537.
Knopf, ``Eugenics in its Relation to the Tuberculosis Problem,'' 300. Knopf continues to describe the ``habitus phthisicus'' as ``a constitution below par, a cylindrical or flat chest, long body, deficient muscular development and little adipose tissue, a tendency to contracting infectious diseases, and a particularly suitable field for the invasion and spread of the tubercle bacillus.''
Ott, 19.
Johnston, ``Tuberculosis,'' 1060. He extends the time frame of this argument, claiming that all of the ``extensive research on heredity'' as a causal factor in tuberculosis throughout the 20th century ``produced only ambiguous results.''
Kellicott, Social Direction of Human Evolution, 168–172.
In more recent times, McKeown received much attention for similar claims although some like L.G. Wilson have challenged his claims. For insightful and succinct summaries of tuberculosis from the public health vantage point, see Rothman and Fairchild and Oppenheimer.
Pearson, 28 and 38.
Govaerts, ``The Hereditary Factor,'' 553.
Kellogg file.
Govaerts, “The Hereditary Factor,” 549. This work was reprinted in 1922 as Eugenics Record Office Bulletin, vol. 23. Govaerts also shared his findings in Eugenics Review (1925). Following his year at the ERO, Govaerts returned to his homeland where, in 1922, he established a national organization, the Société Belge d'Eugénique. In January 1923, he established a eugenics inquiry office within the Clique Quinton in Brussels.
Teller briefly summarized Ales Hrdlicka's investigations of tuberculosis in Native Americans and Theodore Sach's similar investigations among the Jews (pp. 97–98). Kraut notes that despite the statistical evidence, Eastern European Jewish immigrants were so ``frequently associated in the public mind with tuberculosis,'' that it became regarded as ``a Jewish disease'' (pp. 155–158). For a discussion of tuberculosis among the black populations in antebellum United States, see Feldberg (pp. 28–29) and, for a slightly later period, Torchia. H.G. Carter offered further contemporary distinctions of tuberculosis suffering between Negroes and mulattos.
The immigrant as transporter of tuberculosis was a prevalent theme in popular writings of the period. This imagery still finds its way into the literature, such as in Ott's recent depiction of the tie between germs, immigrants and society. She claimed that ``Rapidly reducing germs threatened American bodies in the same way that `hordes' of unwashed immigrants with large families sought entrance into the American social body'' (p. 67). Such passages evoke symbolic imagery suggestive of Susan Sontag's poignant and compelling analysis of the social attitudes towards tuberculosis based upon the use of metaphors in Illness as Metaphor, first published as a series in the New York Review of Books, vols. 24 and 25, and reprinted with an essay bringing her thesis into the culture of AIDS as Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and its Metaphors.
Norfolk physician, Charles R. Grandy, concluded that the higher mortality among blacks was ``due to a racial lack of resistance, the result of … [the black's] relatively short period of contact with the disease, rather than to bodily weakness or manner of living … .''
Pearl, ``The Relative Influence of the Constitutional Factor,'' 688–712.
Wright, ``The Effects of Inbreeding and Crossbreeding Pigs,'' 20–25.
Lewis, 181.
Govaerts, ``The Hereditary Factor,'' 553.
Ibid., 554–563.
Ibid., 564.
Govaerts, “The Influence of Heredity,” np.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Rusker, ``More `Eugenics Laws,''' 224 and 219.
Adams, Tubercle, 23.
Drolet, ``The Inheritance Factor,'' 44–45.
Knopf, 300.
Lerner, ``Constructing Medical Indications,'' 362–379.
Jordan, ``The Place of Eugenics,'' 398.
Emerson, ``Eugenics in Relation to Medicine,'' 66–68, 70.
Rosen, Preventive Medicine in the U.S. 1900–1925.
Rushton, Genetics & Medicine in the U.S. 1600–1922, 76–77.
Ott, 112.
Myers, ``Lessons for Physicians,'' 383–384.
Yoxen discussed many stimulating sociological ideas regarding why and how certain diseases become professionally and publicly termed ``genetic'' diseases. For an in-depth history of ideas approach toward explaining the ``genetic'' concept applied to some diseases, see Barton Childs.
Puffer, Familial Susceptibility, 79.
Von Verschuer, “Twin Research,” 62.
Puffer, 86, 89.
Dubos & Dubos, 124–125.
Ibid., 189.
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Acknowledgments
Portions of the research for this essay were undertaken as an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellow at the American Philosophical Society Library. I am grateful for the additional helpful suggestions provided by David M. Morens and Robert C. Olby.
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Wilson, P.K. Confronting “Hereditary” Disease: Eugenic Attempts to Eliminate Tuberculosis in Progressive Era America. J Med Humanit 27, 19–37 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-005-9001-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-005-9001-6