After King
George III spiraled into insanity in 1789, the study of human heredity began.
Research began at England's insane asylums. This was well before DNA was
discovered so to study heredity, people kept records and performed statistical
calculations. Family history in madness, disability, and crime were recorded
for those in asylums. Physicians considered severe mental deficits as a disease
and efforts to find relatives of the sick were put into place. The number of
patients institutionalized increased and discouraged the "sick" from
reproducing. Ludvig Dahl published family pedigrees of mental illness in 1859 using
detailed census records. Dahl helped to lay the groundwork to launch the
eugenics movement by 1900. After Mendel's work with peas, eugenicists’ hoped that people
inherited mental illness the same way peas inherit smooth or wrinkled skin.
This idea was rejected in 1920. German researchers began to collect data on
family traits of asylum patients which was later expanded by the Nazi's. This is
all discussed in a book called "Genetics in the Madhouse", by
Theodore M. Porter.
After coming across this article, I instantly became interested in
reading this book. It's fascinating how far we have come from these times.
After discovering DNA, it helped us understand genetics and heredity. The
science behind genetics today is so much different from what they believed it
was back then. It makes me wonder how much more we will learn in the future and
if anything we believe today will be proven wrong in years to come.
Link to related article
No comments:
Post a Comment