Genetics and medicine in the United States, 1800 to 1922

Abstract

This book investigates the relationship between developments in the science of genetics and the clinical practice of medicine in the United States. Rushton shows how physicians first doubted, then slowly accepted, the relevance of Mendel's work for human heredity. The modern synthesis of cytology and genetics, which explained the inheritance of specific characters by the segregation of genes on the chromosomes of egg and sperm, was widely discussed in the medical community by 1910. By 1915, physicians began to recognize that the transmission of such human disorders as haemophilia, Huntington chorea, and Tay-Sachs disease fit the Mendelian model. Yet by the early 1920s, Rushton explains, progress had reached a near standstill. First, physicians were becoming convinced that genetic illness was relatively rare compared with such bacteriological diseases as tuberculosis, which posed a far more visible threat to public health. In addition, many physicians permitted their ethical objections to eugenics theories, increasingly embraced by genetics researchers, to colour their judgment of the research itself.