Madness in Numbers

Abstract

In Genetics in the Madhouse, Theodore Porter retraces the study of human heredity to its origins in the lunatic asylums of the 18th and 19th centuries. Preceding the discovery of DNA by more than a century, the field emerged far from the laboratory, “amid the moans, stench, and unruly despair of mostly hidden places, where data were recorded, combined, and grouped into tables and graphs.”