“Like Produces Like”: Popular Conceptions of Heredity in Canada, 1860-1900.

by

Riiko Olivia Bedford

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology University of Toronto

© Copyright by Riiko Bedford 2017 “Like Produces Like”: Popular Conceptions of Heredity in Canada, 1860-1900.

Riiko Bedford Doctor of Philosophy Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology University of Toronto 2017

Abstract

This dissertation examines popular conceptions of heredity in Canada between 1860-

1900. I focus on three bodies of literature in which ideas about heredity were explored, discussed, and negotiated: farmers’ and breeders’ periodicals, written by and for farmers and animal breeders; medical advice manuals aimed at wives and mothers; and the publications of the prominent reform organization, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU).

Specifically, I ask: how did these three groups understand the nature of heredity, how did this affect the ways they interacted with the world, and where did these ideas about heredity come from? In each case, I examine the particular notions of heredity they embraced, their sources, and how such notions were forged and operationalized to make sense of and order both the natural and the social worlds. I show how popular notions of heredity interacted with the interests and aspirations of the people who engaged with them. By examining the contours and sources of popular ideas about heredity, my research also helps untangle and make clear aspects of the complex circulation of scientific knowledge in late 19th century

Canadian society. This dissertation demonstrate the role of these three distinct bodies of literature in the circulation of knowledge about heredity, and in the active discussion and negotiation about its broader social meanings. These media, which were themselves

ii interconnected and mutually influential, exposed their readers to a range of sources and ways of knowing about heredity. They encouraged Canadians to think about the nature of heredity and its relevance to the health of their bodies and minds, their families, and the body politic.

iii Acknowledgments

I am grateful to many people who have helped me in writing this dissertation.

In the first place, I would like to thank my supervisor, Nikolai Krementsov, for his continued support and guidance during the process of writing this thesis. His high standards helped me improve my research and writing, and his encouragement and pragmatic advice made the daunting task of writing a doctoral dissertation seem possible and even fun. I would also like to thank my co-supervisor, Marga Vicedo, for her valuable advice throughout this process. In particular, I owe her thanks for the careful assistance and guidance she gave during my preparation for the specialist exam, which laid the groundwork for this project. I thank my third committee member, Bernard Lightman, as well, for his helpful and interesting suggestions and for his positive encouragement.

I owe thanks to many friends as well. Thanks to Liz Koester and Kira Lussier, who have read and heard me talk about too many versions of my third chapter, and who have provided advice, support, and comic relief throughout the process of course work and producing a dissertation. Thanks to Janaya, Bob, Sarah, Jordan, Paul, Adam, and Steve, for being my extended family the last several years, with whom I could commiserate about, and enjoy the special perks of, that unusual stage of life which is graduate school.

There were times when my parents, Sue Tatemichi and David Bedford, believed in me more than I did and I can’t thank them enough for that. I treasure the many interesting conversations — sometimes on the phone, sometimes over toast and tea — that I shared with my father about my project over these last few years. I thank my parents as well for always

iv being ready to jump in and help me get some work done by spending time with my increasingly mobile and busy son.

My husband, Tom Cheney, has been a source of constant support and delicious food. Writing this dissertation would not have been possible — or at least, would have been much less fun

— without him. He often prioritized my writing over his own, for which I am extremely grateful. Finally, I thank Owen, for being a daily source of wonder and joy, and for keeping me on my toes and motivated to keep working.

v Table of Contents

Abstract ...... ii

Acknowledgments ...... iv

Table of Contents ...... vi

Introduction ...... 1

Outline of the Dissertation ...... 15

Chapter 1 — Heredity on the Farm: The Periodical Literature of Amateur Breeders and Farmers ...... 20

1.1 Introduction ...... 20

1.2 History of Agricultural Periodicals in the 19th Century ...... 23

1.3 Discussions of Heredity in Canadian Agricultural Journals ...... 32

1.3.1 Heredity, Prepotency, and Blood ...... 34

1.3.2 Breeding Techniques: Breeding In-and-In ...... 43

1.3.3 On the Sexes ...... 52

1.3.4 Heredity of Disease ...... 62

1.4 Sources of Knowledge about Heredity ...... 66

1.5 Conclusion ...... 75

Chapter 2 — Heredity in the Home: Domestic Medical Advice Manuals ...... 79

2.1 Introduction ...... 79

2.2 Domestic Medical Manuals in 19th-Century North America ...... 82

2.3 Heredity in Domestic Medical Manuals ...... 91

2.3.1 Heredity and Disease ...... 95

2.3.2 Heredity, Prenatal Influences, and Lifestyle ...... 105

2.3.3 Heredity, Marriage, and Race ...... 114

vi 2.3.4 Heredity and Alcoholism ...... 126

2.3.5 Heredity and Domestic Medical Manuals ...... 129

2.4 Sources of Knowledge about Heredity ...... 133

2.5 Conclusion ...... 146

Chapter 3 — Heredity and Morality: the Canadian WCTU and Social Reform ...... 152

3.1 Introduction ...... 152

3.2 History of the WCTU in Canada ...... 157

3.2.1 Departments of Heredity ...... 159

3.3 Ontario WCTU’s Conception of Heredity ...... 164

3.3.1 Alcoholism and Heredity ...... 166

3.3.2 Heredity as a Religious Concept ...... 169

3.4 The National (American) WCTU ...... 173

3.4.1 Department of Heredity ...... 174

3.4.2 Ambiguity of Heredity ...... 177

3.4.3 Heredity as Force ...... 179

3.4.4 Malleability of Heredity ...... 183

3.5 Sources of Knowledge about Heredity ...... 187

3.6 Conclusion ...... 199

Conclusion ...... 203

Epilogue: Eugenics ...... 219

Breeders, Farmers, and Agricultural Periodicals ...... 222

Domestic Medical Manuals ...... 223

The Ontario WCTU ...... 225

vii

Introduction

This dissertation examines popular conceptions of heredity in Canada between 1860 and 1900. This period, book-ended by the publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species and the rediscovery of Gregor Mendel’s “laws of hybridization,” was characterized by the proliferation of popular and scientific theories of heredity. I focus on three bodies of literature in which ideas about heredity were explored, discussed, and negotiated: farmers’ and breeders’ periodicals, domestic medical advice manuals, and publications of the prominent reform organization, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). In each case, I examine the particular notions of heredity they embraced, their sources, and how such notions were forged and operationalized to make sense of and order both the natural and the social worlds. I show how popular notions of heredity interacted with the interests and aspirations of the people who engaged with them. By examining the contours and sources of popular ideas about heredity, my research also helps untangle and make clear aspects of the complex circulation of scientific knowledge in late 19th century Canadian society. I demonstrate that these three distinct bodies of literature functioned simultaneously as the sources, sites of production, and nodes of exchange of certain ideas about heredity for different groups of Canadians. These media, which were themselves interconnected and mutually influential, exposed their readers to a range of sources and ways of knowing about heredity. They encouraged Canadians to think about the nature of heredity and its relevance to the health of their bodies and minds, their families, and the body politic.

1 2

Prior to the 19th century, the biological phenomena of heredity did not constitute a distinct area of inquiry.1 Since antiquity, people had recognized that plants, animals, and humans produced offspring of their own kind. It was taken for granted that oak trees always produced oak trees and that families produced children that resembled their parents. Yet, the reasons for these similarities were understood to be rooted in the processes of generation itself. The shared conditions surrounding conception, gestation, and development accounted for the likenesses between members of a family or species.2 Notions of inheritance originally had social and juridicial meanings, referring to the transmission of possessions down family lines. Importantly, rules of inheritance were organized around systems of classifying relations between kin. Yet, these were only occasionally used in a biological sense, and then only metaphorically — typically by physicians trying to describe the tendency of certain diseases, such as gout or consumption, for example, to reappear within generations of the same family.3 In the early modern period, the increased transportation of people, plants, and animals from their traditional environments associated with European colonization brought into question the natural conjunction between conditions of upbringing and uniformity of type: tropical plants brought back into botanical gardens continued to produce their kind, as did stock animals sent to colonies abroad.4 A recognition of this constancy in the face of changing environmental conditions was a crucial pre-condition for identifying hereditary

1 In what follows, I outline the broad contours of the history of heredity in which the present study is situated. The account I give is the dominant narrative that comes out of the historical literature on the cultural history of heredity, exemplified by Müller-Wille and Rheinberger’s A Cultural History of Heredity. 2 Müller-Wille and Rheinberger, Cultural History, 15-21; Falk, Genetic Analysis, 11-12; Churchill, “From Heredity to Vererbung.” 3 Müller-Wille and Rheinberger, Cultural History, 7, 42-52; Falk, Genetic Analysis, 15. 4 Müller-Wille and Rheinberger, “Introduction,” 4; Falk, Genetic Analysis, 11-13.

3 phenomena as distinct from the processes of generation and development. Yet, while it was not until the middle of the 19th century that explicit concepts of heredity came to occupy a central position in the life sciences, the foundations for the study of heredity were laid in several different domains.

In the first place, a long history of legal and political debates surrounding the organization of the inheritance of family property stimulated thinking about the transmission of goods down familial lines, encouraged broader analyses of kinship and genealogy, and provided the basic language of inheritance which the natural sciences would later adopt.5

Developments in the study of plant, animal, and human biology in the 17th and 18th centuries contributed as well in creating a space for the study of heredity as a distinct and fundamental biological process. Anthropologists studying human races, and natural historians studying plants and animals, for example, increasingly dealt with questions about variation and constancy in the context of greater global transportation. Driven by practical necessity and economic interest, plant and animal breeders additionally developed a standard vocabulary and set of practices in their efforts to predict and control the qualities of the offspring of their organisms. The work of Robert Bakewell (1725-1795) and his associates in creating the

Dishley breed of sheep and in consolidating a new method of breeding is representative of this process. In so doing, breeders such as Bakewell began to clarify and make evident some of the major features of hereditary transmission.6 Finally, physicians studying familial diseases were also critical in articulating a concept of heredity, and in using the language of

5 Müller-Wille and Rheinberger, Cultural History, 45-52. 6 Müller-Wille and Rheinberger, Cultural History, 58-69; Wood and Orel, Genetic Prehistory, 58-93; Waller, “Ideas of Heredity.”

4 inheritance in a biological sense.7 Importantly, it was within discussions among physicians on the inheritance of unusual features or deformities that the adjective “hereditary” was reified to a concept of “heredity” as a thing in the first half of the 19th century.8

In the early part of the 19th century, a general biological notion of heredity emerged from the gradual confluence of these different domains in which the phenomena of hereditary transmission were being explored.9 In particular, after Charles Darwin’s publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859, the problem of the transmission of hereditary characters was brought to the fore within the life sciences, as theories of evolution raised the question of the mechanism by which species both changed and remained relatively stable over time.10 By the second half of the 19th century, studies of heredity were being carried out by scientists from a range of disciplines, including cytology, natural history, botany, physiology, and zoology, among others.11 This period is characterized by great theoretical diversity. In contrast to historical narratives that posit the straightforward and logical “hardening” of heredity across the 19th century until its final culmination in Mendelian genetics at the turn of the 20th, notions of heredity remained varied and diverse in the period that separates Darwin and the rediscovery of Mendel in 1901. Soft and hard theories of heredity coexisted and overlapped with theories that conceptualized heredity as a material structure versus an immaterial

7 Müller-Wille and Rheinberger, Cultural History, 52-58. Waller, “Ideas of Heredity.” 8 Müller-Wille and Rheinberger, Cultural History, 52-58. López-Beltrán, “Heredity Old and New”; López- Beltrán, “Forging Heredity”. 9 Müller-Wille and Rheinberger, Cultural History, 69-74. 10 While Darwin is widely credited as the first person to propose a theory of evolution, there were others before him. James Secord, in his analysis of the reception and widespread readership of the anonymously published book by Robert Chambers, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), shows that this work was critically important in bringing evolutionary theory into the public view. Secord, Victorian Sensation. 11 Müller-Wille and Rheinberger, Cultural History, 89.

5 force.12 Finally, many of these ideas about heredity were additionally bound up with social and political considerations.13 While scientific theories proliferated during this period of uncertainty about the mechanisms behind biological heredity, this diversity largely disappeared with the rediscovery of the work of Gregor Mendel in 1901 and the subsequent crystallization of the discipline of genetics around the study of genes as the discrete material units of hereditary transmission.14

In the early decades of the 20th century, new genetic concepts of heredity were harnessed by the reformist spirit of the Progressive Era. A science of eugenics and a widespread interest in its potential for social uplift emerged in this context. Aiming to repair what were perceived to be a series of grave problems plaguing society — ever rising levels of disease, poverty, and mental insufficiency, for example — eugenics promoted both positive and negative measures to improve human hereditary qualities. These ranged from promoting better health and education, to recommending self-imposed limits on marriage and

12 “Soft" theories of heredity suppose that heredity is malleable and open to change through external influences, such as neo-Lamarckian theories that assert the inheritance of acquired characteristics. In contrast, “hard” theories of heredity suppose that our hereditary makeup is unchangeable. August Weismann’s theory of the immutable germ plasm is one such “hard” theory of heredity. Other theories of heredity differed with respect to the question of whether heredity was to be conceived of as a force, that could be wielded in a particular direction, strengthened or weakened, or as a material substrate that was transmitted across generations and that provided a physical bridge between the ancestors and offspring. Breeders typically ascribed to the “force” understandings of heredity, while Weismann’s germ plasm, and Francis Galton’s “stirp” both suggested heredity was composed of a material substrate. The Mendelian gene is the classic example of a material unit of heredity. 13 Francis Galton, in particular, explicitly politicized human heredity in his aim to improve the human race by controlling who could marry and reproduce. Indeed, he coined the term eugenics, meaning “well-born,” in 1883. Yet, he was not the only one to see political implications in the fact that our social traits as well as physical characteristics were inherited. Some physicians and social reformers also advocated for more prudent marriage choices to prevent the propagation of hereditary faults, for example. See e.g. Waller, “Ideas of Heredity”; Rosenberg, “Bitter Fruit.” 14 However, Jan Sapp has shown how alternative research programs centred around the role of cytoplasmic factors in hereditary transmission persisted during the 20th century, albeit in a marginalized position relative to Mendelian genetics. Sapp, Beyond the Gene.

6 reproduction among those deemed less hereditarily desirable, and even to their incarceration and involuntary sterilization. While eugenics assumed varying forms in different geographical, disciplinary, institutional, political, and religious settings, its history illustrates how the science of heredity was operationalized for a range of social, political, and ideological aims.15 After its lofty promises did not appear to be fulfilled, and especially after the Nazi atrocities were revealed following the close of the Second World War, eugenics as a science and social movement was discredited. While eugenics does not represent part of our contemporary political landscape, social and political concerns about human heredity have never disappeared.16 In the 1950’s and 60’s, old eugenic concerns morphed into the more acceptable forms of studies of population control, family planning, and medical genetics.17

Even today, ideas about heredity structure our thinking about human capacities and natures,

15 In particular, Paul, Controlling Human Heredity; Paul, Politics of Heredity; Adams, Wellborn Science; and Meloni, Political Biology, show the remarkable diversity of eugenics movements in different social and political contexts. Together, they also show that the political implications of human heredity were underdetermined; that is, that assumptions about either the malleability or rigidity of heredity could be applied to a range of social agendas, from both left and right political positions. On eugenics in Canada, see Dowbiggin, Keeping America Sane; McLaren, Own Master Race; Dyck, Facing Eugenics; Strange and Stephen, “Eugenics in Canada”; Caulfield and Robertson, “Eugenic Policies in Alberta”; Chapman, “Early Eugenics in Western Canada”; Grekul, “Well-Oiled Machine,” etc. On eugenics in different national, religious, and cultural contexts, additionally see Bashford and Levine, Handbook of Eugenics; Codgell, Eugenic Design; Currel and Codgell, Popular Eugenics; Haller, Eugenics; Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics; Kline, Building a Better Race; Ludmerer, Genetics and American Society; Nies, Eugenic Fantasies; Pernick, Black Stork; Rosen, Preaching Eugenics; Smith, Hideous Progeny; Stern, Eugenic Nation; Zenderland, Biblical Biology. 16 Paul discusses recent claims that contemporary applications of medical genetics, such as genetic screening and “designer babies,” for example, represent the return of eugenics in a modern guise. However, whether or not such claims are useful, Paul indicates that they depend on how we define eugenics, and that the negative connotations it now holds as a result of its association with the Nazi atrocities during World War Two belie the multiplicity of meanings and progressive political implications that were associated with eugenics in the early decades of the 20th century. Paul, Controlling Human Heredity, 1-21. 17 Paul, Controlling Human Heredity, 115-135; Comfort, Science of Human Perfection; Bashford, “Where did Eugenics Go?,” 539-552.

7 as perennial debates about the relative power of nature versus nurture attest to.18 Most recently, contemporary theories about epigenetics, which recall older ideas about the progressive potential thought to inhere in soft theories of inheritance, continue to reveal this dynamic. The belief that epigenetics implies that we are able to take control and shape the functioning of one’s genome through dietary or behavioural practices, for example, is yet another instance of the way that human heredity is consistently thought to have social and political implications. In this case, it is reflective of the neoliberal context in which epigenetic science is being produced and consumed.19

Just as the study of heredity emerged from a range of extra- and para-scientific domains, and was subsequently shaped by social and political concerns about the body politic, the concept of heredity also enjoyed a wide popular interest in the second half of the

19th century, and, as we have seen, it came to inform a wide range of popular thinking about issues both biological and social. Heredity was thus “cultural” in both senses of the word; it informed and was informed by elements of the society in which it was studied. Questions about this important feature of heredity have begun to be addressed by historians working in what has been called the cultural history of heredity. This field emerged from a project initiated by the Max-Planck Institute for the History of Science in 2001. A series of five conferences were held that covered the historical period between the 17th to the 21st century, and which brought together historians working on various topics in the history of heredity

18 For an excellent analysis of the nature nurture debate, see Fox-Keller, Mirage of A Space. 19 Meloni, Political Biology, 211.

8

outside of the scope of strictly genetics or eugenics.20 Three books also emerged from this project: the 2007 volume edited by Staffan Müller-Wille and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger,

Heredity Produced: At the Crossroads of Biology, Politics, and Culture, 1500-1870, the

2012, A Cultural History of Heredity, by the same authors, and the 2016 volume Heredity

Explored: Between Public Domain and Experimental Science, 1850-1930, edited by Staffan

Müller-Wille and Christina Brandt. A Cultural History of Heredity is a valuable synthetic analysis of recent scholarship on the history of heredity and of the research presented at the five conferences, in particular for its emphasis on the social and cultural roots of the science of heredity, and for its focus on heredity prior to the 20th century.21

An important theme of A Cultural History of Heredity, which has structured the general narrative I provided above, is the authors’ argument that there were three crucial contexts from which a 19th century science of heredity emerged — and indeed, from which it became possible to conceive of heredity as a natural phenomenon deserving of study — that is, law/politics, medicine, and natural history/breeding/anthropology. From the piecemeal and gradual convergence of the questions, concepts, practices, and interests of these three domains, Müller-Wille and Rheinberger argue, there emerged a new epistemic space in which the concept of heredity was the central object of research and intervention. The focus of this project, and of A Cultural History of Heredity, however, is on tracing the emergence of a science of heredity in the 19th century from various extra-scientific roots, characterizing

20 The proceedings of four of these conferences are available to read: Cultural History of Heredity I; Cultural History of Heredity II; Cultural History of Heredity III; Cultural History of Heredity IV. 21 Müller-Wille and Rheinberger, Heredity Produced; Müller-Wille and Rheinberger, Cultural History of Heredity; Müller-Wille and Brandt, Heredity Explored.

9 its internal content and character, and following its trajectory through to the end of the 20th century. Thus, despite calling itself a cultural history of heredity, the popular reception and integration of these changing ideas about heredity is left unexplored. Yet, as we have seen, the popular ideas and uses of such concepts of heredity have been significant.22 Moreover, neither A Cultural History of Heredity, Heredity Produced, Heredity Examined, nor the published proceedings of the first four conferences focus on North America.

Popular conceptions of heredity in Canada in the second half of the 19th century therefore remain an unexplored area of the history of this science. The present study aims to fill this gap by exploring in greater detail one aspect of the dialectic by which heredity and culture have been reciprocally shaped: the circulation of ideas about heredity within

Canadian society during the period between 1860 and 1900. More specifically, it focuses on three cultural sites in which ideas about heredity were considered and used by and for different audiences: agricultural periodicals, written by and for farmers and breeders; medical advice manuals aimed at wives and mothers; and journals, pamphlets, and books issued by the prominent reform organization, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU).

Two of these areas, medicine and breeding, were important cultural sites that paved the way for a science of heredity to emerge in the 19th century. The WCTU’s literature exemplifies the deep intertwining of notions of heredity with social and political concerns. In each case, scientific knowledge about heredity was considered in the context of instructions for proper

22 Histories of eugenics have explored the ways that ideas about heredity shaped attempts to improve the human race in the 20th century, and have even looked to 19th century for precursors of later eugenic ideas. However, a broad range of popular ideas about heredity existed in the 19th century, not all of which turned into eugenics. Therefore, this cannot be the only frame through which to examine popular ideas about heredity.

10 ways of living and behaving — in the case of medical manuals and the WCTU — and of practical advice in the case of breeders and farmers. Considered together, these three areas cut across a number of categories: they represent works aimed at both women and men as well as adults and children; their objects of intervention range from the biological animal body, to the human body, to the human soul or moral being, and to society as a whole; they have both urban and rural audiences; and they reflect a range of motivating interests, from the interests of amateur hobbyists to the economic interests of farmers, and from the daily domestic concerns of (largely) women caring for the health and well-being of their family, to the evangelical and future-oriented reform aspirations of the WCTU. My dissertation is framed around the following broad questions: how did these three groups understand the nature of heredity, how did this affect the ways they interacted with the world, and where did their particular ideas about heredity come from?

It is important to clarify what this project is not doing. It is not concerned directly with the processes through which the academic work of scientists is made available to the public. Certainly, this is part of the picture and is a necessary background to my story; however, for the most part, the audiences I examine were working with ideas about heredity that had already been popularized.23 Instead, this project focuses on the circulation of knowledge about heredity derived from a broad range of sources, not only limited to the scientific. Members of the WCTU for example, referenced in the same breath the work of statisticians, physicians, and social scientists when underlining the importance of heredity to

23 They also drew on a wide range of ideas and ways of knowing about heredity that did not come from professional scientific research. In fact, the ideas of scientists only represented a portion of those authorities cited in discussions of heredity within each of my case studies.

11 the work of their reform organization. In addition to the particular ideas of heredity held by each of my audiences, I am interested in the range of sources of knowledge and ways of knowing that influenced the development of these notions. While it is not the aim of my dissertation to speak directly to the literature studying the popularization of science, it is important nonetheless to situate my project in context of this body of work to show the ways that they are both connected and not.

Historians of popular science have illustrated the wide range of media and means by which scientific knowledge was made available to the public, including the role played by such written materials as books, magazines, and pamphlets, for example, as well as such other media as popular lectures, museums, fairs, radio, and television. The varied motivations and interests of popularizers and the varied reception and uses of scientific knowledge have also been explored.24 In this way, these historians have shown that it was not a simple one- way process of diffusion of scientific knowledge from “science” to “the public,” with the occasional distortion or misunderstanding of the message along the way.25 Instead, by recognizing the agency of the popularizers, the media of information exchange, and the consumers of scientific knowledge alike, these historians have shown that this exchange of knowledge was characterized at all levels by active negotiation and interpretation. Others, taking cue from Cooter and Pumphrey and Secord, have additionally attempted to move beyond what they see as a problematic tendency to use “science” and “the public” as

24 On means and motivations of popularizers in Britain, see Cooter, Phrenology; Secord, Victorian Sensation; Lightman, Victorian Popularizers; and Bowler, Science for All. In the US, see Burnham, How Superstition Won; Tomes, Gospels of Germ; LaFollette, Science on Air; Lewenstein, “Science Books.” 25 As some of the literature on the public understanding of science (PUS) assumes, e.g. Wynne, “Misunderstood Misunderstanding.”

12 analytical categories, by reorienting their object of study to the processes of communication of scientific knowledge itself, or “knowledge in transit.”26

My ultimate focus is on the cultural life of ideas about heredity: what was the role of heredity in the three social contexts I have identified, and where did each of their specific notions of heredity come from? Thus, my dissertation does not aim to examine the processes of popularization per se. However, I do take from studies of popular science an interest in the varied meanings and uses that scientific knowledge held for different groups of people.27

Indeed, this project illustrates how heredity was a malleable concept that held varying meanings and uses in different contexts. Relatedly, my emphasis is not on “the public,” as if the consumers of scientific information represented a single monolithic group. Instead, I focus on the role that the science of heredity played in the minds of three specific groups of

Canadian audiences, namely, breeders and farmers, the readers and users of domestic medical manuals, and the members of the WCTU. In so doing, I show how agricultural periodicals, domestic medical manuals, and the publications of a lay reform organization, the

WCTU, each served as important avenues through which different groups of Canadians were exposed to, interpreted, and made use of a broad range of ideas and ways of knowing about heredity.

Finally, in this respect, my particular study of the cultural life of heredity is also part of Canadian history, from the decade just prior to Confederation through to the turn of the century. These were important years for the nation that witnessed significant changes to its

26 e.g. Cooter and Pumphrey, “Separate Spheres”; Secord, “Knowledge in Transit”; Daum, “Historical Reflections”; O’Connor, “Genres, Categories, Historians”; Pandora, “Transnational Perspective.” 27 e.g. Turney, Frankenstein’s Footsteps; Tomes, Gospels of Germ; Secord, Victorian Sensation.

13 political boundaries, demographics, and economy. In the years following Confederation,

Canada expanded westward, as it acquired a large tract of land in the Prairies and the North, transferred from the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1870. The colonies of British Columbia and

Prince Edward Island also joined the Confederation in the 1870s, and the rest of the century saw frequent re-drawing of internal provincial and territorial borders. This acquisition of great expanses of new land meant greater opportunities for agricultural development. While agriculture developed differently in different regions of the country, the period was characterized by a shift from a primary focus on wheat to mixed farming methods that coupled wheat farming with livestock production. This period also saw the rise of greater reliance on machinery and technology, not only in agriculture, but across other segments of the economy. Indeed, Canada was also rapidly industrializing during the second half of the

19th century. At the same time as agricultural practices were changing, many people were also leaving rural and agricultural work for manufacturing jobs. More women entered the workforce, and the number of people living in urban centres grew. As traditional ties between family and work were being severed, and as people moved from smaller communities to cities, new social ties and arrangements emerged. This period saw the rise of social movements — temperance, social purity, and women’s suffrage, for example — that aimed to curb the ill-effects of industrialization and urbanization such as over-crowding, unsanitary living conditions, alcoholism, and crime.

While the period under consideration witnessed the rise in technologies of communication and connection, such as the telegraph, the railroad, and a national postal system, Canada remained a diverse nation, geographically, as well as religiously and socially.

From the beginning, it was founded on the uneasy union of the French Catholic and British

14

Protestant colonies, and as it expanded into vastly different regional terrains and welcomed great numbers of immigrants in the later years of the century, its diverse and multicultural character was further cemented. It is therefore difficult to describe “the” history of Canada, as it is composed of multiple histories, actors, and regions. However, the inhabitants of

Canada were aware of their status as populating a new nation, and there existed from the beginning of Confederation nationalist movements that aimed to create a distinctly

“Canadian” culture independent of both Britain and the United States (although, as with the case of Canada First movement, this meant an English and Protestant culture only).

My exploration of popular concepts of heredity in Canada during the last half of the

19th century therefore runs up against the problem of accounting for the diversity of

Canadians during this period. My study does not aim to be exhaustive. However, through a case-study approach, I am able to examine the ideas of three definite groups of Canadians, namely, farmers and breeders, the readers and users of domestic medical manuals, and the members of a prominent reform organization, the WCTU. While these audiences are admittedly largely white and English-speaking, they cut across a number of categories, including rural and urban populations, and men, women, and children. Because of the visibility of their ideas about heredity, these cases are particularly useful lenses through which to examine contemporary ideas about heredity as possessed by different groups of

Canadians. Moreover, considered together, these cases illustrate some of the ways that scientific knowledge about heredity and biology circulated within Canadian society and came to shape the ways that people thought about the nature of the health, disease, and morality of not only their own bodies, but also of the Canadian body politic.

15

Outline of the Dissertation This thesis adopts a case study approach centred around a crucial set of primary sources. I begin in Chapter 1 by exploring the ideas of breeders and farmers as expressed in a set of popular agricultural periodicals published in Canada. After first describing the history of agricultural periodicals in North America, I examine the notions of heredity that were embedded in certain discussions in Canadian agricultural periodicals. In particular, I focus on debates that were particularly visible and of practical significance to farmers and breeders — namely, the fact that “like begets like” and the prominent exception of this law due to prepotency, the value of in-breeding, factors related to the sexes of the mated animals, and the heredity of disease. In the last section of the chapter, I examine the sources of knowledge and authority upon which agricultural magazines relied in developing, defending, and discussing their ideas about heredity.

In this chapter I reveal that heredity was broadly understood by breeders of animals to be a process of transmission of traits from ancestors to offspring that was characterized by a certain regularity, described as “like begets like.” Yet, at the same time, heredity was characterized by variations in strength — as some animals were understood to transmit their traits more strongly than others — and form — when different or unexpected sets of traits were transmitted to offspring. These variations were at times capricious. This chapter also reveals that while heredity was recognized to be important for the livelihoods of farmers and breeders, their knowledge of hereditary transmission was largely implicit and bound up with their practical concerns and experiences. Concepts of heredity did not so much influence their breeding practices as their breeding practices constituted implicit notions of heredity.

With respect to the question of sources of knowledge on heredity, I show how breeders and

16 farmers privileged the practical and experiential as the most effective and reliable means of acquiring knowledge about heredity. This chapter also shows that there existed an active community of readers and contributors to Canadian agricultural periodicals on practical questions about the nature of hereditary transmission. In this respect, the agricultural periodical served to expand the horizons of experience of the average farmer by bringing them into contact with the experiences and observations of a global community of breeders both past and present. Through the agricultural periodical, Canadian breeders were not only exposed to a large body of knowledge built up about all matters hereditary, but were also provided with a medium through which to contribute to these debates.

In Chapter 2, I examine the ideas about heredity expressed in domestic medical manuals published in Canada, as well as popular manuals published elsewhere that were likely to have crossed the border to be read in Canada. I examine manuals belonging to one of four types: general medical manuals, texts directed at the diseases of men or women specifically, sexual hygiene texts, and school textbooks. In the first section, I consider the history of domestic medical manuals in North America. I then consider the ideas about heredity found within these manuals, in particular as they related to questions about the role of heredity in disease causation, the relation of heredity to the influences of environment, prenatal conditions, and lifestyle, and the significance of heredity for national and racial concerns. Here, I show how the way that manuals understood these issues and the practical consequences their ideas about heredity suggested, varied according to the type of manual. In the last section of this chapter, I explore the sources of knowledge and authority upon which the authors of medical manuals relied in articulating their notions of heredity. I show how manuals drew on an eclectic set of sources, from academic science and medicine to the

17 knowledge of breeders and horticulturalists, and from the personal and professional experience of the authors as physicians to curious anecdotes from history and folklore, and

Bible texts. Domestic medical manuals therefore served as another important means through which Canadians came to be exposed to an array of ideas and ways of knowing about heredity, and were encouraged to think about the relation of heredity to the health and well- being of themselves, their families, and even the human race.

In Chapter 3, I consider the role of heredity in the prominent Canadian reform organization, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). Starting in the 1880’s the

WCTU in Canada and the United States had departments dedicated to the study of hereditary tendencies. Significantly, it was the American WCTU, rather than breeders or the medical community or other researchers, who founded perhaps the world’s first Journal of Heredity, in 1885.28 I consider the role that heredity played in these organizations. In the first place, I consider the history of the WCTU in North America, and of the union’s departments of heredity. I then consider the ideas of the Ontario WCTU about heredity, and show how their particular notions of heredity were intimately tied up with their visions for the reform of

Canadian society. Because of the interesting contrasts to be made, I also examine the ideas of heredity of the National American WCTU, in particular, as expressed in the Journal of

Heredity, which they published between 1885 and 1889. This chapter illustrates how heredity was a malleable concept employed differently by two branches of the same organization. For the Ontario WCTU, heredity was conceptualized as a God-given law with a very specific

28 The American Genetic Association’s Journal of Heredity (originally the American Breeders’ Magazine) was founded 25 years later, in 1910.

18 moral and religious (evangelical) meaning — as the lawful transmission of simultaneously physical and moral constitutions. In contrast, for the American WCTU, heredity was understood to be a conservative force that established ties between the present generation and its ancestors, although its exact nature and strength remained largely ambiguous and open for interpretation. In the final section of this chapter, I consider the various ideas and ways of knowing about heredity on which the Ontario WCTU drew in developing their notion of heredity. The Ontario WCTU was influenced by an eclectic range of sources of information on heredity, one which they largely shared with their American sisters. However, these two organizations did not share identical notions of heredity. In this sense, this chapter considers the role of a lay organization such as the WCTU as an active mediator of a range of ideas and ways of knowing about heredity. Indeed, the WCTU served as a dynamic means through which Canadian women reformers came to be exposed to ideas about heredity and were compelled to consider its relation to the physical and moral uplift of themselves and their nation.

By beginning with the ideas of breeders and finishing with the ideas of the WCTU, this dissertation moves from audiences whose main objects of intervention ranged from the animal to the human body, and from the human soul or moral being to society as a whole.

Moreover, whereas breeders were primarily inward-looking — in that they prioritized the practical experiences of their fellow breeders as the most reliable sources of knowledge on matters related to heredity — we see a broadening of the sources of knowledge and ways of knowing relied upon as we move to consider the ideas of heredity expressed in domestic medical manuals and by the members of the WCTU. Considered together, these cases show how heredity served during this period as a malleable and useful concept with which to make

19 sense of — and even offer some control over — the natural and social world. It also shows how a range of individuals in the second half of the 19th century in Canada came into contact with ideas about heredity, and illustrates what heredity meant to them and how their notions of heredity structured their views of the animal, human, and social body. Finally, this dissertation argues that agricultural periodicals, domestic medical manuals, and WCTU publications each served as important sources of information on heredity, as sites of active discussion about the broader social implications of heredity, and as dynamic nodes in a complex web of ideas and ways of knowing about heredity for certain late 19th century

Canadians.

In an epilogue, I take these stories about heredity into the 20th century. Here, I consider how the ideas about heredity of breeders, domestic medical manual authors, and the members of the WCTU shifted as they entered a new social and political context. I take note of the continuities and discontinuities that existed between their ideas and eugenic ideas of the 20th century.

Chapter 1 — Heredity on the Farm: The Periodical Literature of Amateur Breeders and Farmers

1.1 Introduction “It is an old law of nature that “like begets like.” Is it any wonder, then, that the consequences of [poor surroundings], with hap-hazard breeding… is a constantly deteriorating race of scrubs, scarcely paying their way?”29 As we can see with this comment from an article on the care and improvement of dairy stock written for the Canadian Live-

Stock Journal in 1885, the fact of hereditary transmission, epitomized by the notion “like begets like,” represented for farmers a critical aspect of the success — or failure — of their daily work. In the middle of the 19th century in Canada, wheat production dominated the agricultural landscape. By Confederation in 1867, however, this landscape had shifted to see a rise in mixed farming and a greater emphasis on the production of livestock, a trend that would continue through the rest of the century.30 This shift in part reflected decreasing wheat yields, which were thought to result from the simple crop rotation system commonly used that did not return nutrients to the soil during fallow years. Consequently, experts promoted mixed, or “scientific,” farming methods to farmers, where wheat production was paired with animal husbandry to return nutrients to the land. Changing economic circumstances also affected agricultural practices. Canadian farmers found a new market for cattle in the United

States after the outbreak of the Civil War broke off trade of beef between the eastern and

29 Can. Live-Stock J., 2.5 (1885), 127. 30 Derry, Cattle Kingdom, 3-8; McInnis, Perspectives, 85-86.

20 21 western states. This market continued after the war, along with markets for live cattle both in

Canada and in Britain.31 Importantly, this increase in livestock production coupled with other broad changes in agricultural practices, such as the rise of mechanization and farm movements aimed at improving agricultural practices, expanded the desire for agricultural education generally, including information about heredity and breeding specifically.

Animal breeders and farmers had long had special knowledge of the features of hereditary transmission. Referred to variously as a cardinal maxim, a well-known axiom, and the great natural law, among other descriptions, breeders were fond of summarizing the basis for their breeding practices with the principle that “like begets like.” The history of animal and plant breeding is therefore closely tied to the histories of genetics, eugenics, and heredity. Historians have explored the complex interactions between genetics, eugenics, and plant and animal breeding in the context of organisms of study, organizations, and individuals.32 Others working in the cultural history of heredity have also highlighted the role of breeders in creating an “epistemic space” in which it became possible to think about, and study scientifically, the phenomena of heredity in its own right, that is, separate from the phenomena of generation.33 While some historians of heredity and breeding have outlined the ideas of breeders with respect to heredity, few works have focused specifically on the attitudes of Canadian farmers, or on the popular ideas expressed in their periodical

31 Derry, Cattle Kingdom, 6-9. 32 e.g. Kimmelman, “American Breeder’s Association”; Theunissen, “Practical Animal Breeding”; Palladino, “Between Craft and Science”; Bonneuil, “Mendelism, Plant Breeding, and Experimental Cultures”; Roll- Hansen, “Theory and Practice”; Thurtle, “Harnessing Heredity”; Derry, Art and Science; Derry, Cattle Kingdom. 33 e.g. Muller-Wille and Rheinberger, Cultural History; Muller-Wille and Rheinberger, Heredity Produced; Orel, “Spectre”; Wood and Orel, Genetic Prehistory.

22 literature.34 Therefore, as one means of exploring ideas about heredity in the late 19th century, I examine the notions of heredity found in a collection of popular agricultural magazines published in Canada between 1860 to 1900, which included publications both general and specialized, as well as both national and provincial in scope. More specifically, I ask: what were the ideas of heredity explicitly and implicitly expressed in agricultural periodicals, to what extent did these notions structure the recommended and actual practices of breeders, and what were the important sources of these ideas about heredity? In so doing, I also highlight the role of agricultural periodicals as a medium through which one group of late 19th century Canadians — in this case, farmers, breeders, and their families — were exposed to a range of ideas about heredity, and encouraged to consider the relation of heredity to the animal body and even to the economic state of the nation.

This chapter consists of three parts. In the first, I review the history of agricultural journalism in North American, and introduce the periodicals I chose to examine. I then explore in detail some important themes about heredity that were common to most journals.

Here, I focus on debates that were particularly visible and of practical importance to the farmer — namely, the nature of prepotency, the value of the practice of in-breeding, and questions about the sexes of the mated animals and the heredity of disease. I show how farmers and breeders’ ideas about heredity were difficult to separate from their practical experiences, and how through such debates as the value of in-breeding, notions of heredity

34 One notable exception is the work of Margaret Derry. Her book, Art and Science in Breeding examines the science/farm relationship in Canada and the United States with respect to chicken breeding in particular. Ontario’s Cattle Kingdom, which came out of her doctoral dissertation, explores the purebred cattle industry in Ontario between 1870-1920.

23 were being indirectly worked out. Hereditary transmission was understood to be situated in some way in the medium of the blood, to be characterized by a certain regularity, expressed as “like begets like,” and to differ in strength among different animals. There were also variations in the sets of traits that were passed on to offspring that were not always understood. Agriculture periodicals, however, functioned as one medium through which aspects of hereditary transmission were being discussed and worked out among those who worked with animals for a living. The final section of this chapter considers the sources of knowledge upon which agricultural magazines relied in developing, defending, and discussing their ideas about heredity. Here, I show how breeders’ and farmers magazines relied almost entirely on each other and on the opinions of both local and prominent breeders worldwide as sources of information about heredity. Theirs was an inward-looking, albeit global, community that had their own immediate basis of experience from which they developed their growing (if at times, tacit) body of knowledge about the nature of heredity.

1.2 History of Agricultural Periodicals in the 19th Century The average farmer looking to expand their agricultural knowledge during the 19th century had a variety of resources at his or her disposal, including almanacs, newspaper articles, magazines, and textbooks, as well as through word of mouth in the context of personal connections, farmers’ clubs, and agricultural exhibitions, for example.35 Because of their low cost and regular issuance, agricultural periodicals were important sources of

35 Wood and Pawson, “Information Exchange,” 340.

24 information for farmers at this time, which were able to keep readers abreast of recent changes and current events in agriculture, such as fluctuating market prices or recent scientific discoveries.36 In the United States, agricultural journalism is typically said to have begun with the establishment of the American Farmer by John Skinner in Baltimore in

1819.37 In the 1830’s, agricultural journals started to be established with greater frequency throughout the United States, and by the start of the Civil War, historian of the American agricultural press, Albert Demaree, has suggested that there were between fifty and sixty active periodicals with a readership of over 250,000, although many of these were short- lived.38 In Canada, farmers were reading some of these early American journals, and, later,

Canadian periodicals as well. As we will see, there was also extensive borrowing and cross- referencing of information between agricultural journals of different subjects and places of publication. Canadian historian Fred Landon has found evidence of what he thinks to be the first agricultural journal published in Upper Canada, the Upper Canada Farmer, established in 1837, although he was unable to find a surviving copy. Two other early journals, the

British American Cultivator (published in Toronto between 1842 and 1847), and the Farmer and Mechanic (established in Toronto in 1848), he has suggested were modelled explicitly on the American Albany Cultivator, and the Maine Farmer and Mechanic.39 The first issue of another early Canadian agricultural periodical, the Canada Farmer (Toronto, 1864-1876), gave a brief history of agricultural journalism in Upper Canada. The editors indicated they

36 Wood and Pawson, “Information Exchange,” 338. 37 Landon, “Agricultural Journals,” 167. 38 Demaree, Agricultural Press, 13-18. 39 Landon, “Agricultural Journals,” 168-171.

25 believed the first agricultural journal published in Upper Canada to be the British American

Cultivator, started in 1842 by W.G. Edmonton. In 1849, it became the Canadian

Agriculturist, edited by Mr. McDougall and Mr. Buckland, and after the former retired in

1857 it was taken over by the Board of Agriculture of Upper Canada. At that point, the journal became the Canadian Agriculturist and Transactions of the Board of Agriculture of

Upper Canada. It remained as such until it was bought by the publishers of the Canada

Farmer and merged with them in 1864. The editors of the Canada Farmer indicated that it was at this time the only agricultural journal of Upper Canada.40

These early agricultural journals were driven by the common goal of agricultural improvement, which they sought by promoting specific practices such as crop rotation, tillage, and the use of manure, for example. Journals also described the uses and values of new agricultural machinery, advocated for broader agricultural education, and aimed to dispel older superstitions, such as a belief in the influence of the moon.41 In the later part of the century, the farm journals also functioned as vehicles of the Country Life movement, a reform campaign of the Progressive Era that aimed to bring up rural standards of living and improve agricultural efficiency.42 Expansion of agricultural journals continued throughout the 19th century, accompanied by increasing specialization, with the spread of publications specifically devoted to dairying, poultry breeding, or bee-keeping, for example.43 The care

40 Can. Farm., 1.1 (1864), 8-9. 41 Demaree, Agricultural Press, 39-55. 42 Fry, Farm Press, xviii. 43 Mott, American Magazines, Vol. 4, 336; Goddard, “Agricultural Periodicals,” 117.

26 and breeding of livestock represented a significant subject of many general and specialized agricultural journals.

Historians have noted the value of agricultural periodicals as sources for the student of the 19th century, and in particular, their usefulness as sources for evaluating popular beliefs and ideas.44 They provide fascinating details about daily rural and agricultural life, in the context of tips for how best to keep bees over winter, or advertisements for an electric insect exterminator (“saves money and kills every time”), for example.45 However, to appeal to their readers and maintain subscribers, agricultural journals also needed to reflect the views and tastes of their readers. For both of these reasons, these materials can tell the historian much about the lives and opinions of the farmers (and their families) who were reading them. Agricultural periodicals therefore serve as useful historical lenses for examining the contemporary ideas about heredity of Canadian farmers and breeders. To get a sense of the range of ideas about heredity embodied in Canadian agricultural periodicals, I chose a set of fourteen magazines that covered the period from 1860 to 1900, and that included publications both general and specialized, as well as both national and provincial in scope.46 This was facilitated by Stephen Stunz’s extremely useful List of the Agricultural

Periodicals of the Unites States and Canada, and by the variety of periodical material made available online through the Canadian open-source and digital preservation project,

Canadiana.org.47 The purpose of this examination (not meant to be exhaustive) is to explore

44 e.g. Mott, American Magazines Vol. 1; Demaree, Agricultural Press; Marti, Soil and Mind; Fry, Farm Press; Landon, “Agricultural Journals:” Fry, “Good Farming.” 45 e.g. Farming, 14.11 (1987), xxix. 46 This number includes the different iterations of periodicals that underwent changes of name. 47 Stunz and Hawks, List of Agricultural Periodicals.

27 one avenue through which a certain group of Canadians were exposed to ideas about heredity during this period. The periodicals I examined fell into four categories: general periodicals that dealt with all aspects of agricultural life, geographically-specific journals that aimed to provide advice to farmers living in specific areas of Canada, those that focused on the care and breeding of live-stock generally, and specialized journals devoted to the breeding of one specific animal.

The general periodicals I examined include the Canadian Agriculturist (1848-1863), the Canada Farmer (1864-1876) — which acquired the Canadian Agriculturist and merged with it in 1864 — and the Rural Canadian (1881-1898). I also examined a few issues of the general weekly agricultural periodical, the Farm and Fireside (1888-1894). All of these journals were published in Toronto, Ontario. In the first issue of the Canada Farmer, the publisher, G. Brown, underscored his devotion to agricultural advancement, and his belief that the prosperity of Canada depended on the condition of her agriculture. The journal, he explained, would promote discussions on a range of agricultural questions, drawing upon both scientific research and, more importantly, the practical experiences of breeders and farmers.48 In this sense, the Canada Farmer, and its predecessor, the Canadian Agriculturist are representative of the scope of the general farmer’s magazines more broadly: to promote agricultural advancement in all areas related to farming, and to promote especially the communication and collaboration between Canadian farmers in its pages.49 Their explicit connection of the state of agriculture and the well-being of the nation is also characteristic of

48 Can. Farm., 1.1 (1864), 8-9. 49 e.g. see Can. Ag., 1.1 (1849), 1.

28 many of the periodicals I examined. Issues were organized into sections, which typically included any number of the following: horticulture, the field, the breeder and grazier, the dairy, the apiary, the poultry yard, veterinary, the household, crop reports, miscellaneous, etc.

Journals also included editorials and sections for readers to submit questions and general observations.

The geographically-specific magazines I examined were organized along similar lines as the general magazines, and with similar aims of general agricultural advancement, but directed towards issues relevant to the farmer of a specific area. The Ontario Farmer (1867-

1871), the Canadian Cultivator and Household Magazine (1890-1892), and the Journal of

Agriculture and Horticulture (1897-1936), fall into this category. The Ontario Farmer, published in Toronto, Ontario, was founded by the former editor of the Canada Farmer,

Wm. F. Clarke, who left his post at the latter with “no spirit of hostility” to start his own journal in 1869. This new journal, he remarked, while embodying all the valuable features of its predecessor, would stand out in its particular emphasis on emigration and the “mechanic arts” (in what way the journal was going to speak to Ontario farmers specifically was not described).50 Sections in the first year of the Ontario Farmer included: the farm, the live stock, the garden, our country, arts and manufactures, and hearth and home, among others.

The short-lived Canadian Cultivator and Household Magazine, published in Sherbrooke,

Quebec, was established with the aim of providing useful information to farmers and stock- raisers of the Eastern Townships. The editors expressed their desire that local farmers would

50 On. Farm., 1.1 (1869), 1-2.

29 use the pages to discuss matters among themselves for the edification of readers.51 Finally, the Journal of Agriculture and Horticulture, published in Montreal and edited by Arthur

Jenner, was the English version of the Journal d’agriculture et d’horticulture de la Province du Québec, the official organ of the Council of Agriculture of the province of Quebec.

Several journals focused more specifically on the care and breeding of live-stock, although, perhaps to maintain readership, they also tended to include a similarly broad range of information about the farm as found in the general magazines. The Canadian Breeder and

Agricultural Review (1884-1886) and the Canadian Stock-Raiser’s Journal (1884) and its later iterations, the Canadian Livestock Journal (1885-1886) and the Canadian Livestock and

Farm Journal (1886), fall in this category. The prospectus for the Canadian Breeder and

Agricultural Review, published in Toronto, Ontario, indicated the journal hoped to “promote the breeding of valuable live stock in Canada,” in particular by connecting breeders and buyers of livestock in Canada, Great Britain, and the United States, and by keeping breeders abreast of the most current scientific and experimental advances in breeding and agriculture.

The journal would contain information on farming, dairying, and stock-raising, but, they underlined, would not be a “family fireside” paper — those looking for amusing stories of escapades and “impossibly good children” would have to look elsewhere.52 Similarly, the

Stock-Raiser’s Journal, published in Hamilton, Ontario, set for itself the lofty mission of striving to ensure that “no “scrub” stock shall be found within our borders… [and that] every

51 Can. Cult. Mag., 1.1 (1890), 1. 52 Can. Br. Ag. Rev., 2.1 (1885), 16.

30 farmer shall be capable of raising stock that will do credit to the markets of old London.”53

Both the Canadian Breeder and the Stock-Raiser’s Journal framed their interests in terms of improving the quality of Canada’s livestock as a nation, so that Canada might be able to compete on the market with British and American producers. In so doing, the latter reported in their prospectus that they would contain biographical sketches of stock men, the history of various breeds and strains, scientific and experimental articles on the nature of these breeds, discussion of new machinery, as well as illustrations of the best specimens of Canadian stock and of advanced farm buildings, among other things.54 Yet, while “devoted mainly to the interests of stock-raisers of the Dominion,” they also ensured readers that they would overlook no department of the farm.55 The Stock-Raiser’s Journal underwent a few name changes in the years after its establishment, but in 1895 was completely overhauled and renamed, Farming. It was also produced with a new publisher, Bryant Press, in Toronto.

With respect to this “radical" change, the editors explained that the conditions of agriculture were changing, and they must keep up with the times. From then on the journal would be devoted to all aspects of farming, and in so doing, it became what I classified for my purposes as a “general” agricultural periodical.56

Finally, I examined two journals which can be considered “specialized” in their scope: the weekly Canadian Bee Journal (1885-1913), published in Beeton, Ontario, and the

Canadian Poultry Review (1877-1975), published in Strathroy, Ontario. These journals were

53 Can. Stock J., 1.4 (1884), prospectus. 54 Can. Stock J., 1.4 (1884), prospectus. 55 Can. Stock J., 1.4 (1884), cover. 56 Farming, 13.1 (1895), xvii-xviii.

31 devoted to the keeping and breeding of bees and poultry, respectively — subjects which were often grouped together into a single section by general periodicals. In fact, the Canadian

Poultry Review opened an Apiary Department in 1878 to promote and improve the practice of bee-keeping among readers, and the Canadian Bee Journal opened a Poultry Department in their magazine in 1889.57 The latter periodical explained that bee- and poultry-keeping were often practiced together because the combination worked well seasonally: in winter, when bees are mostly inactive, poultry-keeping requires the most work.58 The Bee Journal described in its first issue that its aims were to improve the emerging science of apiculture, and that it would feature pieces from leading bee-keepers around the world, as well as selections from British and American bee journals.59 It did not hold to a specific format based on subheadings as did the more general periodicals, but instead addressed a range of subjects that varied each week. The journal did make a point, however, to include regular space for readers to submit queries and receive replies, from both editors and other readers. The editors of the Canadian Poultry Review saw one of its chief goals as to “assist in placing the poultry interest among those factors of production, by which Canada can be made a powerful and prosperous country.”60 To this aim, they would publish articles from leading fanciers and other publications, and also encourage readers to submit their questions and observations.

Like the Bee Journal, it was not strictly organized by sections, but it did include semi-regular columns for reader correspondence.

57 Can. Poultry Rev., 2.1 (1878), 8; Can. Bee J., 5.5 (1889), 93. 58 Can. Bee J., 5.5 (1889), 93. 59 Can. Bee J., 1.1 (1885), 2. 60 Can. Poultry Rev., 1.1 (1877), 12.

32

1.3 Discussions of Heredity in Canadian Agricultural Journals An understanding of hereditary transmission was fundamental for one’s success as a farmer or breeder. For this reason, notions of heredity were embedded in many subjects of discussion within agricultural periodicals. More comprehensive descriptions of the ideas of breeders on heredity can be found elsewhere,61 but for my purposes, I will explore a subset of subjects that were particularly visible — namely, the fact that “like begets like” and the prominent exception of this law due to prepotency, the value of in-breeding, factors related to the sexes of the mated animals, and the heredity of disease. For the most part, notions of heredity were consistent across the types of periodical I examined. For this reason, I consider them together, and mention variations when relevant.

These discussions reveal how heredity was understood in the first place to be a process of transmission of traits between ancestors and offspring. This process was characterized by a certain predictable regularity, described as “like begets like,” which made breeders’ work possible. Heredity was also understood to come in different strengths: some animals were thought to be able to transmit their traits more effectively to offspring than others. These animals were said to be highly prepotent, and discussions surrounding the nature of prepotency reveal that breeders understood this to be an inborn power which could be strengthened or weakened in animals through different breeding practices. Hereditary transmission was understood to occur through a special medium — the blood — which also

61 Such as: Wood and Orel, Genetic Prehistory; Wood, “Sheep Breeders’ View”; Derry, Art and Science.

33 structured breeders’ notions of prepotency. For breeders, prepotency was a measure of the purity or concentration of blood as the carrier of hereditary traits.

Heredity was additionally understood as the sum of the traits being transmitted from parents (and ancestors) to offspring. This included both desirable and undesirable features, such as disease or the faulty formation of body parts, for example. Yet there were variations in the sets of traits thought to be passed on. Some breeders thought that males and females transmitted different features to offspring. The influence of the mother’s first mate was sometimes thought to extend throughout her reproductive life to affect all her subsequent offspring, no matter who their fathers were, a phenomenon named telegony. Finally, in cases of atavism, traits were understood to come not from the parents directly, but from more distant ancestors. Thus, while hereditary transmission varied in strength, it also varied in form, and in ways that were at times capricious.

Finally, the discussions in agricultural periodicals in which notions of heredity were embedded reveal that knowledge of hereditary transmission was largely implicit and bound up with breeders and farmers’ practical concerns and experiences. These discussions at the same time reveal an active community of readers and contributors to practical questions about the nature of hereditary transmission. The agricultural periodical served as a medium for these discussions, though which notions of heredity were debated and indirectly worked out. Agricultural periodicals additionally allowed Canadian farmers and breeders to make themselves familiar with, evaluate, and challenge, ideas emerging from the scientific study of heredity, generation, and reproduction.

34

1.3.1 Heredity, Prepotency, and Blood The general beliefs of farmers and breeders about heredity as expressed in their agricultural literature may be most briefly summed up as “like begets like.”62 This principle, the Canadian Agriculturist asserted in 1860, is the foundation upon which all breeding is built.63 That this applied to both good and bad traits was well-known, and the Canada

Farmer explained in 1864 that this law applied not only to animals, but also humans and plants.64 While periodicals asserted that this principle was well-known by all breeders, they also often lamented the fact that it was at the same time frequently ignored. In an example that also demonstrates the extensive borrowing and cross-referencing that took place between different agricultural journals, the Ontario Farmer reprinted an article on the selection of breeding stock in 1871 that had appeared the year before in the Canada Farmer, which in turn had reprinted it from the British Mark Lane Express. The article commented on the unfortunate situation that, although there were many well-bred animals available in the country, there remained a “superabundance of wretched breeds to be met in every direction.”

While this state of things was to be partially explained by poor environmental conditions, the article also complained that “the great natural law that ‘like begets like’ seems … to be entirely over-looked, animals of both sexes continuing to be bred from stock which are entirely unfit for breeding purposes.” Farmers who neglected this “great natural law,” the article said, were reprehensible.65 This neglect was a concern for the livelihoods of the

62 Breeders called this variously a natural law, a principle of breeding, a saying, and a maxim, among other descriptions. 63 Can. Ag., 12.23 (1860), 624. 64 Can. Farm., 1.4 (1864), 43; Can. Farm., 1.6 (1864), 83. 65 Can. Farm., New Ser. 2.12 (1870), 449; On. Farm., 3.4 (1871), 103.

35 farmers involved, but importantly, it also reflected poorly on the status of breeding and agriculture, and by extension, the general welfare of the new nation. Indeed, the quality of the nation’s animals, and as a consequence, breeding practices founded on an understanding of heredity, were often considered in these nationalistic terms.66

Perhaps these farmers might be forgiven, for many contributors to agricultural periodicals also recognized that the principle of hereditary transmission, that “like begets like,” was subject to many qualifications. Offspring could take more strongly after one or the other parent, or even a more distant ancestor, and siblings could vary substantially from each other. An article in the Canadian Agriculturist in 1860 explained that the law of heredity is

“liable to some exceptions, and is much more generally true when breeding down than when breeding up.”67 In 1871, the Canada Farmer printed a lecture on the principles of breeding given by T.F. Jameson, lecturer on agriculture at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland.

Jameson expressed the uncertainty surrounding hereditary transmission more strongly, so far as to say that "one would be inclined to say that the laws of inheritance are very capricious and unaccountable. This, however, no doubt arises from our ignorance, for the subject has not been studied with that amount of attention which it deserves.”68 In an article published in both the Canadian Live-Stock and Farm Journal and the Rural Canadian in March of 1887, cattle breeder William Linton, of Aurora, Ontario explained that the saying “like begets like” is true in a certain sense, but that it “undoubtedly is not true in the popular sense in which it

66 Derry, Cattle Kingdom, 17-18, 22-23. 67 Can. Ag., 12.23 (1860), 624. By breeding up and down, the author was likely referring to the process of grading up or down. This was a process in which the percentage of “blood” of a specific breed or family line was increased or decreased in successive generations by either mating with the breed or line in question or by using different animals. 68 Can. Farm., New Ser. 3.6 (1871), 212.

36 is used.” By this, he meant that animals may appear outwardly one way, but carry hidden qualities from more distant ancestors that are passed on to offspring, and that breeders who rely on these outward signs alone may be disappointed by their results.69 Finally, as late as

1899, professor of veterinary science at the Ontario Agricultural College, Hugo Reed of

Guelph, Ontario explained in an article on horse breeding for Farming, that the law of heredity was “not absolute,” but that there were deviations from it which were difficult or impossible to explain.70 Thus, for breeders, heredity referred in the first place to a process of transmission whereby like produced like. However, at the same time, the form that this transmission took varied in ways that were not always predictable or understood.

Two well-known exceptions to the law that “like produces like” in which different sets of traits were transmitted to offspring were the phenomena of “throwing back” and the influence of the first sire. The former, also known as atavism (in particular with respect to discussions of human heredity), occurred when an offspring resembled not the immediate parents, but more distant ancestors. Breeders were well aware of the tendency of the offspring of crosses to “throw back” to the traits of their grandparents’ breeds, and this formed the basis for warnings against breeding from mixed or “mongrel” stock. It was also recognized that offspring could occasionally reflect the features not of the father, but of the mother’s first mate. Dubbed “telegony” by German biologist August Weismann, this phenomenon was understood to occur in humans as well.71 One breeder of poultry explained that while he may not understand the causes behind these occurrences, he nonetheless never

69 Can. Live-Stock and Farm, 4.3 (1887), 431; Rural Can., 10.3 (1887), 77-78. Emphasis mine. 70 Farming, 17.17 (1899), 486. 71 Bynum, “Discarded Diagnoses,” 1256; Wood, “Sheep Breeders’ View,” 24.

37 let his pullets run “promiscuously” with other breeds for fear of the wrong breed influencing these pullets’ later offspring.72 In both cases, the traits transmitted were not necessarily those possessed by the parents.

Perhaps the most important source of deviation from the simple notion that like begets like had to do with the varying prepotency of the parental animals. Certain animals were recognized to be able to transmit their traits more faithfully to their offspring than others. Animals with this ability were called prepotent and they were said to “stamp” their traits onto their offspring with greater force than others. It was therefore possible that the less prepotent of two mated animals did not transmit any of their traits at all. “By prepotency,”

Hugo Reed explained in 1900, “we mean the power, or ability, to transmit to his progeny his own characteristics.”73 Thus, in addition to the variation among the sets of traits transmitted, as seen in the cases of atavism and telegony, hereditary transmission itself was known to vary in strength. While atavism and telegony were features of both animal and human hereditary transmission recognized by the authors of domestic medical manuals and the WCTU, as we will later see, discussions of prepotency were unique among breeders and confined to their animal subjects.

Prepotency was understood to come from long use of the practice of in-breeding — made famous by Robert Bakewell (1725-1795) in the creation of his breed of Dishley sheep

— whereby related animals were bred with each other to “fix” certain traits into the offspring and thereby reduce variation among offspring in future generations. Like produced like, but

72 Can. Farm. 4.7 (1867), 103. 73 J. Ag. Hort., 17.21 (1900), 615.

38 this also included the likeness of some ancestors, and so the more the parents and ancestors resembled one another, the less likely there would be surprise “hidden” traits coming from ancestors, and the more likely the offspring would also take on the familial form. Thus, it was widely recognized by breeders that purebred or thoroughbred animals were more likely to breed true, and were thus of greater prepotency than the average “scrub” or mixed breed animal. For this reason, contributors to magazines often recommended that farmers use purebred animals (typically male) if they sought to improve the quality of their herd, for the effect of a single highly prepotent parent could significantly improve the quality of the herd in a few generations with its “desirable” features. As Walter Bunbury, of the Compton Model

Farm in Quebec explained, “The force of inheritance is strongest in old and well established pure breeds… The greater the extent to which animals are pure-bred… the more fixed or permanent are their points or peculiarities, and the more capable are they of transmitting them unimpaired to offspring.”74 Prepotency was thus a valuable trait for breeders, as it provided a “guarantee” of the result of certain matings: unlike the breeding of two “wild” or

“scrub” animals, the use of one, or better, two purebred animals would produce relatively uniform and predictable offspring. Specific advice offered in agricultural periodicals for using purebred sires to bring up the quality of one’s herd relied on such notions of prepotency.75

74 J. Ag. Hort, 1.10 (1898), 154. 75 It is perhaps because of this association of prepotency with continued in-breeding that discussions about prepotency in animals were not applied to or considered in the context of human heredity (as discussions about the negative effects about in-breeding were, for example).

39

Beliefs about the nature of prepotency were tied up with longstanding ideas about blood as the medium of inheritance. According to traditional views, blood was thought to contain the traits or essence of the animal. These traits were then transmitted to offspring in some way, whether by compacting into “seed” that went into the formation of the new organism, or through the mother’s milk after parturition.76 Darwin’s theory of pangenesis as the proposed mechanism behind hereditary transmission, first articulated in his 1868

Variation in Animals and Plants Under Domestication, represented a version of these theories. According to the pangenesis theory, all cells of the body threw off minute particles, called gemmules, which represented their specific qualities in miniature. These gemmules circulated through the blood, and, taken together, represented all the features of the parental organism. Furthermore, these gemmules collected in the reproductive organs, and were in this way transmitted to offspring. Consequently, children shared the features of their parents, including those which may have been acquired during their parents’ lifetimes.77 Darwin’s theory of pangenesis was indeed mentioned in articles written by breeders as a possible explanation for the mechanism of hereditary transmission.78

For breeders, prepotency, as a measure of the strength of hereditary transmission, was associated with purity of blood. Valencey Fuller, of Hamilton, Ontario, wrote to readers of the Canadian Live-Stock Journal in 1885 about the strength of hereditary transmission in certain cows (with names like Victor Hugo, and Stoke Pogis 3d). He suggested that in using a

76 Wood, “Sheep Breeders’ View,” 22; Sabean and Teuscher, “Introduction,” 9-10. 77 Darwin, Variation, 428-483. 78 Can. Bee J. 5.34 (1889), 813-814; Can. Poultry J. 14.3 (1891), 44-45. One, which considers it in the context of heredity in bees, will be discussed in greater detail below.

40 bull descended from a celebrated animal to improve a herd, “the greater the blood percentage

[of that animal], the greater are our probabilities of obtaining what we seek.”79 In another article on the breeding of cows, A.C. Hallman of Ontario said that it is important to use “a thoroughbred bull of high merit, of the type you are aiming to produce.” If he is a vigorous and healthy animal, he will be sure to stamp his traits on offspring: “It is here where heredity will show itself. Blood will tell.”80 Such ideas about the purity and power of blood were taken for granted in these and other offhand comments about having breeds “sufficiently stamped” in an animal’s blood, or individuals “bringing with them” the blood of a long line of ancestors.81 Indeed, this language of blood as carrier of familial traits also structured discussions about the value of certain practices, such as in-breeding and cross-breeding, as we will see later.

A related question for some readers was what constituted a “pure-blooded” or

“thoroughbred” animal (terms often used interchangeably).82 Breeders offered both technical and functional definitions. In 1867, the Canada Farmer published a question from a reader, who called himself “Ploughboy” about what constituted a “full-blooded animal.” With respect to the short-horned cattle, “Ploughboy” wanted to know if someone qualified could tell him how many crosses with a purebred animal it would take to bring up a lineage of native Canadian cows to qualify for a place in the Canadian stud book (which required

79 Can. Live-Stock J., 2.4 (1885), 100. 80 Farming, 14.2 (1896), 85. Emphasis mine. 81 e.g. Can. Farm., New Ser. 2.6 (1870), 206; Rural Can., 2.7 (1883), 137. 82 Formally, these terms had different meanings, but as Derry notes, they were used largely interchangeably. She suggests that interest in purebred animals so dominated the breeding landscape in the late 19th century that the former meaning of “thoroughbred” was lost and it came to be used in the same sense as “purebred”. Derry, Art and Science, 28.

41 pureblood status).83 This had a technical definition, as was explained to another similar reader query in Canada Farmer two years later: the Canadian Herd Book, the editor explained, defined a Thoroughbred Shorthorn cattle to be “one whose pedigree shows not less than four crosses with Herd Book bulls.”84 In contrast, for poultry, an article in the

Canadian Poultry Review indicated that it took six crosses with a thoroughbred cock to sufficiently remove all traces of mongrel blood to call subsequent offspring pureblooded.85

Note that in these cases, it was only through the use of males in such a breeding program that thoroughbred status could be achieved.

Others breeders, however, offered more functional definitions of what it meant to be thoroughbred or pure-blooded. An 1874 article in the Canada Farmer said that if you have fowls that produce offspring that are “true fac-similies” of the parents with respect to certain points (colour, form, and size), then these points are thoroughbred in the fowl.86 In this case, thoroughbred status referred only to the functional output: could the animals in question reproduce themselves faithfully or not? H.S. Babcock offered a similar assessment to readers of the Canadian Poultry Review in 1892. “The length of time a fowl has been bred is not the test of its thoroughbred character,” he explained. Instead, it means, when applied to fowls,

“that they will produce their characteristics with great uniformity. The progeny will have the characteristics of the parents and will breed them down to the next generation and so on.” Of course, it helps to have a long line of ancestors with similar traits, Babcock acknowledged,

83 Can. Farm., 4.10 (1867), 149. 84 Can. Farm., New. Ser. 1.9 (1868), 341; see also, e.g. On. Farm., 1.2 (1869), 51. 85 Can. Poultry Rev., 1.11 (1878), 163. 86 Can. Farm., 11.9 (1874), 178.

42 but it is the capacity for transmission, not its origin from either one or many sources, which determines thoroughbred status.87 According to this definition, to be thoroughbred was to be prepotent, and vice versa. Thus, for breeders, while the definitions of pure-blood or thoroughbred status were perhaps fluid, they were nonetheless reliably associated with — if not equated with — prepotency.

We can see from these discussions about prepotency that it was an eminently practical category. In the first place it was understood to emerge from a specific set of breeding practices, that is, continued use of some form of in-breeding. Moreover, it was also defined functionally, as the ability of an animal to reliably produce offspring that carried its own features. While discussions surrounding the nature of prepotency were often structured by metaphors of blood and purity, the practical significance of prepotency also shaped these metaphors: as we saw, the functional definition of pure-blood or thoroughbred equated such status with prepotency. Thus, for breeders, heredity referred broadly to a process of transmission whereby like produced like, which was rooted in the blood and which varied in strength between different animals. Heredity involved at times the transmission of different sets of traits, as in cases of atavism and telegony. Yet, heredity was also a practical concept for breeders, one that was often inextricably bound up with their ideas about breeding methods.

87 Can. Poultry Rev., 15.1 (1892), 7-8.

43

1.3.2 Breeding Techniques: Breeding In-and-In Because like did not always beget like, whether owing to atavism, telegony, or the varying prepotency of the mated animals, the techniques used by breeders in perpetuating their herds were of particular importance. Breeding techniques — such as in-breeding, cross- breeding, line-breeding, and grading — therefore represented another important subject of discussion and disagreement in the pages of agricultural journals that spoke to issues of heredity. This section will focus in particular on debates about in-breeding, a contentious breeding system designed to “fix” traits in a familial line and generate highly prepotent animals. These debates surrounding in-breeding embodied broader ideas about heredity, blood, and human and animal nature. Importantly, they also illustrate that breeders’ ideas about heredity were difficult to separate from their utilitarian interests and practical experiences in breeding.

“Breeding in-and-in,” “in-breeding,” or “pure breeding” was a system that mated closely-related individuals, with the aim of producing a herd of purebred animals that faithfully reproduced their traits.88 These traits had also been selected for during this process.

It was widely recognized that this was an efficient way of establishing a new breed of animals, or of “fixing” a trait in a breed. Many contributors mentioned the remarkable success of the British breeder Robert Bakewell (1725-1795) in this respect.89 A few referred to other successful breeders, such as Col. Samuel Jacques, of Charleston Mass., said to have

88 For example, parents with offspring, or sisters with brothers, although the exact parameters of in-breeding were sometimes debated. 89 e.g. Can. Farm., New Ser. Vol. 1.6 (1869), 213; Can. Farm., New Ser. Vol. 3.6 (1871), 211; Can. Live-Stock. and Farm., 4.2 (1887), 400; Rural Can. 10.3 (1887), 77-78.

44 been one of the most noted American stockbreeders, Thomas Booth of Yorkshire, and

Thomas Bates of Northumberland, both well-known British shorthorn breeders.90

Yet, breeding in-and-in was a contentious subject. Almost every commentator acknowledged that if it was not done extremely carefully, in-breeding would lead to a series of negative consequences: loss of vigour, decreased fertility, increased susceptibility to disease, etc. Many dismissed it outright for these reasons. Few breeders, articles often underlined, possessed the skill and judgement necessary to carry out in-breeding successfully. A lecture given by T.F. Jameson of Scotland on the principles of breeding, published in the Canada Farmer in 1871, explained that breeding in-and-in was “a system that requires to be pursued with great judgement and caution, and only succeeds in the hands of a master, for although it no doubt has the effect of more speedily attaining certain objects yet it is equally certain that numerous bad consequences have in many cases resulted from it.”91 An article in that same issue described the qualities necessary to be a successful breeder, according to a Prof. Miles of the Michigan Agricultural College. A good breeder must possess: “definite ideas as to the kind of animals he wishes to produce… persistence and perseverance…[and] a correct and educated eye.” They must be familiar with the principles of anatomy and physiology, free of prejudice, generally cautious and not prone to jumping to conclusions. Finally, they should also be “an Artist, capable of forming an ideal model of perfection and then of approximating to the conception already formed by

90 Can. Ag., 15.7 (1863), 254; Can. Farm., 12.2 (1875), 29. 91 Can. Farm., New Ser. 3.6 (1871), 211.

45 moulding the plastic organization of the animal so as to give it expression.”92 In other words, the breeder who was capable of carrying out in-and-in breeding successfully was to be almost superhuman in their deep understanding of each of the specific animals with which they were working, and in their ability to guide the trajectory of successive generations of offspring toward some preconceived ideal form. Perhaps it is not so remarkable after all that J.K.

Nestler, Professor of Natural History and Agriculture at the University of Olomouc, commented in 1839 that, “it seems to me remarkable that for the last fifty years the old conflict on inbreeding has been revised approximately once every decade.”93

This debate was by no means over when, forty years later, it was carried out in the pages of the Canadian Poultry Review. In January of 1879, a reader who identified himself as “X-Roads,” wrote in to express his views about in-breeding.94 While he acknowledged that many did not agree with this position, X-Roads indicated that he was a convert to in- breeding, as he had come to realize that it was the only way to produce and maintain properly purebred animals whose features or strain you intend to perpetuate. While the author indicated he was not able to provide any rules by which in-breeding could be carried out without causing damage to the line, he indicated that he knew of instances in which brother and sister had been mated with each other for several generations, without mental or physical injury to the breed. Indeed, X-Roads indicated that he was not only not prejudiced against in-

92 Can. Farm., New Ser. 3.6 (1871), 213. 93 Quoted in Wood and Orel, Genetic Prehistory, 275. 94 Where the identities of these contributors are unknown I alternate between referring to them as “he” and “she.” However, it is likely that they were all male, as I encountered few female contributors to the agricultural journals I surveyed. Derry, Art and Science in Breeding additionally indicates that among poultry breeders, there was a gendered divide; men were typically involved in fancying, which revolved around in- breeding, while women were more involved in improving the productivity of stock for practical purposes, which typically involved crossing (65-68).

46 breeding, but in fact, prejudiced against crossing, and that he would rather breed brother and sister than introduce outside blood and risk ruining his whole stock.95

This submission generated debate among readers. A reader identifying herself as

“Pure Blood” wrote in in the following month from Montreal, indicating that she found X-

Road’s contribution “exceedingly interesting.” She herself had been “endeavouring to make some advances in this very important subject” in the last few years and found herself increasingly leaning towards the value of in-breeding. She explained that in the past, following prevailing wisdom, she had introduced an outside male to her flock and found herself with inferior offspring, with “white-tipped primaries, red feathers on the back, loss of velvety-white in the face, etc.” Disappointed with crossing, she decided to try in-breeding after reading an article about it, and had had great success for the past four years. She indicated that she would be glad to see this subject discussed by others who have had more experience than her.96 In March, Massachusetts subscriber John Fleming, wrote in to give his two cents. He applauded X-Roads for being clear and fair in his statement and added that he never believed in the confidence of those who held fast to their assumptions without testing by extensive experiment. Fleming acknowledged that he knew of both successful and failed attempts to improve breeds by in-and-in breeding, and so contributed his own modest experience with the subject. He “breeds from family blood, but not from brothers and

95 Can. Poultry Rev., 2.2 (1879), 24-25. 96 Can. Poultry Rev., 2.3 (1879), 40.

47 sisters,” and now has “[his] type and can breed [his] fowls of uniform appearance and can continue so to do.”97

Yet not everyone agreed. In that same issue, a reader “K” from Michigan expressed her deep disapproval of in-breeding: “We all know that the law against incest is as old as

Holy Writ, and what is in-breeding but incest?” Just as in humans, she explained, breeding animals too closely brings out all kinds of hereditary diseases in offspring. “K” objected to the evidence offered by “Pure Blood” that it was the very fact of bringing in new blood that ruined her stock, and countered that it was more likely that this bird simply had some hidden hereditary fault. She declared, “the pleas against In-Breeding are almost without limit.”98

Readers continued to write in for the next few months.

This debate is interesting for several reasons. In the first place, it reveals a wide community of readers and active contributors to the Canadian Poultry Review, and to this debate specifically. “K” and John Fleming hailed from Michigan and Massachusetts, respectively, while “Gallinae” and “Pure Blood” wrote from Ontario and Quebec. Another author “Thomas” was writing from Delaware, but a comment from John Fleming’s article indicated that he was a Canadian expat living in the United States, and also evidently a regular contributor to the journal. Thus, Canadians were not only reading American agricultural journals, but evidently Americans were also reading Canadian publications and were involved in discussions within their pages.

97 Can. Poultry Rev., 2.4 (1879), 54-55. 98 Can. Poultry Rev., 2.4 (1879), 55.

48

Second, a number of authors asserted that their contributions were no mere opinion, but were based on facts, observations, or experiment. In so doing, these breeders privileged their experiential epistemological access to the phenomena of heredity, and assumed that the true path to knowledge on these matters was through practical experience. But the debate also revealed that observed facts were sometimes not enough. Indeed, as we have seen with the disagreement between “K” and “Pure Blood,” the same observation was taken by different interpreters to both affirm and deny the value of in-breeding. “X-Roads” recognized this problem when he said that “I think those who are not in favour of in-breeding are too apt to attribute weakness and all sorts of disease to it.” He suggested instead that the weakness observed among in-bred animals more likely comes from the tendency of those who in-breed animals for the purposes of exhibitions to coddle their animals, who, by so doing, weaken the capacity of their animals to withstand disease and foul weather.99

Third, the discussion also indicates that the exact meaning of in-breeding for these individuals was not clearly defined. Some said it involved breeding brother and sister, while others who identified as practicing in-breeding said they would breed no closer than parent to offspring. Contributors to the in-breeding debate gave a range of suggestions for what they believed would constitute an effective practice of in-breeding, including a later suggestion from “X-Roads” to bring in new blood by taking a set of his animals to a different location, allowing them to breed there for a few generations, and then bringing them back in again.

The reason this worked, he explained, was because a new location or climate changed

99 Can. Poultry Rev., 2.6 (1879), 102.

49 animals sufficiently that their blood was good for breeding-in again.100 Others gave advice for splitting up animals of the same breed into separate pens and then rotating among them when choosing animals to breed.101 Twelve years later, in 1891, H.S. Babcock, of

Providence, Rhode Island, argued that the term was still poorly-defined, and that in-breeding could be construed to mean breeding between any relations, no matter how distant, or only between very close ones. Much of the conflict about in-breeding, he suggested, comes from this lack of clear definition; for the purposes of his discussion, he defined it as any breeding involving animals closer than first-cousins.102

Finally, in addition to their first-hand experience, and the usual references to the opinions of other eminent or unnamed breeders, a number of contributors to the debate also drew on another form of evidence: analogy from nature. In his original article, “X-Roads” stated that there was certainly some law of nature which has allowed all wild animals to in- breed, and if we only knew “nature’s secret in this, and follow[ed] it out, there is no reason why our domestic animals could not be bred just as true.”103 “Gallinae” challenged “X-

Roads” on this point, conceding that if there was evidence of in-breeding in nature it would be the strongest argument he could think of for practicing it on the farm, but that the habits of some of the most well-known varieties of wild birds seem to indicate they do not in-breed.104

A comment from “K” referring to the heredity of human and animal diseases underlined the logic behind using these analogies: “animated nature is one and the same, be it man, beast, or

100 Can. Poultry Rev., 2.6 (1879), 103. 101 Can. Poultry Rev., 2.7 (1879), 130. 102 Can. Poultry Rev., 14.1 (1891), 60. 103 Can. Poultry Rev., 2.2 (1879), 24. 104 Can. Poultry Rev., 2.6 (1879), 101.

50 bird.”105 Evidence from human and plant nature was seen as legitimate in discussions of hereditary transmission in animals, and, conversely, knowledge about animal heredity was thought to be relevant, at least in some ways, to human affairs.

Thus, for this group of contributors, breeding in-and-in represented a subject of debate that intersected with broader ideas about heredity, blood, and human and animal nature. The debate was also inextricably bound up with specific sets of practices of mating and rearing animals. To frame it in terms of heredity, for these breeders of poultry, their ideas about heredity were difficult to separate from their assumptions about the heredity of human disease, from common notions about purity of blood, and from their own practical experiences with mating specific sets of chickens. The set of breeders involved in the debate were largely interested in breeding for “fancy” points for the purposes of exhibition, rather than aiming to improve laying productivity or fattening qualities. For this reason, the positions they took with respect to in-breeding likely varied from those adopted by other breeders of poultry looking to improve the practical features of their birds, who generally used cross-breeding rather than in-breeding methods. As an 1890 article from the Canadian

Livestock and Farm Journal on inbreeding in poultry explained, “as most breeders [of fancy fowl] are aware, it is a hard matter to fix the outward characteristics of the fowl intended for exhibition without [inbreeding] to a limited extent.” In contrast, “fowls kept for breeding, laying, and table purposes, should never be inbred if the best results in utility are desired.”106

Nonetheless, the debate represents in its general contours the main features of similar

105 Can. Poultry Rev., 2.4 (1879), 55. 106 Can. Livestock and Farm, 7.11 (1890), 382.

51 discussions about in-breeding found in many other Canadian agricultural journals, including the forms of evidence relied upon in discussing matters related to heredity, and in the broader sets of ideas and practices in which implicit and explicit knowledge of heredity was embedded.

The different categories of agricultural journals I examined contained largely similar views on in-breeding. All reflected a range of opinions on the technique, the most common position being that it was useful for certain purposes, but only under a specific set of conditions (for example, using healthy animals) and only when practiced by an expert breeder. The Canadian Poultry Review had the most extended and focused discussion on the subject. It may be that in-breeding was more relevant or acceptable to the readers of a specialized periodical — many of whom would have been fanciers who bred fowl for very specific sets of traits for exhibition-purposes — than to the readers of a general periodical that addressed more practical farming interests. The other specialized periodical I examined, the Canadian Bee Journal, was less accepting of in-breeding than the Poultry Review, but its aims were decidedly practical: to improve the science of apiculture in general, which in many cases meant improving the productivity of honey yields.

Similar sets of discussions revolved around other general breeding techniques, such as cross-breeding, grading, and line-breeding. Cross-breeding, the practice of crossing different breeds of animals, was typically employed to search for combinations that produced superior offspring. It was widely recognized that cross-breeding was not a good approach for fixing traits into a line, as after the first cross, offspring often “threw back” to the traits of the original breeds. It was, however, found that the products of crosses were often strong and vigorous, and for this reason, it was promoted by many contributors to agricultural journals

52 as a means for improving the productivity of stock on a farm. There was an interesting tension within these discussions between cross-breeding as “contaminating” the blood line purity established by hard work through in-breeding, and as reinvigorating the strength of the herd by bringing in fresh blood. Evidently, the sides taken on this question depended on the purposes for which one was breeding. Some authors acknowledged the different reasons for using in-breeding and cross-breeding, and advocated for the importance of keeping stocks of purebred animals available for the average farmer to use in crossing with other breeds or with their own animals to improve their stock.107

Journals also considered the value of, and offered specific advice for employing grading, a practice whereby a purebred animal is bred with a non-purebred animal and to the subsequent generations of offspring to increase each generations’ percentage of purebred blood. Line-breeding, which is similar to the practice of grading, but uses sires of the same breed, rather than using the same animal, was also a subject of discussion. In all of these cases, as we have seen with the discussions around in-breeding, the ideas about heredity implicitly or explicitly expressed by the breeder-contributors to agricultural periodicals were tightly bound up with their utilitarian interests and practical experiences.

1.3.3 On the Sexes Ideas about heredity were also embedded in discussions on topics related to the sexes of mated animals — namely, the relation of prepotency to masculinity, the relative

107 e.g. Can. Ag., 3.15 (1861), 449-450; On. Farm., 1.2 (1869), 48; Granger, 1.1 (1875), 4.

53 contribution of the sexes to the features of offspring, and whether or how it was possible to produce animals of a specific sex at will. These discussions were structured by certain notions of heredity, but also served as a medium through which ideas about heredity were further developed. Moreover, they allowed average farmers to participate in broader debates in the scientific study of biology about the nature of heredity and reproduction. Finally, these were eminently practical discussions whose outcome affected the livelihoods of farmers and breeders. Being able to control the sex of offspring, for example, was crucial for poultry farmers looking to increase their yield of eggs.

Notions of masculinity often shaped breeders’ understanding of prepotency. Consider for example, Alban Wye’s explanation of prepotency in an article originally published in

1885 in the American publication the Country Gentleman and reprinted the same year in the

Canadian Breeder and Agricultural Review. “Expert breeders,” he explained, say that prepotency “depends upon the greater or less vigor of the nervous system in each of the parents, and that the influence of the stallion upon the get, which is deemed greater, on the average, than that of the mare, is dependent upon the effect which he exerts upon the nervous system of the mare at the time of service.”108 Rarely were female animals said to be prepotent, although if prepotency relied solely on concentration of blood, they would partake equally of the quality as males. Instead, breeding advice often relied on bringing in purebred males, who were to be bred with the best females the farmer already had. This was often explained by reference to the fact that a single purebred male would have a greater economic payoff than a single purebred female by virtue of the number of offspring he could sire in one

108 Can. Br. Ag. Rev., 2.40 (1885), 628.

54 season. However, as Wye suggested, it was also thought males were generally more effective at transmitting their traits than females.

This association between prepotency and masculinity in particular was revealed in an

1897 focused editorial discussion in Farming, summarizing a recent debate in the pages of the Rural New Yorker about whether or not de-horning a bull reduces its prepotency.109 The discussion, between academic breeders at various American experiment stations, was prompted by a recent statement in Hoard’s Dairyman that “so serious a mutilation as dis- horning, so near the brain, the great seat of the nerve power and force, cannot but result in lessening that finer prepotency which constitutes the greater value of any desirable bull.”110

While some agreed, such as a “well-known breeder of dairy stock in Wisconsin,” most commentators — including a veterinarian at the North Dakota Experiment Station, a veterinarian at the Pennsylvania Experiment Station, and the Director of the Indiana

Experiment Station — did not believe this to be the case, citing physiological and scientific reasoning in support of their positions. Others acknowledged the preference among breeders to keep bulls horned, and offered possible explanations for the phenomenon. Professor J.A.

Craig of the University of Wisconsin, formerly the editor of Farming, said that he did not think dehorning affected prepotency per se, but reasoned that it might affect vigour, which was an essential aspect of prepotent animals. His explanation also underlined the association between prepotency, vigour, and masculinity: “In the dairy bull the possession of a strong horn, a high, thick crest and overflowing vigor, are the chief evidences of masculinity. As far

109 Farming, 14.11 (1897), 713-716. 110 Farming, 14.11 (1897), 713.

55 as my observation goes, the bull that is thoroughly masculine is invariably prepotent… If dishorning lessens that vigor which a bull should have to be impressive as a dairy sire, then I should expect his prepotency to be somewhat affected by the operation.”111 Interestingly, taking the assumption that prepotency reflect some measure of exceptional nervous energy or vigour, Frank Emory, director of the North Carolina Experiment station was led to the opposite conclusion, that dehorning might in fact increase prepotency. By redirecting energy that would have previously been spent fighting towards reproduction instead, de-horning would consequently increase the animal's ability to stamp their qualities on offspring.112 Here we can see how broader social ideals of masculinity such as vigour, nervous power, and impressiveness shaped discussions about the nature of hereditary prepotency. Yet, this discussion about prepotency and masculinity was not abstract, but was framed around a practical question — whether or not to de-horn bulls — that was thought to hold implications for the livelihoods of the farmers reading the debate.

Ideas about heredity were also implicit in discussions about which features — such as strength, nervous disposition, or shape of the limbs, for example — each of the parents contributed to offspring. In this case, what was being questioned was the set of traits being transmitted to offspring, rather than the nature of heredity as a process of transmission.

Opinions abounded. Eminent British veterinary surgeon W.C. Spooner gave the following view in 1861, in an article reprinted in the Canadian Agriculturist from the Journal of the

Royal Agricultural Society of England. “The most probable supposition is that propagation is

111 Farming, 14.11, p. 715. Emphasis mine 112 Farming, 14.11, p. 715.

56 done by halves, each parent giving to the offspring the shape of one half the body” — that is, the back end, general shape, force, and size are influenced by one parent, usually the male; while the front end, constitution, vital organs, and nervous system by the other parent, usually the female. He corroborated this theory with examples from horse breeding.113 Other authors gave similar descriptions of the differential contributions of the sexes with respect to horse and cattle breeding: females were typically said to influence the head, nervous system, internal organs, temperament, and nutritive system, while males were typically given credit for the size, strength, outward form, colour, locomotion, and shape of limbs.114 While Prof.

Hugo Reed, of Guelph indicated in 1899 that this theory was disputed, he did not elaborate or offer an alternative theory.115 Journals offered practical advice based on these beliefs: an article originally from the North British Agriculturist republished in the Canadian

Agriculturist, for example, advised readers to therefore never breed from mares with “narrow contracted chests or weak loins, or delicate constitutions.”116 Poultry breeders understood a different set of traits to be transmitted by the male and female parents. In contrast to the breeding of horses and cattle, in which it was assumed that the male contributed the size and form to offspring, an article on breeding poultry for exhibition published in the Canada

Farmer suggested that the colour and fancy points were determined by the male bird, while form, size, and useful qualities (such as fattening or laying abilities) were derived from the

113 Can. Ag., 13.1 (1861), 3-4. 114 e.g. Can. Ag., 14.18 (1862), 558; Can. Ag., 15.1 (1863), 22; Can. Br. and Ag. Rev., 2.26 (1885), 403; Can. Br. and Ag. Rev., 2.47 (1885), 739. 115 Farming, 17.17 (1899), 486. 116 Can. Ag., 14.18 (1862), 558.

57 hen.117 Other contributors gave similar assessments.118 Finally, some breeders did not think these traits were so sex-specific, but that instead, the distribution of parental traits reflected their contrasting vigour or purity of blood,119 or that the male parent influenced the female offspring, and vice versa.120 It also seems that by the end of the century, with respect to the question of the differential contribution of the sexes, the emphasis seemed to be more on providing the general advice to choose both mates wisely and in relation to each other, rather than focusing on the specific traits thought to arise from each sex. In this regard, readers were advised to consider the special features or deficiencies of the animals they wished to mate and pair them accordingly: a female deficient in some point should ideally be matched with a mate with a surplus in it.

Depending on their practical aims, farmers often wished to produce more male or female offspring — dairy farmers, for example, desired more female offspring to increase their milk production, while purebred breeders seeking to sell bulls or stallions for sire wanted male offspring. For this reason, the subject of whether or how it was possible to produce the sexes at will cropped up periodically throughout Canadian agricultural journals, although there was never any consensus on the validity of these theories. For example, consider the coverage in the Canada Farmer of the theory of Marc Thury, a professor at the

Academy of Geneva. In 1863, Thury published a pamphlet outlining the results of his recent experiments with cattle on this subject. His theory was that the sex of offspring was

117 Can. Farm., 11.4 (1874), 76-77. 118 see, e.g. Can. Stock. J., 1.4 (1884), 64; Can. Poultry Rev., (1894), 94. 119 e.g. Can. Ag., 14.18 (1862), 558. 120 Farming, 14.2 (1896), 76.

58 determined by the state of maturity — by which he meant time after ovulation — of the ovum at the time of fertilization. Eggs fertilized shortly after ovulation produced females, while those which passed a certain period of time (approximately half the period of heat) before being fertilized produced males.121 In February of the next year, the Canada Farmer contained a short note about Thury’s recent work on the production of sexes at will in cattle buried between longer articles. The next month his theory was described in greater detail.122

While this theory came up periodically in other articles on the subject, there was no consensus about its validity, despite the original encouraging reports. Short pieces from

Bell’s Messenger and the Kentucky Live Stock Record published in the Canada Farmer described readers who had had no luck with Thury’s method.123 In 1868, the editor of the journal himself responded to a reader question about whether there was any trustworthy method for controlling sex in offspring with the reply, “Not that we are aware of. Several theories have been propounded, and supposed proofs of their soundness furnished, but thus far, all have proved imaginary.”124

The wide range of theories proposed about producing the sexes at will is illustrated by a piece written by J. Sanders Spencer upon request for the Canadian Breeder and

Agricultural Review in 1885 on the “circumstances and conditions influencing the sex of offspring.”125 Indicating that there were well over five hundred different theories proposed, and that at least one thousand people had written on the subject, as far back as Aristotle and

121 Thury, Notice. 122 Can. Farm., 1.2 (1864), 22; Can. Farm., 1.5 (1864), 71; 123 Can. Farm., 2.4 (1865), 20; Can. Farm., 12.5 (1875), 89. 124 Can. Farm., 5.7 (1868), 105. 125 Can. Br. Ag. Rev., 2.50 (1885), 787-788; Can. Br. Ag. Rev., 2.51 (1885), 804.

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Plato, Spencer summarized the most prominent types of theories about the determination of sex at that time. The five categories of theories he described were the ovulary, the spermatic, the epigenesian, metamorphosis, and superiority. According to the ovulary and spermatic theories, it is the ovum or sperm which determines the sex of offspring, respectively, while according to the epigenesian theory, sex is undetermined at fertilization, and is instead the product of the conditions of gestation. The theory he called metamorphosis is more generally known as preformationism,126 whereby the entire organism is believed to be already contained in miniature in the ovum prior to conception (and even prior to the birth of the mother). Finally, according to the superiority theory, to which he adhered, the more vigorous parent at the time of mating determined the sex of the offspring. Thury’s theory of the maturity of the ovum represented one version of the ovulary-type theories, but Sanders also pointed out that there were some who believed that males, rather than females, were produced in the first period of heat. A range of other less prominent theories were also proposed or mentioned that same year by a series of contributors to the Rural Canadian, including a theory first proposed by a Mr. Stuyvesant of the National Livestock Journal that sexes alternated with heats, a theory proposed by the German physician P.P. Sixt that males were generated by one testicle and females by the other, and various other theories about the effects of the time of day, the weather, or the relative ages of the animals mated.127 While

126 Spencer’s classification of these theories comes from George Starkweather, and in describing this theory, it is possible he just took the first word of the relevant chapter subheading, “Metamorphosis, Preformation, and Postformation,” from Starkweather’s book. Starkweather, Law of Sex, x. 127 e.g. Rural Can., 3.9 (1884), 156; Rural Can., New Ser. 4.5 (1885), 102-103; Rural Can., New Ser. 4.6 (1885), 124; Rural Can., New Ser. 4.7 (1885), 148; Rural Can., New Ser. 4.8 (1885), 172.

60

Thury’s theory was making the rounds in 1864, a contributor to the Canadian Breeder and

Agricultural Review in 1885 indicated that the latest idea being circulated was Sixt’s.128

Spencer himself was influenced by George Starkweather, Fellow of the Royal

Geographical Society of Britain, to whom is attributed the superiority theory. Indeed, the classification and history of the theories of sex determination that Spencer described were taken from Starkweather’s 1883 book, The Law of Sex: An Exposition of the Natural Law by

Which the Sex of Offspring is Controlled in Man and the Lower Animals. Spencer accepted the general principle that the most vigorous parent at the time of conception influenced the sex of the offspring. However, while Starkweather argued that the more vigorous parent would produce offspring of the opposite sex, Spencer disputed his evidence on this point.

What Starkweather took to mean a lessening of vigour in his experimental sheep subjects

(dullness from overfeeding), Sanders instead understood to be the conditions for superiority in sheep. Thus, the results were the same, but due to Starkweather’s “want of practical knowledge of sheep-breeding upon light lands,” Spencer argued that the animals

Starkweather assumed to be inferior and superior were reversed, and that the latter therefore interpreted his results incorrectly. Spencer’s disagreement with Starkweather’s understanding of superiority suggests that Spencer believed that his long practical experience (in breeding sheep “upon light lands”) gave him the authority to interpret the real meaning of

Starkweather’s experimental results.129

128 Can. Br. Ag. Rev., 2.38 (1885), 596. 129 Starkweather, Law of Sex, 248-265. It is additionally interesting because Starkweather, who was also interested in and wrote elsewhere about eugenics, explicitly drew implications from his theory to humans and to the future of the race. On eugenics, see Starkweather, Biogenetic Marvels.

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These discussions about the determination of sex in offspring are revealing of the circulation of scientific knowledge within agricultural periodicals. Reports of Thury’s work appeared in Canadian agricultural periodicals shortly after the original publication of his

Notice, and experimental evaluations of his theory were republished from both British and

American journals. Moreover, as Spencer’s classification of the main theories of sex- production reveals, the discussions captured at a smaller scale broader debates about the nature of generation and reproduction. As we have seen, both the well-known and the average breeder contributed to these debates, however peripherally, by offering their own personal experiences, experiments, and observations to the ongoing conversation. An unidentified reader, for example, gave his thoughts on the question from his twenty years of experience breeding Devon cattle. He explained that in his experience, “a fat bull begets mostly male calves, and a lean bull begets mostly female calves, provided the cows are in fair condition.” He then described in detail, the history of some of his cows, as well as the experiences of a neighbour and of a relative of his on the subject.130 This sort of contribution was not uncommon, and shows how, through the medium of the agricultural journal, the average person could — and did — actively participate in broad and far-reaching debates at the heart of the grand narrative of the history of biology. While the reader described above perhaps did not alter the course of this history, these discussions illustrate nonetheless that these academic debates were not isolated from the lay person whose living came from a daily practical engagement with the animal body — but were in fact relevant to their personal interests and livelihoods. Moreover, they show that these individuals did not passively accept

130 Rural Can., New Ser. 4.5 (1885), 102-103.

62 prevailing theories about the basic processes of generation, reproduction, and heredity, but instead tested, challenged, and modified them based on their own personal experiences.

1.3.4 Heredity of Disease Maintaining the health of one’s animals was a significant responsibility for breeders and farmers, and many pages of agricultural journals were therefore devoted to the identification and cure of a range of common diseases. The heredity of these diseases was considered in many cases, and in particular the question of whether diseases were inherited directly or indirectly. Discussions of the heredity of various animal diseases generally appeared in the context of specific advice on how to choose or purchase animals for breeding purposes: those with any number of hereditary diseases or general hereditary unsoundness were to be strictly avoided. Indeed, the heredity of a number of specific diseases of various animals was discussed or mentioned in passing. Roaring, heaving, ringbones, spavin, and moon-blindness were diseases commonly said to be hereditary among horses.131 Foul brood and bee paralysis were widely-believed to be hereditary among bees.132

Yet, for the most part, these diseases were not thought to be transmitted directly though the generations, but to be predisposed among certain offspring. This could mean one of two things: tendency to acquire a disease more easily, or a faulty formation of certain body parts. Thus, in many cases, the diseases that were said to be hereditary were understood to additionally require exciting causes — such as hard work or poor nutrition, for example — to

131 e.g. Farming, 17.13 (1899), 350; Farming, 17.17 (1899), 486. 132 e.g. Can. Bee. J., 3.24 (1887), 491; Can. Bee. J., 8.4 (1892), 58; Can. Bee. J., 8.20 (1893), 325-326; Can. Bee. J., New Ser. 1.10 (1894), 205.

63 manifest in an individual. Consider roaring, for example, a disease of horses in which a loud roaring or wheezing sound can be heard upon inspiration. Veterinarian T.K. Quickfall of

Belleville, Ontario explained to readers of the Canada Farmer in 1867 that the disease could be caused by a range of things, such as the use of overly tight straps around the neck and musty hay or bad oats, but that it was most likely to appear among animals with a peculiar malformation of the throat. This malformation may be transmitted, he explained, but he added that “I do not believe in the notion that a morbid action is capable of being conveyed from parent to offspring.”133 In this case, according to Quickfall, the disease was not transmitted directly by heredity, and that the only thing strictly inherited was the predisposition in the form of a particular set of bodily traits.

For others, however, this transmission was nonetheless almost guaranteed: F.C.

Grenside of Guelph, for example, warned readers of the Canadian Live-Stock and Farm

Journal in 1888 that roaring was undoubtedly hereditary, and that “where there is a predisposition to it, it is impossible to ward off by any amount of care.”134 Either way, information conveyed about the heredity of disease in agricultural journals formed the basis of breeding advice, similarly, as we will see, to how it shaped marriage advice in domestic medical manuals. Readers of an article on ringbone, for example, were told to take the utmost care in choosing animals free of any hereditary disease for breeding, lest the disease appear in offspring.135

133 Can. Farm., 4.2 (1867), 22. 134 Can. Live-Stock and Farm., 5.61 (1888), 308. 135 Can. Farm., 1.3 (1864), 43.

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Incidentally, what was considered a hereditary disease or not was given official form with the publication of the third report of the Royal Commission on Horse Breeding in 1890, which aimed to improve horse breeding and production in Britain. Previously, the

Commission had asked the British Council of the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons to confer with members of their profession to determine which defects among horses should be determined hereditary and thus render afflicted horses unfit for stud purposes. The Council consolidated their view based on the replies to 2,500 circulars they sent out to members and determined that “the following diseases shall be deemed a legitimate reason for disqualification [for stud purposes by the Commission]:” roaring, sidebone, ringbone, navicular disease, curb, bone spavin, bog spavin, grease, shivering, and cataract, as well as a few others under certain (unspecified) circumstances. In this case, these diseases were deemed “officially” hereditary, despite possible lingering natural-historical or philosophical disputes about the necessity or not of exciting causes. In fact, the consensus the Council provided belies the extensive discussion and disagreement that went on behind the scenes before it was established. The results of this inquiry were published in two short articles in the Canadian Livestock and Farm Journal in 1889. Here, we can see how the expertise of the veterinary profession on heredity and disease was consolidated from the results of the

Commission’s inquiry and made available to breeders through their agricultural periodical literature.136

136 Royal Commission, 8; Can. Live-Stock and Farm., 6.68 (1889), 164; Can. Live-Stock and Farm., 7.11 (1890), 363.

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To conclude, ideas about heredity were embedded and being worked out in the context of a series of discussions about the contingencies of hereditary transmission, ideal breeding practices, the role of the sexes in heredity, and the heredity of disease. We can see from these discussions a general understanding of the process of hereditary transmission summed up by the observation that “like begets like.” Heredity was understood to vary in strength, and to be rooted in the blood. Yet, there were also variations in the sets of traits transmitted to offspring that were not always understood. Heredity was seen to be important to the prosperity of the nation, given its central relevance for agriculture and animal husbandry, but its manifestations capricious. These discussions reveal an active engagement on the part of farmers and breeders, of different educational and social backgrounds, with these questions about heredity. Indeed, agricultural journals served as a medium of exposure for this group of Canadians to a range of ideas about heredity as it related to the animal body, and additionally served as a medium through which farmers and breeders could exchange and evaluate these ideas. The debate about in-breeding, for example, reveals a wide community of active readers and contributors who placed a significant emphasis on the value of personal experience and observation when it came to settling practical questions related to hereditary phenomena. It also reveals how these ideas about heredity were in many cases deeply intertwined with beliefs about best practices and with farmers’ utilitarian interests and practical experience in working with their animals. The discussion about whether or how it was possible to produce the sexes at will illustrates the role of agricultural journals in exposing readers to broader debates taking place in the scientific study of heredity, reproduction, and generation, and in providing a forum for farmers to engage in these conversations. Rather than accepting changing scientific currents passively, farmers and

66 breeders were actively involved in testing and evaluating these theories of generation and heredity as they related to their own interests and experiences. In what follows, this role of

Canadian agricultural periodicals as medium of information exchange and communication between farmers and breeders is examined more closely.

1.4 Sources of Knowledge about Heredity As we have seen, Canadian agricultural periodicals provided a forum through which breeders and farmers engaged in a variety of discussions related to breeding and agricultural practices. Some of these debates embodied implicit or explicit notions about heredity. Yet, where did these ideas about heredity come from, and upon what authority were they based?

These questions were related and relevant for the readers and publishers of agricultural periodicals. Indeed, there was a tension apparent within agricultural journals about the relative value of science over personal experience when it came to matters related to breeding. It was understood that science could contribute much to the advancement of agriculture, but was no replacement for solid practical knowledge. The real authority or expert when it came to knowledge about the principles of breeding was the breeder him- or herself. Thus, while these periodicals did reference scientists (mostly Darwin) as sources of knowledge and authority on the subject of heredity, for the most part, the agricultural journals I examined were publishing, referencing, and commenting on information provided by breeders — including the average breeder/farmer, those associated with veterinary schools or agricultural stations, and eminent breeders, notably Robert Bakewell. This inward-looking tendency applied to contributions specifically written for the Canadian journals in question,

67 as well as to information re-published in full or in part from a range of Canadian, British, and

American periodicals.

The most frequently cited scientist within the pages of Canadian agricultural journals was Charles Darwin (1809-1882). In debates on in-breeding, for example, Darwin’s name was frequently invoked. An article on in-breeding in cattle published in the Rural Canadian in 1869 consisted only of a long excerpt from Darwin’s Variation of Animals and Plants

Under Domestication, which had been published just the previous year, in 1868. This massive book aimed to make sense of the causes of variation in plants and animals. Variation represented a foundational aspect of Darwin’s theory of natural selection, which he laid out in his 1859 Origin of Species. The evolution of a species of bird, for example, depended on the differential survival of individuals with varying traits that enabled them to navigate the world more or less successfully than others. Yet, the nature and causes of this variation remained unexplained. In attempting to make sense of it, Darwin amassed huge volumes of data from breeders and fanciers. It was in this book that Darwin outlined his provisional theory of heredity, pangenesis. Here, Darwin also discussed the effects of in-breeding, and his views on both of these subjects were subsequently cited by breeders of various animals.

An article on in-breeding in bees published in 1889, for example, drew support from Darwin, who showed that sustained in-breeding was injurious to plants, and additionally highlighted the role of bees as mitigating excessive in-breeding by helping plants to cross-fertilize.137

H.S. Babcock also considered the ideas of Darwin and his contemporary, Alfred Russel

Wallace (1823-1913), on in-breeding poultry in an article published in 1891, but explained

137 Can. Bee J., 4.29 (1889), 992-993.

68 that he was inclined to side with the latter, who denied that it necessarily produced ill- effects.138 The Rural Canadian included a little note in April of 1889 marking Darwin’s death earlier that month, and commented on his contributions to the advancement of knowledge as well as agriculture.139

The influence of breeders’ knowledge on the development of Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection is well known,140 thus, it is additionally interesting to see the extent to which breeders in turn relied on Darwin as a source of authority on matters relating to hereditary phenomena, especially when it was with respect to information that he had derived from them. Consider, for example, an 1899 article written by the editor of the

Journal of Agriculture and Horticulture on breeding. With respect to the tendency of animals to “throw back” to more distant ancestors, he explained, “this is called ‘atavism,’ and is frequently observed by all the breeders of white pigeons, who, in spite of all their pains to keep their birds pure in color, find constantly, to their trouble, that black feathers will show themselves in young ones.”141 Importantly, the editor referenced Darwin (note: just

“Darwin,” not any of his publications specifically) to support his point about the general knowledge of breeders. Evidently, Darwin’s theories were sufficiently well-known, and

Darwin sufficiently well-respected that the editor of the Journal of Agriculture and

Horticulture could refer to him only by name to lend legitimacy to this claim about his own peoples’ knowledge.

138 Can. Poultry J., 14.1 (1891), 60. 139 Rural Can., 1.11 (1883), 161. 140 e.g. Secord, “Nature’s Fancy.” 141 J. Ag. Hort., 3.8 (1899), 174-176.

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Other breeders used Darwin in more concrete and unusual ways to support their theories about heredity. One particularly interesting example comes from a paper by R.A.

Grimshaw on heredity in bees, read before the British Beekeepers’ Association, and published in both the Canadian Bee Journal and the British Bee Journal in 1889, and in the

American Bee Journal the following year.142 Grimshaw described a pressing problem in understanding hereditary transmission in bees, which stemmed from their unusual systems of reproduction. Bees are highly social animals, and each individual occupies one of three different specialized roles within the hive. There is one queen, who lays eggs and does nothing else. Queens do not collect pollen, protect the hive, secrete wax, etc. There are male bees, called drones, whose primary role is to mate with queens. Finally, the remaining tasks of maintaining the hive and its inhabitants fall upon the workers. The worker bees are all the remaining female bees that are not queens, and they do such tasks as collect pollen, guard the hive, feed the young, attend to the queen, etc. This much was known to bee-keepers at the time. In 1835, Polish apiarist Johann Dzierzon proposed that drones were produced from unfertilized eggs, and later, proposed that female bees, which were the products of fertilization, developed either into workers or queens depending on the diets they were fed as young. While Dzierzon’s work was widely known, his drone theory remained controversial until the early 20th century.143 Nonetheless, this pattern of reproduction posed an interesting problem for bee-keepers: if workers were the offspring of queens and drones, neither of whom ever performed any of the usual worker-bee tasks, then how were these traits

142 Brit. Bee J., 17.384 (1889), 460-461; Can. Bee J., 5.34 (1889), 813-184; Am. Bee J., 26.32 (1890), 535. 143 Churchill, “Weismann and Dickel,” 61-64.

70 transmitted? As Grimshaw put it, “the truly wonderous … instincts in the worker bee are not possessed by the parent bees.”

Grimshaw’s solution to this problem was clever. He inferred from the fact that the future of female eggs depended on their treatment (i.e. feeding) by worker bees, that it was somehow this “brood food” that was the means of hereditary transmission. He admitted that this seemed far-fetched, but he explained that Darwin’s theory of gemmules supported his theory of “heredity by generations of specialized food.” Grimshaw proposed that through the medium of the food fed to young queen bees (as well as drone and worker bees), workers were able to transmit to them the multitudes of their own gemmules and thereby transmit to queens and drones their specialized characteristics. In this way, Grimshaw deemed these worker “foster-mothers” the “real highways of heredity” in bees and their milk-like secretions the means by which they transmitted their traits down through the generations.144

This understanding has an interesting political twist, in that the worker bee is made the focal point of the hive, and the queen and drones seen to work for them, specialized for carrying out reproductive tasks. More importantly, however, we can see here how the ideas of Darwin were not simply accepted, but that his theory of pangenesis was actively interpreted and extended to apply to the particular interests of the bee-keeper.

Far more important within discussions of heredity, however, was the knowledge of other breeders. In the first place, this came from extensive sharing of information between different agricultural journals. I found reference to over forty different periodicals, most of them agricultural, within the pages of the Canadian periodicals I examined. The majority

144 Can. Bee. J., 5.34 (1889), 813-814.

71 were American publications, but there were many British and Canadian periodicals referenced, as well as one from Australia. They covered the range of categories I examined, including many state- or region-specific journals from the United States. Not only did

Canadian periodicals reference American and British publications, but they were read and cited abroad as well.145 Historian Fred Landon has found similar results among the early agricultural periodicals of Upper Canada. In the 1845 volume of the British American

Cultivator he has identified quotations from nearly fifty different agricultural and horticultural publications.146

Information sharing between periodicals took different forms. Sometimes a lecture delivered to a breeder’s association or agricultural institute would be published in several journals within a short period of time, as with the case of Grimshaw’s lecture on heredity in bees delivered to the British Beekeepers’ Association. Other times, a focused discussion would be reproduced in full, or summarized by the editors of another journal, as we have seen with the discussion on prepotency and de-horning bulls. In this case, a discussion originally published in the Rural New Yorker and summarized in the Canadian periodical

Farming was initiated by a comment made in a third journal, Hoard’s Dairyman. Very commonly, articles would be re-published from other journals, either with their source simply cited at the end of the piece, or with a brief preface, such as, for example, “A farmer’s wife writes the American Agriculturist as follows…”147 Evidently, agricultural periodicals at

145 Derry found similar results in the North American periodical literature on chicken breeding. Derry, Art and Science, 8-9. 146 Landon, “Agricultural journals,” 170. 147 Can. Farm., 3.6 (1866), 87.

72 this time were well aware of each other and frequently published overlapping sets of materials.

With respect to the content internal to the articles themselves — regardless of publication of origin — the information on heredity contained in Canadian agricultural periodicals also came largely from other breeders. Sometimes, articles referred, with minimal explanation, to the successes of famous breeders, such as Robert Bakewell, or Thomas Booth

(1755-1835), an eminent British breeder of Shorthorn cattle. References such as these were used to support arguments in favour of in-breeding, for example, of which Bakewell represented the pinnacle of success. Yet, since much of Bakewell’s insight had already been incorporated into general breeders’ knowledge and lore, Bakewell and other eminent breeders were mostly cited in passing — their names invoked more as a stand-in to represent a range of interrelated and standard ideas about breeding rather than as sources of detailed information. As we have already seen, more specific information typically came from references to, or direct contributions from other established authorities, such as breeders working at agricultural experiment stations or veterinary colleges, the editors of prominent agricultural journals, or respected local breeders. However, input from average breeders and farmers was also not overlooked as a valuable source of information on matters related to heredity. Indeed, many journals encouraged subscribers to submit their own personal observations for the edification and advancement of their fellow Canadian breeders and farmers, and also to ask questions of their peers through their pages. In the first number of the new edition of the Rural Canadian, the editor suggests, “we invite the valuable aid of friends in every section of the country. Let us have your practical experiences in the various

73 departments of husbandry. We do not ask for long essays, but brief, pointed papers, written by farmers for farmers.”148

In being so inclusive in their sources of information, agricultural periodicals did not necessarily privilege the knowledge derived from more learned or eminent breeders over the knowledge contributed by the average farmer. Breeders stationed at colleges or model farms perhaps had the resources to observe more animals and conduct more experiments than the average farmer, but it was practical experience paired with careful observation and record- keeping that was the valued foundation of knowledge, and this was accessible to even the most modest farmer. The editors of the Canada Farmer in 1864 explained that, “while the aids of science will be systematically invoked, the great end constantly kept in view will be to gather up the matured opinions of practical men on practical matters.”149 A note introducing the new series of the journal in 1869 revealed that they did not expect their journal to be composed only of scholarly writing. The editors asserted that "the most important object… that, should be kept in view, is the opportunity which [agricultural journals] afford to farmers of interchanging ideas, comparing experience, and communicating information… we would beg our correspondents not be deterred from inexperience in writing. Let us have your statements of facts, or rational opinions, in your own words.”150

Thus, personal experience and observation, from breeders of any sort, was thought to be valuable. It was abstract theory, in contrast, that was suspect. In his article on sex determination for the Canadian Breeder, for example, Spencer expressed his hesitation in

148 Rural Can., New Ser. 4.1 (1885), 16. 149 Can. Farm., 1.1 (1864), 8. 150 Can. Farm. New Ser., 1.1 (1869), 21. Emphasis mine

74 contributing, for so much of what he had to say was theoretical and not based on experiment or observation.151 An article titled “The Farmer as Observer” republished in 1862 in the

Canadian Agriculturist from the Country Gentleman expressed this view clearly: “The advancement of farm literature must depend upon the observations of practical farmers, and not upon the hypothetical speculations of mere theorists, writers, or lecturers who know practically nothing concerning the subjects they write or talk about.” Rather than “studied essays,” they believed that agricultural periodicals would be most effective if farmers contributed the plain facts that they had collected through careful observation and recording.152 Even as late as 1894, eminent poultry breeder William Cook wrote in an article about the heredity of tuberculosis in poultry that “science, to a great extent, rules over many things, but practical experience in poultry keeping, at least, must stand before science.”153

Agricultural periodicals thus functioned as vast repositories of information available to Canadian agriculturists. In this sense, by compiling information from a range of different breeders and farmers, the agricultural periodical literature functioned as a medium of communication on matters related to heredity between individuals across the country, as well as from the United States and elsewhere.154 Breeders could contribute their (however modest) experiences and experiments, for example, in breeding for a particular sex. In so doing, agricultural periodicals extended their readers’ range of relevant experiences and observations from which to draw in making decisions on the farm, beyond just their own and

151 Can. Br. Ag. Rev., 2.50 (1885), 787. 152 Can. Ag., 14.8 (1862), 237-239. 153 Can. Poultry Rev., 17.6 (1894), 87. 154 And less, Britain.

75 those of their friends and family. Indeed, by aiming to share matters of fact collected by different farmers, agricultural periodicals can perhaps be described as technologies of virtual witnessing, to borrow the phrase loosely from Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer’s

Leviathan and the Air-Pump.155 Readers of Canadian agricultural periodicals were brought into contact with the experiences, observations, and “matured opinions of practical men on practical matters” from a global community of breeders both past and present. They were thereby given the venue to contribute to, dispute, and even extend, this grand body of knowledge built up about all matters hereditary.

1.5 Conclusion Agricultural periodicals offer us a look at some of the implicit and explicit ideas about heredity held by a certain subset of late 19th century Canadians, namely, farmers and breeders. They served as an important medium through which this group of Canadians were exposed to and engaged with ideas about heredity, by offering their own experiences or observations about hereditary phenomena and by reading about the ideas of others. Indeed, agricultural periodicals represented an inclusive site of discussion through which the nature of heredity and its implications for the practices of farmers and breeders was being worked out. Heredity, as both process of transmission and the set of traits being transmitted, was understood to be central to the work of farmers and breeders. The basic principle of heredity upon which breeders’ practices were built was that like produced like. It was also known that

155 Shapin and Schaffer, Air Pump. Although, in this case, this did not preclude or dissuade disputes about the causal mechanisms behind these accepted facts, as we saw in the case of the discussion on in-breeding in the Canadian Poultry Review.

76 offspring frequently did not resemble their parents. The differing prepotency of the parents was one important cause of this variation, as were the phenomena of atavism and telegony.

Beyond this general understanding, however, many of the contingencies of hereditary transmission were still largely unresolved. Yet, through the discussion of certain subjects — the nature of prepotency, the value of in-breeding, the role of the sexes, and the inheritance of disease — the contours of a broader understanding of heredity were being implicitly worked out by the farmers and breeders who contributed their input to agricultural periodicals.

Ideas about heredity were intimately bound up with the techniques that were designed to control it: there were few specific discussions about the heredity of consanguinity, for example, but many about the uses and effects of in-breeding and the different ways it can or cannot be done. Notions of heredity in animals also intersected with broader ideas about human and animal nature, and at times bore the weight of certain societal ideas about human nature. The discussion on prepotency illustrates how ideals of masculinity, imagined as overflowing vigour, strong nervous vitality, and ability to impress female animals, were thought to mark a male animal’s ability to pass on his traits to his offspring. Notions of heredity also reflected the practical and economic realities of the farmers and breeders who were contributing to these conversations. Whether a breeder saw cross-breeding as contaminating the hereditary lineage they had developed through careful in-breeding, or revitalizing a line made degenerate through too-long mating of close relations depended in many cases on the purposes for which they were breeding.

Importantly, farmers and breeders represented important sources of information and authority on hereditary phenomena as a result of their close practical involvement with

77 heredity in the context of their daily work. As we will see in subsequent chapters, this authority and broad body of knowledge that breeders possessed was drawn upon by authors of domestic medical manuals in their own discussions about heredity. In this way, the ideas of breeders about heredity, derived from their observations about its functioning in the animal body, were subsequently used to make sense of heredity in the broader contexts of human health and sociality.

The ideas about heredity represented in agricultural periodicals came from a range of sources, as we have seen, including some scientists, as well as through analogy with human and plant biology. However, these sources were largely limited to those from within the community of breeders and agriculturalists. This community was far-reaching, extending across the continent and the Atlantic, and back into time to include past insights that had since become part of general breeding knowledge. Epistemologically, contributors to agricultural periodicals prioritized the practical and experiential as the most effective and reliable means of acquiring knowledge about heredity. As a result, input from professional and educated students of breeding, as well as the average farmer, was not only accepted, but also encouraged. This allowed farmers and breeders of all backgrounds to weigh in on and contribute their part, however peripheral, to the broader evolution of ideas about the nature of heredity, reproduction, and generation. Indeed, as we have seen, some readers of agricultural periodicals were actively engaged in these discussions, and evaluated and commented on them in the context of their own experiences. Yet, even those readers who did not participate in such discussions were nonetheless exposed to these broader questions, and were perhaps led to think about heredity and its implications for the animal, human, and social world more explicitly. In this way, agricultural periodicals encouraged those people whose livelihoods

78 were dependent on their ability to harness the power of heredity to think more broadly about the nature, and all the contingencies, of what it meant for like to beget like.

Chapter 2 — Heredity in the Home: Domestic Medical Advice Manuals

2.1 Introduction In his 1899 domestic medical manual, The Home Practice of Medicine, American surgeon John Wesley Daily explains to his readers that “all diseased tendencies are inherited…[and] if we should resort to the law of the survival of the fittest, in marriage, it might be decried as cruel, yet it would not seem more heartless than to perpetuate, for thousands of generations, the diseases that have crept into the veins, arteries, bones, nerves, and the brain of the present fabric of society, and threaten to shake the human temple to its foundations.”156 With these words, Daily asserted to his readers the deep intertwinement of heredity and health, and additionally suggested that these two were intimately linked to the welfare of both the individual and the state. Daily was not alone among other authors of home medical manuals in believing heredity to be of medical and even social significance, although not all shared his exact outlook. In North America in the early decades of the 19th century, medical care could be obtained from a variety of practitioners, ranging from formally educated medical doctors, to untrained healers identifying with one of various medical sects, to the lay healer with personal experience in attending to the ill. Patients moved freely along this spectrum of healers when acquiring medical care. For many people in Canada and the United States, the services of a physician were out of reach due to either

156 Daily, Home Practice of Medicine, 232.

79 80 financial or geographical constraints, or both.157 Thus, there thrived throughout the 19th century a tradition of domestic medicine and medical self-care that began with the ideas, practices, and materials people carried with them to the New World from abroad.158 One particularly important set of resources available to practitioners of home care were the manuscript-length guides to domestic medical practice written by physicians and educators, such as that of John Wesley Daily.159 These medical guides are rich sources of historical information about contemporary science and medicine, as well as of broader social and political assumptions about health, disease, and the body. Importantly, as Daily’s quote illustrates, many of them had clear ideas about heredity and its relation to states of health and illness. While there have been excellent studies of domestic medical manuals in North

America, few works have focused either on Canadian publications or the ideas of heredity they embodied specifically.160 Therefore, as one means of exploring popular ideas about heredity in Canada, in this chapter, I examine medical manuals published in Canada between

1860-1900 for the notions of heredity that they expressed. I categorized the manuals I chose into four general types: general medical manuals, texts directed at the diseases of men or women specifically, sexual hygiene texts, and school textbooks.161 More specifically, I ask:

157 Cassedy, “Why Self Help?” 31-48; Murphy, Enter the Physician, xv, 1-6. 158 Rosenberg, “Health in the Home,” 1-3; Gevitz, “‘But All Those Authors are Foreigners’,” p. 232-233. This is not to neglect the long traditions of healing that existed within indigenous American societies prior to European colonization. However, my main focus is on published medical manuals, and thus, while these practices are largely outside the scope of my research, they do appear occasionally in some of the medical manuals I examined. 159 Risse, “Introduction,” 4; Porter, “Introduction,” 1-16; Rosenberg, “Health in the Home,” 1-3; Horrocks, Popular Print and Popular Medicine. 160 Particularly valuable are the works of Norman Gevitz, Charles Rosenberg, Thomas Horrocks, and Anita and Michael Fellman. 161 General medical manuals addressed a wide range of diseases and aimed to be comprehensive home medical resources. Sex-specific texts followed the same overall format as general manuals, but focused on the

81 what were the implicit or explicit ideas about heredity expressed in these manuals, how did these ideas shape the sorts of practical advice that manuals offered, and what kinds of sources and authorities influenced the development of these ideas?

The chapter consists of three parts. In the first, I review the history of domestic medical manuals and explain and introduce the manuals I chose to examine. I then consider in detail the ideas about heredity found within these manuals, and illustrate how the notions of heredity and the sorts of practical advice these notions influenced varied according to the type of manual. Sexual hygiene manuals contained the most references to heredity, and were the most explicit in tying their resulting advice — often about marriage and reproduction — to the future of the nation or race. Sex-specific texts also promoted many of these views, but in general were more moderate in their views about the relation between heredity and broader social issues and in the practical conclusions they drew from them. General medical manuals contained many references to heredity as well, but these were not as often tied to racial concerns. Instead, these manuals frequently considered the relation of heredity to disease causation. The advice these manuals offered was largely in relation to the maintenance of health, but also took the form of marriage and prenatal advice. Finally, school text books contained the fewest references to heredity; those that did discuss the subject typically did so in relation to the consequences of tobacco and alcohol abuse. In the last section of this chapter, I explore the sources and forms of knowledge from which the authors of medical

diseases of men or women in particular. Sexual hygiene manuals addressed both men and women (although occasionally focused on young men or women only). However, they were not arranged around lists of diseases and how to prevent or cure them, but instead provided health and medical advice in the context of encouraging readers to live pure and healthy lives. Finally, I examined a small collection of school textbooks that were written for use in schools. These aimed to teach children about physiology and healthy living.

82 manuals drew when articulating their notions of heredity. Here, I consider the role of domestic medical manuals as an important medium through which Canadians came to be exposed to an array of ideas and ways of knowing about heredity. Manuals drew on an eclectic set of sources, from academic science and medicine to the knowledge of breeders and horticulturalists, and from the personal and professional experience of the authors as physicians to curious anecdotes from history and folklore, and Biblical texts. In the process, this chapter therefore offers a complex view of the travel of scientific ideas in late 19th century Canada.

2.2 Domestic Medical Manuals in 19th-Century North America The history of domestic medical guides typically begins with the publication of

Scottish physician William Buchan’s Domestic Medicine in 1769, although the tradition of compiling and circulating cookbooks or receipt books on caring for the sick extends at least to the 16th century.162 Buchan’s book, however, marks a departure from earlier genres of health books that typically took the form of either receipt books, which provided lists of remedies for diseases, or regimen texts, that outlined proper ways of living to promote health and longevity. Domestic Medicine combined aspects of each of these genres and set the basic format which subsequent authors of domestic medical guides would follow. It began with a general discussion of health and its preservation, and then moved on to consider various diseases; for each, Buchan discussed the disease’s typical symptoms and causation, as well as

162 e.g. Blake, “From Buchan to Fishbein,” 12; Porter, “Introduction,” 1-2.

83 appropriate means of prevention and treatment.163 Historian Charles Rosenberg has suggested that it would not be far-fetched to assert that Buchan’s Domestic Medicine was the most widely-read non-religious book in English during the first fifty years after its publication. It was certainly highly influential in North America, and went through multiple printings and editions in both Britain and the United States.164

Buchan’s success in the United States was followed by a rise of American-authored domestic medical guides in the early decades of the 19th century. Historian Norman Gevitz has considered the emergence of these manuals in the context of an era of literary nationalism following the American revolution, pointing out that many authors emphasized that their work was written specifically for American audiences, and offered customized advice based on the American climate and an assumed difference of the temperament of its population. He has found that between 1800 and 1810, eight domestic medical guides were published in the United States, only two of which were American; however, by the decade between 1850 and 1860, Americans authored 41 of the 50 manuals published in the US. By the Civil War, Gevitz has suggested, the main competitors of American authors of medical guides were their fellow citizens.165 I was unable to find many domestic medical manuals written by Canadian authors, but many American and a few British manuals published in

Canada during the period from 1860 to 1900.166 While the work of Gevitz highlights some of the differences that characterize manuals published in the United States and Britain, there

163 Murphy, Enter the Physician, 6-9; Rosenberg, “Medical Text and Social Context,” 32-36. 164 Rosenberg, “Medical Text and Social Context,” 32. 165 Gevitz, “But All Those Authors Are Foreigners,” 232-236, 245-246. 166 Canadian historian of medicine Michael Bliss corroborates this observation: Bliss, “Pure Books,” 97-98.

84 does not appear to be a substantial national division of the manuals published within North

America. This is corroborated by my analysis of the content of these manuals, with the exception of a few Canadian editions of American manuals that explicitly addressed challenges of living in the Canadian climate, for example. In an attempt to examine how

Canadians would have encountered heredity within medical manuals, I have therefore focused on manuals published in Canada, and on prominent American and British manuals that would have been most likely to cross the border into Canada.

Domestic medical manuals were written not only by orthodox physicians out of a perceived duty to educate the public about health, disease, and their bodies, but also by authors of various backgrounds and motivating interests, from educators and pastors with specific pedagogical aims to entrepreneurs and publishers interested in profiting from sales.167 These guides to health served a variety of purposes for both author and reader. In the first place, they filled a distinct practical need. Especially in the early decades, but throughout the 19th century, there were many people for whom the cost of a physician’s services was prohibitive, or who lived too far away from a practitioner to be able to rely on them in case of illness or emergency. In such cases, a medical manual could serve as a family’s very own “home physician,” as the title of George Beard’s 1869 Our Home

Physician suggests, providing members with an accessible catalogue of information about how to identify and treat common diseases and accidents, as well as general advice about the preservation of health and home.168

167 Blake, “From Buchan to Fishbein,” 12; Rosenberg, “Health in the Home,” 3. 168 Cassedy, “Why Self Help?” x-y, Beard, Our Home Physician.

85

Yet the authors of domestic medical guides were not always entirely selfless in their written efforts to disseminate medical knowledge. Historian Lamar Murphy has described how one aspect of the boundary disputes between orthodox physicians and medical sectarians was articulated through the publication of medical advice literature. In addition to legislative efforts and the formation of exclusive medical societies, orthodox physicians turned to writing domestic medical guides to articulate and publicize their view of the appropriate division between what could be treated in the home and what required professional (i.e. orthodox) consultation. Medical sectarians too, sought to promote their own brands of medical practice through the publication of popular health manuals.169

Other authors penned domestic medical manuals to advertise or sell patent medicines or health services. Historian Norman Gevitz has suggested that roughly twenty percent of the manuals published in the 19th and early 20th centuries were meant to advertise drugs that were sold by the author.170 Raymond Pierce’s The People’s Common Sense Medical Advisor, first published in 1875, for example, frequently cited his “Golden Medical Discovery” as crucial to the successful treatment of his patients. Describing it as an “alterative” designed to

“arous[e] the emunctories to remove morbid materials, and at the same time ton[e] the secretory organs,” Pierce recommended his Golden Medical Discovery for the treatment of conditions ranging from bilious fever and erysipelas to inflammation of the cornea and

169 Murphy, Enter The Physician, xv-xvi. 170 Gevitz, “Domestic Medical Guides,” 52.

86 insanity.171 “Dr. Pierce’s Pleasant Purgative Pellets” were also often recommended in tandem with his Golden Medical Discovery.

Moreover, the Common Sense Medical Advisor was a vehicle not only for the advertisement of his patent medicines, but, through frequent anecdotal references to the successful treatment of often intractable cases, it also let readers know about his World’s

Dispensary, out of which his patent medicine operation was run. Patients could come to the

World’s Dispensary, located in Buffalo, NY, to be diagnosed and treated by a host of specialized physicians, surgeons, and pharmacists — including one physician who specialized in the analysis of urine. Alternatively, they could correspond with a resident physician via mail. In this case, patients were asked to provide detailed information about their family histories and symptoms, and to enclose one dollar for a consultation fee.172

Domestic medical manuals were also allied with the broader social and political interests of their authors. As Gevitz has argued elsewhere, medical manuals such as James

Ewell’s 1807 The Planter’s and Mariner’s Medical Companion, and John Gunn’s 1830

Domestic Medicine articulated a form of American nationalism and patriotism by emphasizing, for example, the superiority of “American remedies” — that is, local botanical treatments — over what were characterized as often unnecessary and even dangerous

“foreign” medicines.173 Many of these early American manuals, along with Buchan’s

Domestic Medicine, also highlighted the democratizing value of spreading medical knowledge widely among common people as contrasted with its traditional location in the

171 Pierce, People’s Common Sense Advisor, 316, 408, 416, 656, 641. 172 Pierce, People’s Common Sense Advisor, 841-843, 853-857, 874. 173 Gevitz, “But All Those Authors Are Foreigners,” 238-245.

87 hands of a small medical elite.174 Health guides were not infrequently mobilized by the advocates of health and social reform movements of the 19th century. Many of the books of

Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, head of Battle Creek Sanitarium of Battle Creek, Michigan, and devoted supporter of health reform, for example, suggested that broader societal reform needed to begin with the improvement of the general health of the population. “It is high time,” he argued in the preface of his 1891 Household Monitor of Health, “that those seeking to reform the world, should begin to preach the gospel of health.”175 His advice in Man, the

Masterpiece and Plain Facts about Sexual Life was framed in terms of reversing the degeneration of the race and nation he feared was widespread.176 Through his general medical and sexual hygiene manuals, Kellogg articulated and popularized his vision for the reform of the nation’s bodies and minds through a strictly regimented life of vegetarianism, regular bowel movements and physical activity, abstinence from tobacco, alcohol, and sex, and the occasional use of water or electrical cures. Later, his health manuals upheld more explicitly eugenic ideals, as he became a vocal proponent of the emerging eugenics movement and co-founder of the American eugenics organization, the Race Betterment

Foundation. Similarly, Lutheran minister and publisher Sylvanus Stall’s Self and Sex series sought to encourage social purity by enlightening people of all ages about their bodies and the dangers of sexual improprieties. Contextualizing his work within not only the history of sexual health education but also book history, historian Jennifer Pierce has demonstrated that

Stall was also a skillful marketer of his works, and profited from their extremely successful

174 Starr, Social Transformation American Medicine, 32-35. 175 Kellogg, Household Monitor of Health, v. 176 Kellogg, Man, the Masterpiece, v-vi; Kellogg, Plain Facts about Sexual Life, iii-iv.

88 domestic and international sales; his books were translated into many languages and sold widely with the help of travelling missionaries and local armies of door-to-door canvassers.177

Domestic medical manuals were therefore much more than simply lists of remedies and tips on maintaining health. While they can provide us with an interesting glimpse into changing medical ideas and practices, popular health books are also particularly revealing of commonplace and lay ideas about health and disease, beyond what an analysis of internal advances in medical science can tell us. Thomas Horrocks has pointed out in his study of health advice in American almanacs that despite whatever changes may have taken place in medical theory or practice, authors and publishers had to make sure their information accorded with the assumptions of their readers about the nature of health and illness to continue selling their works. For example, Paul Starr has argued that the content of American domestic medical manuals suggests that by the 19th century, most people understood the body and disease in largely naturalistic, rather than supernatural, terms.178 Moreover, medical advice manuals can also serve as useful lenses for exploring the broader social, political, and cultural preoccupations of both their readers and authors. In their study of American medical advice literature published between 1870 and 1890, historians Anita and Michael Fellman have argued that changing ideas about the body and mind embedded in domestic medical manuals reflect the broader social and political context in which these manuals were being written and read. In particular, they argued that a widespread feeling of anxiety about the

177 Pierce, “What Young Readers,” 110-131. 178 Horrocks, Popular Print and Popular Medicine, 66; Starr, Social Transformation American Medicine, 35-36.

89 accelerating cultural, economic, and demographic changes that characterized the late 19th century created a need for people to understand the functioning and control of their own bodies, and that a preoccupation among many manuals with “natural” ways of living to restore and maintain health, for example, reflects prevailing concerns about the degenerating influence of modern civilization and changing modes of production.179 Domestic medical manuals therefore serve as particularly useful historical lenses for examining contemporary ideas about not only health, disease, and the body, but also how the body was thought to be related or not to broader social questions of the time. In this chapter, I suggest that they can also tell us much about the nature and exchange of popular understandings of heredity. As with the body, ideas about heredity are often difficult to separate from contemporary ideas about the nature of the self, the social, and history, and biological heredity has at various times been highlighted as a potential site of social control and reform.

Compiling a list of relevant manuals was greatly facilitated by the annotated and indexed catalogue of the Edward C. Atwater collection of American popular medicine and health reform published by C. Hoolihan in 2001.180 This catalogue had an index entry on

Canadian imprints, which made it easy to identify manuals published in Canada. These results were compared against the online catalogue of the National Library of Medicine in

Bethesda, MD, the catalogue of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, of Toronto, ON, and the San Francisco-based digital library, the Internet Archive, for medical manuals published in Canada. I also examined manuals published in the United States and Britain that appeared

179 Fellman A. and M. Fellman, Making Sense of Self, 10-15, 27-37. 180 Hoolihan, Annotated Catalogue V3.

90 frequently in these catalogues, as this is an indication that they were popular and visible, and hence most likely to have crossed the border to be read in Canada. In particular, I sought general medical manuals, sexual hygiene manuals, those aimed at women and mothers, and those aimed at youth. This meant excluding many manuals that were exclusively cookbooks or lists of recipes for the treatment of disease, and those on domestic economy, for example.

The manuals I found tended to fall into one of four kinds: general medical manuals for the entire family, but in practice written for mothers; texts directed at men or women specifically, dealing with the diseases peculiar to their sex; sexual hygiene texts, which gave advice to men and women of various ages about proper sexual behaviour and hygiene; and school texts aimed at children and young adults.181 I chose 69 manuals, 31 published in

Canada, 30 published in the United States, and 8 published in Britain that together give me a reasonable glimpse into the average person’s exposure to domestic medical manuals in the late 19th century Canada.

The purpose of this examination is not to be exhaustive, but to explore one of the media through which knowledge about heredity was circulated and made available to

Canadians during this period. My examination of these manuals revealed that not only was it common to find discussions of heredity within the pages of domestic medical manuals, but in fact, that it was the norm for these manuals to include at least some mention of heredity. Out of the 69 manuals I examined, only 8 did not contain any references to heredity, which means

181 This is a classification I imposed on my sample as I aimed to identify manuals that addressed a range of different audiences, from men and women, to mothers caring for friends and family, to children and young adults. Sexual hygiene manuals did constitute a distinct category that emerged with the social purity movement in the late 1860’s and 1870’s, as I discuss later.

91 that roughly 88% of the manuals I examined discussed heredity in some capacity or another.

This suggests that by 1860, notions of heredity were constituent of popular understandings of the body, health and disease. In what follows I will examine the contours of these ideas about heredity, and their relation to the body and the body politic, in more detail. Heredity was discussed in connection to a set of different topics — namely, disease, prenatal influences, lifestyle, marriage, race, and alcoholism. How manuals understood the relation of heredity to these subjects varied according to their type, and by extension, to the interests of their authors.

2.3 Heredity in Domestic Medical Manuals A host of glossary definitions appended to the end of certain medical manuals reveals a general sense of what was meant by the word heredity, or the adjective hereditary. The

1863 and 1864 versions of John Gunn’s Domestic Medicine defined hereditary as “that has descended from a parent;” by its 1887 edition, this had been altered slightly to “descended from a parent; inherited.”182 Dr. Chase’ earlier recipe books defined hereditary as “disease from parents,” although by 1889 this had become the more general “inherited from a parent.”183 Similarly, George Beard defined hereditary as “coming down from ancestors,” in his 1869 Our Home Physician, but changed this to the definition also offered by Gunn,

182 Gunn, New Domestic Physician (1863), 1099; Gunn, New Domestic Physician (1864), 1099; Gunn, Newest Revised Physician, 1161. 183 Chase, Dr. Chase’s Recipes (1869), 371; Chase, Dr. Chase’s Recipes (1881), 371; Chase, Dr. Chase’s New Receipt Book, 358; Chase, Dr. Chase’s Third, Last, and Complete, 824.

92

“descended from a parent; inherited,” by the 1881 version of this manual.184 Other manuals either used these same, or similar definitions, such as “transmitted from parents,” and

“passing from parents to children,” to the more specific “transmission of physical or mental peculiarities, qualities, diseases and the like from parents to offspring.”185 These definitions reveal that among these manuals, “hereditary” was used to refer broadly to those traits or conditions which had the quality of being passed down easily or regularly from parents or ancestors to offspring. Heredity, by implication, was the process by which these elements were transmitted. It was common for domestic health manuals to reflect on what they considered to be the nature and essential features of heredity, although different manuals and authors focused on different aspects of it. Consider, for example, the following discussions about heredity by George Beard, George Napheys, Prof. and Mrs. Gibson, and Mary Wood-

Allen.

George Beard referred to the various “laws of hereditary descent” — he consistently used this phrase rather than just “heredity” — and highlighted as the most fundamental law that “every quality of organic existence tends to be hereditary.”186 Other laws of hereditary descent include the law that “inherited qualities manifest themselves at corresponding ages and harmoniously with each other,” and the law that “the qualities of organic existence may be derived from very remote as well as from immediate ancestors.”187 The latter law refers to the phenomenon of atavism, and Beard asserted that breeders have been long familiar with

184 Beard, Our Home Physician (1869), 1045; Beard, Our Home Physician (1881), 1233. 185 Jefferis and Nichols, Household Guide, 525; Hartshorne, Practical Household Physician, 699; Gibson and Gibson, Social Purity, 422. 186 Beard, Our Home Physician (1869), 383. 187 Beard, Our Home Physician (1869), 386-387.

93 this process. Moreover, Beard saw hereditary descent as the predisposing cause of almost all human diseases.

Others similarly discussed the different phenomena that fell under the category of hereditary transmission. George Napheys distinguished four types of heredity in his 1880

Physical Life of Woman. Direct inheritance, the most commonly understood form of heredity, was when a child received some of the qualities of their parents, while indirect inheritance occurred when a child bore a resemblance to an aunt or uncle instead. When a child inherited features from not their parents, but from one or more generations past, this constituted atavism — the term, he explained, derives from the Latin atavus, meaning ancestor. Finally,

Napheys described a fourth variety of inheritance, left unnamed, in which a child inherited traits from their mothers’ first husband, rather than their own father. This, we saw previously, was called telegony by breeders. Napheys noted, however, that qualities found in the child as a result of maternal influences received in utero cannot properly be deemed hereditary.188

Husband and wife team Prof. and Mrs. Gibson (it is unclear what he was a Professor of, although neither of them were physicians or medically trained), drew on quotes from Dr.

Sidney Barrington Elliot and Professor Riddell to define heredity as a “law of living things whereby the offspring resembles the parents or other ancestors, the characteristics of one generation being repeated in the next, or some following generation.”189 They adhered to the view that the fundamental law “like produces like” is modified by a second law, that acquired traits are also transmitted to the next generation. These laws stood in opposition, but were

188 Napheys, Physical Life of Woman, 106-107. In this classification, Napheys was influenced by Th. Ribot, who described heredity according to these same four types in his 1875 Heredity: A Psychological Study. 189 Gibson and Gibson, Social Purity, 21.

94 required for the evolution of the species; their interplay was responsible for both forward- looking progress and deterioration of the race.190

In her advice to young women, Dr. Mary Wood-Allen, superintendent at different times of the Department of Purity of both the American National and the World WCTU, similarly considered the dual capacity of heredity to advance both positive and negative social change over time. Wood-Allen drew a distinction between what she termed the Law of

Heredity and the Gospel of Heredity. The former law, written in the first chapter of Genesis, is that law according to which offspring inherit the traits of their parents and ancestors. This law, however, was not fatality; Wood-Allen argued that the power to change the direction of heredity and to consciously choose the inheritance of future generations was ours. The

Gospel of Heredity, then, asserted our ability to transmit good; “while under the Law of

Heredity we are fettered, under the Gospel of Heredity our chains may be broken.”191

The above examples suggest that medical manuals shared a general understanding of heredity as the process by which children came to resemble their parents and ancestors.

However, the specifics of this view, and its implications for human health, reproduction, and social progress, were by no means established. The selections above suggest that authors’ and manuals’ specific ideas about the role of heredity in disease causation, the relation of heredity to the strength of the environment, prenatal influences, and personal lifestyle, as well as the significance of heredity for national and racial concerns, were all under consideration at this time. What role did heredity play in the aetiology of disease? Should

190 Gibson and Gibson, Social Purity, 20-21. 191 Wood-Allen What a Young Woman, 216-217, 241-245.

95 prenatal influences or maternal impressions, for example, be considered among the phenomena of heredity? Could lifestyle changes prevail over the strength of a hereditary endowment? Does the mother have a special role in heredity? What role can heredity play in social reform movements? Moreover, upon what evidential basis should we base our understanding of heredity? Indeed, from the passages above we can see breeders, physicians, and the Bible referenced as authorities on heredity, while the works of Darwin and Galton served as a basis of authority for others. In what follows, I will consider the range of answers found in domestic medical manuals with respect to these questions. As we will see, domestic medical manuals served as a site in which not only the biological nature but also the broader social implications of heredity were being worked out, and through which the average person came to be exposed to these debates.

2.3.1 Heredity and Disease The relation of heredity to disease causation was a common subject of consideration among manuals. A number of texts articulated the view that many diseases were hereditary, but that they further needed to be incited or brought on by environmental or behavioural causes. For some, this also meant that the hereditarily afflicted were not free to accept a

“sentence” of ill-health; rather these individuals were merely especially burdened to live healthy and abstemious lives. In his 1863 version of the New Domestic Physician, John Gunn suggested that many diseases are hereditary. He argued, for example, that consumption was hereditary, since the parent transmits to the child all of their physical peculiarities, including the shape of the lungs — and some shapes, it was assumed, predisposed an individual to the disease. He concluded, however, that it is therefore only prudent for those who know that

96 they have inherited a physical constitution likely to acquire the disease to avoid all causes that might excite the disease into action, such as sudden changes in temperature or prolonged exposure to bad air, and to promote health by exercising often in fresh air and donning appropriate attire. In this way, Gunn believed that the onset of many hereditary diseases could be prevented.192

Many other authors agreed. George Beard, in his 1869 Our Home Physician argued that hereditary descent was the predisposing cause of almost all human diseases, in particular nervous and constitutional diseases. However, in some cases, inciting causes were also necessary to bring these diseases into effect, and hence, even if a disease was considered hereditary, it did not mean that the afflicted was not responsible to prevent it. Beard derided those “gouty” people who blamed their affliction on heredity, when “the cases in which it occurs without the more powerful influence of intemperance and idleness are very rare indeed.”193 William Smith, author of the 1873 Smith’s Family Physician, also referred to the case of gout to consider the relation among the various predisposing causes of disease — such as temperament, debilitating influence (i.e. poor living), sex, and excitement, for example. He considered gout a hereditary disease, but acknowledged that if the son of a gouty father lived abstemiously, the disease might pass him over. Moreover, that a person who comes from a gouty lineage should engage in regular physical activity and partake of a largely vegetable-based diet was especially important, as he later suggested that hereditary

192 Gunn, New Domestic Physician (1863), 36-38. 193 Beard, Our Home Physician (1860), 385, 630.

97 forms of the disease are more difficult to treat than acquired cases.194 George Naphey’s 1880

Physical Life of Woman reinforced this view of the difficulty in treating hereditary forms of disease. Here, consumption was again described as a hereditary disease that one could avoid through proper hygienic precautions, but Napheys went on to warn that those in whom the disease becomes active “must too often, like those who entered Dante’s infernal region,

“abandon hope.”195 Hence, for these authors, a recognition of the causal role of heredity in the predisposition to various diseases was also a call to action; readers who recognized the tendencies to gout, consumption, or scrofula in their family members were thus encouraged to take extra precautions in their lifestyles to prevent the onset of these familial diseases.

Other manuals struggled with the idea of heredity as a predisposing cause of disease.

Hamilton Ayers’ 1879 Every Man His Own Doctor returned to the subject of tuberculosis, for which he recognized two classes of causes: remote and exciting. The latter included intemperance, dust in the lungs, and exposure to the cold or damp, among others. Of the former, he suggested that hereditary predisposition was the most important. Yet, Ayers believed that hereditary predisposition was “not, however, an actual cause of the disease; and hence there are many cases in which the children of consumptive parents do not fall a prey to this disease; but it renders those who are in that condition much more liable to be affected by the exciting causes.”196 Alvin Chase’s 1890 Dr. Chase’s Third, Last, and Complete Receipt

Book, in considering the causality of heredity in relation to consumption, also suggested it is

194 Smith, Smith’s Family Physician, 137-139. 195 Napheys, Physical Life of Woman, 121. Historian John Waller has illustrated the extent to which physicians in the 18th and 19th centuries enthusiastically embraced the notion of hereditary disease, which they saw as nearly always incurable. Waller, “Illusion of an Explanation.” 196 Ayers, Every Man His Own Doctor, 174; emphasis mine.

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“pre-eminently a hereditary disease,” and then simply re-used the same passage quoted above from Ayer’s Every Man His Own Doctor without attribution.197 These authors were thus drawing a distinction between what they call the actual causation of disease — by which they meant immediate or proximate causation — and a predisposition to disease, which they identified as a remote cause that was sometimes not realized. The latter they had trouble recognizing as a “real” cause of disease; hence, Ayers was simultaneously able to assert that hereditary predisposition was both an important predisposing cause of disease, and not an

“actual” cause of disease. Similarly, in a discussion on the nature of diseases, Dr. John

Harvey Kellogg’s 1885 Home Hand-Book of Domestic Hygiene and Rational Medicine highlighted what he saw as the three principal causes of disease: abnormal conditions of surroundings, injurious habits, and accidents. In addition to these direct causes, he also cited various predisposing causes of disease such as age, temperament, sex, occupation, idiosyncrasy, and hereditary tendencies. The latter he suggested is “probably the most powerful and inveterate in its tendency of all,” but he also pointed out that “the actual transmission of disease by heredity occurs only in very exceptional circumstances. The majority of cases of so-called inheritance of disease are simply cases in which the tendency or predisposition to disease has been inherited, the nature of which is simply a weakness or deficiency of vitality on the part of some portion of the organism.”198 That is, Kellogg here also distinguished between the inheritance of disease and the inheritance of a predisposition to disease, and did not consider the latter a direct (or by implication, “real”) cause of disease.

197 Chase, Dr. Chase’s Third, Last, and Complete, 9-10. 198 Kellogg, Home Hand-Book, 817-819.

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Thus, many medical manuals (by Ayers, Chase, Kellogg, Gunn, Beard, and Napheys) agreed that one can be hereditarily predisposed to a disease without ever acquiring it. This shared view shaped a wider discussion of the ambiguities surrounding the priority of predisposing versus exciting causes of disease, and about remote versus proximate causation in general.

It was predominantly general medical manuals that considered the relation of disease causation to heredity. Despite the fact that a large proportion of the sexual hygiene and sex- specific texts were permeated with notions of heredity, few explicitly engaged in a discussion of the nature of the hereditary cause of disease. Perhaps this is because they assumed that readers already understood the importance of heredity in causing disease: many of them were premised on the assumption that there was a general increase in the incidence of hereditary disease, and believed that this was to be remedied through wider consideration of the laws of heredity. Alternatively, sexual hygiene and sex-specific manuals could have had different objects of inquiry from general manuals; many of them spoke of heredity as a thing — good heredity, tainted heredity, etc. — rather than a process, such as hereditary predisposition or hereditary descent; however, the reason for this difference also remains to be explained.

Nonetheless, it seems clear why general medical manuals, which were concerned with explaining the nature of various diseases, as well as how to diagnose, treat, and prevent them, were preoccupied with the relation between heredity and disease. Considerations of the role of heredity in the onset of disease informed the advice these manuals offered for the prevention of diseases, such as tuberculosis and gout. Heredity also informed readers’ diagnosis of diseases — by emphasizing the importance of considering family history in determining the nature of a patient’s complaint — as well as their assessment of prognosis and treatment; hereditary diseases were sometimes thought to be more difficult to treat, and

100 therefore required either special treatment or lifelong management. The nature of this line of thinking within domestic medical manuals evolved over time. The manuals that explicitly discussed hereditary predisposition as remote cause of disease and considered the personal responsibility of those afflicted to ward of disease through proper living, such as those of

Gunn, Beard, and Napheys, were published largely in the 1860’s and 70’s. It was only in the late 1870’s that manuals began to consider the questions highlighted by Ayers, Chase, and

Kellogg about whether hereditary predisposition could be considered a true “cause” of disease.

Not only the nature of disease causation, but also the role of heredity in the aetiology of various specific diseases was considered by many of these same medical manuals. It was, again, largely general medical manuals that cited the heredity of specific diseases, as these often had extended sections cataloguing common diseases. Some manuals dedicated to diseases of men and women, and some sexual hygiene manuals also considered the heredity of specific diseases, but in these cases, fewer diseases were discussed, or in less depth — long lists of diseases thought to be hereditary were often provided without explanation in passages dedicated to marriage advice, for example. Among the most common diseases thought to be hereditary, or to arise from hereditary predisposition, were consumption, scrofula, gout, epilepsy, insanity, cancer, and neuralgia. Asthma, diabetes, and headaches were also not infrequently thought to have a hereditary character, and a great many other diseases were also supposed at various times to be hereditary in some way, such as cataracts,

St. Vitus’ Dance, colourblindness, blear-eye, piles, chlorosis, the solitary vice, cretinism, goitre, haemophilia, rickets, psoriasis, croup, gravel, and ichthyosis, among many others.

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Often, hereditary predisposition was cited as one among a variety of other causes of these diseases.

In many cases, the aetiology of these diseases was uncertain. Gout, for example, was frequently cited to have a hereditary component; yet despite the fact that it was known to run in families, it was also known to occasionally skip a generation. It was understood to be related to “high living” — consuming excessive amounts of rich foods and alcohol and living a sedentary lifestyle, for example — but its exact relation to these factors remained unclear.

Thus, some of the predisposing causes of gout were said to be hereditary, but for readers, this meant that gout could either be acquired or hereditary, that the children of sufferers might not necessarily be afflicted, and that those without hereditary predisposition could also acquire it.

Moreover, gout could transform into something different in offspring. Hartshorne’s The

Practical Household Physician, for example, suggested that the children of gouty parents may have regular gout of the toes, or they may have dyspepsia or neuralgia instead.199

In some cases, this uncertainty went even further. The heredity of cancer, for example, represents an illuminating example. Some authors cited cancer as a hereditary disease. Gunn suggested that people can be predisposed to the disease, and Smith’s Family

Physician pointed out that the fact that cancer runs in families is well-known, even to the public.200 Others, however, disagreed. Raymond Pierce, for example, argued that whether cancer is ever hereditary or whether it is purely accidental is in dispute, and that some even

199 Hartshorne, Practical Household Physician, 473. 200 Gunn, New Domestic Physician (1863), 374; Smith, Smith’s Family Physician, 386.

102 suppose it to be transmitted by direct contagion.201 The British manual Family Physician suggested that despite anecdotal evidence otherwise, when cases of cancer were systematically investigated on a large scale, there was actually found to be little evidence of its heredity.202 Henry Lyman’s Practical Home Physician also cast doubt on the heredity of cancer: popular thinking, he suggested “attaches entirely too much importance to the hereditary influence of cancer. It is by no means proven that there is any hereditary predisposition for cancer; although physicians generally attach some importance to the fact that a patient’s parent has suffered from cancer, yet such a fact carries no weight in deciding a doubtful case.”203 Unlike gout, the heredity of cancer at this time remained an open question.

The designation of some diseases as hereditary at times hinged on whether or not they were contagious. Diseases that we would now recognize as evidently infectious, such as malaria, cholera, and diphtheria, were rarely, if ever said to be hereditary. In some cases, contagion was counterposed with heredity as mutually exclusive causes of disease. Smith’s

1873 Family Physician argued that “scrofula is not a contagious disease, but it is evidently of an hereditary nature.”204 In his discussion of pulmonary consumption (i.e. tuberculosis),

Smith asked “Is Phthsisis contagious?” and answers “No: I verily believe it is not. Neither can the disease be easily (if at all) generated in a sound constitution. Nor is it ever imparted, in my opinion, even by one scrofulous individual to another.”205 Instead, he believed it arose

201 Pierce, People’s Common Sense Advisor, 450-451. 202 The Family Physician; Manual of Domestic Medicine, 167. 203 Lyman, et al. Practical Home Physician, 208-209. 204 Smith, Smith’s Family Physician, 119. 205 Smith, Smith’s Family Physician, 337.

103 from a scrofulous constitution — an inherited peculiarity from which few families are perfectly free — and was excited by want of rest, poor air, or prolonged mental anxiety, for example. Even in seemingly paradigmatic cases of contagion, where no familial tendencies to scrofula could be found, he asserted that a latent diathesis in the patient could be presumed.

However, he followed this discussion by reiterating: “The disorder, I am satisfied, does not spread by contagion. Nevertheless,” he added, “if consulted on the subject, I should, for obvious reasons, dissuade the occupation of the same bed, or even of the same sleeping apartment, by two persons, one of whom was known to labour under pulmonary consumption.”206

By 1901, this view had changed. Prefacing Hartshorne’s Practical Household

Physician was an article by American physician, Lawrence Flick, on tuberculosis. Here, he explained the bacteriological cause of tuberculosis, contrasting it with the “old idea” of the heredity of the disease. Instead, he asserted that “tuberculosis is never transmitted from the parent to the offspring in the true sense of heredity. Sometimes a child is born with the disease, but this is because the mother has the disease so far advanced… that the child gets it by direct contact.”207 Thus, true heredity was here differentiated from infectious transmission. Yet, Flick believed that a predisposition could indeed be inherited, and that some families and races were more prone to infection that others; Hartshorne corroborated this view in the body of his manual.208 In this case, a compromise had been reached whereby bacteriological explanations of the aetiology of tuberculosis could coexist with hereditary

206 Smith, Smith’s Family Physician, 338. 207 Hartshorne, Practical Household Physician, 21. Emphasis mine. 208 Hartshorne, Practical Household Physician, 21, 442.

104 explanations of the incidence of the disease; some individuals, families, or populations were inherently more resistant or susceptible to infection than others.209

A similar compromise is already evident in Henry Lyman et al.’s account of historical understandings of leprosy in his 1884 Practical Home Physician. He explained that in the past, leprosy was considered highly contagious, but in the last century or two, this had come into doubt. Moreover, at other times, the heredity of leprosy was asserted without question.

But Lyman and his coauthors argued that these conclusions neglect the fact that “in order that a disease shall be contagious there must not only be something capable of being transmitted from one individual to another, but also an individual capable of receiving such contagious material.”210 Elsewhere, contagion was explicitly brought to bear in the determination of whether or not diseases could be considered hereditary. In the same volume, Lyman et al. asserted that psoriasis “appears to be, to come extent, hereditary. Several members of the same family will often suffer from it at the same time; yet it is not in the least contagious.”211

The diseases most frequently labelled as hereditary were those of uncertain origin, including ones that we would now recognize as either hereditary, inconsistently contagious, induced by environmental conditions that family members are likely to share (such as eating habits, lifestyle, or physical environment), or so common that they are often found within members of the same family. Heredity was invoked to help explain the onset of these often idiosyncratic diseases, and it also entered into conversations about their nature and aetiology.

209 Historian Michael Worboys has outlined a similar shift in British physicians’ understanding of the aetiology of tuberculosis between 1870-1890, from a belief in the heredity of the disease to the adoption of a “seed and soil” metaphor. Worboys, “From Heredity to Infection.” 210 Lyman, et al., Practical Home Physician, 433. 211 Lyman, et al., Practical Home Physician, 391.

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Thus, while the take-home message for readers in these cases was perhaps less than helpful in terms of practical medical advice, that heredity was so frequently appealed to in conjunction with other commonsensical predisposing causes in explaining difficult-to- understand diseases — and in explaining the nature of disease causation in general — indicates to us that it was a widespread and available concept for making sense of the biological world, and indeed, that it participated in debates about such biological phenomena.

2.3.2 Heredity, Prenatal Influences, and Lifestyle The relative ability of heredity to influence the various biological and social features of our existence was often compared in domestic medical manuals against the power of personal lifestyle choices and prenatal influences to override or reinforce hereditary predispositions and traits. A few authors asserted that heredity prevailed over these other forces. In his 1869 Our Home Physician, George Beard asserted that “the laws of hereditary descent are the most potent of all the influences that determine the character and destinies of individuals and of nations.” The factors of climate and diet can induce certain transient changes in the original types, but they “must always yield to the unconquerable might of race.”212 Here, Beard seems to be suggesting that the original types — species, or, races — were kept true over time by the laws of hereditary descent, and that change can only ever be transitory. This seems to be a comment on evolution, but it is embedded in a discussion of the heredity of diseases; his next assertion was that just about every trait that a given person

212 Beard, Our Home Physician (1869), 383.

106 exhibits can be traced to some remote or immediate ancestor, and that almost all cases of disease are also hereditary in origin — although the inventor of the concept of neurasthenia also acknowledged that there existed in modern society many thousands of exciting causes that may bring on disease. Similarly, Gibson and Gibson’s Social Purity disputed the argument that environment makes more of a difference than heredity, for they asked, why else would there be differences in the talents and moral tendencies among families living in similar surroundings? Instead, they asserted the strength of heredity in the face of education and post-natal culture, and argued that change could only come “at the expense of a long- waged and desperate battle, supplemented by God’s grace.”213 George Napheys argued in his

1871 Transmission of Life, that we could not alter our original natures, although he conceded that some gradual changes, such as acquired habits or vices, could accumulate slowly over time.214 In his 1880 Physical Life of Woman, Napheys reiterated this view. He recognized that education and experience could help an individual overcome an inherited vice, but asserted that these changes could do little for the next generation; it would take exposure over many successive generations for these changes to accumulate in the offspring. He characterized us as “passive transmitters of a nature we have received, and which we have no power to modify.”215 Yet, importantly, even those authors who asserted the overwhelming influence of heredity still left room for its modification, whether that change be merely in the generation in which the hereditary tendencies were manifested, or be also transmitted to the next, however gradually. Beard asserted that a hereditary predisposition for disease did not

213 Gibson and Gibson, Social Purity, 32-33. 214 Napheys, Transmission of Life, 211-212. 215 Napheys, Physical Life of Woman, 117-118.

107 absolve you of the responsibility to live properly, but in fact impelled you to live better than those without the tendency, and the Gibsons argued that it was not our fault for coming into the world with hereditary defects, but that it was nonetheless our duty to strive to overcome them.216 While these authors left limited room for change, other domestic medical manuals highlighted a number of powerful means by which heredity may be overcome. The most prominent of these included prenatal culture and lifestyle modifications.

It was widely believed in the 19th century that the transient effects of changes in the habit, diet, temperament, and health of prospective parents could be transmitted as permanent, i.e. inherited, characteristics to offspring.217 These prenatal influences — acquired either prior to conception, at the moment of conception, or during gestation — were often positioned in contrast to heredity as separate forces determining the physical and mental traits of offspring. The practice of developing positive traits in parents prior to conceiving was called prenatal culture, and was a common subject of discussion among domestic medical manuals, as was the relative strength of prenatal influences, heredity, and lifestyle changes. Sylvanus Stall’s What a Young Husband Ought to Know, for example, distinguished between three crucial periods during which parents could influence the inheritance of their offspring: the period preceding conception, the generative act itself, and the period of gestation. The first period included hereditary influences (including both acquired and inherited traits), but Stall highlighted the last — where maternal influences dominated — as the most potent of the three; it was here that the moulding of the raw

216 Gibson and Gibson, Social Purity, 35. 217 This represents a neo-Lamarckian understanding of heredity.

108 hereditary material took place which most strongly shaped the character of the offspring.218

Benjamin Jefferis and James Nichols’ sexual hygiene manual, Search Lights on Health, asserted that prenatal influences played more of a role in the formation of character than all later education. Children, they believed, inherited both the physiology and the mentality of their parents at the moment of conception. Moreover, the proper application of this knowledge could bring either good or evil to humankind; thus, to prepare for this crucial period, Jefferis and Nichols suggested that parents should avoid excesses of any kinds, take good care of the body and develop strength and stamina, avoid exposure and disease, and exhibit love for one another. Mothers in particular, they advised, were to avoid spicy foods and late hours, and fathers, alcohol and tobacco. Through these prenatal influences, Jefferis and Nichols asserted that parents might produce a generation (and more) of better children.219

Mary Melendy, Chicago homeopathic and eclectic physician and author of advice manuals for women, similarly advocated positive lifestyle change as a means to overcome hereditary defects and improve the quality of the next generation, and indeed, the race.

Melendy argued in her 1904 book for women, Vivilore, that the condition of parents both prior to, and at the moment of conception, was crucial; germ cells, she explained, carried with them “all the developed and undeveloped traits, peculiarities and characteristics” of the parents, as well as those traits most prominently expressed at the time of the creative act.220

In her 1901 Perfect Womanhood, she argued that the law of “like produces like” was subject to modification by another law, namely, that nature tended to revert towards health. By living

218 Stall, Young Husband, 265-269. 219 Jefferis and Nichols, Search Lights on Health, 227-230, 268. 220 Melendy, Vivilore, 321.

109 healthfully and naturally, she argued, we facilitated this healthful reversion. Moreover, by preparing for parenthood through rigorous prenatal culture, Melendy argued that this improvement for the individual could be passed on across many generations and improve the race.221 Since, as she argued, “the tendencies for good or evil interwoven into the very woof and texture of the embryo evidently have greater power in shaping the characters and acts of individuals than all the training and discipline of childhood and youth,” prenatal culture was especially important in this endeavour to correct faulty hereditary lineages.222 Indeed, she suggested that knowledge of prenatal culture and its ability to influence heredity was “to become one of the brightest lights of the twentieth century.”223

The specific advice for prenatal culture offered by manuals varied, but was characterized generally by the belief that parents should be healthy and strong at the time of conception, and that during pregnancy, the mother should surround herself with beauty and goodness, and cultivate her positive traits while trying to mitigate any physical or mental defects she might harbour. George Naphey’s Physical Life of Woman, for example, included a short section on “callipœdia”, or how to have beautiful children, which recommended waiting until both parents were in their best physical condition before conceiving, and during pregnancy, exposing the mother to beautiful images and statues, and having her avoid ugly people, bad posture, and awkward attitudes.224 According to Mary Melendy, prenatal culture overcame or balanced hereditary taints through the exercise and activation of counteracting

221 Melendy, Perfect Womanhood, 69-70. 222 Melendy, Perfect Womanhood, 141. 223 Melendy, Vivilore, 321-322. 224 Napheys, Physical Life of Woman, 112-113.

110 facilities. Parents who were not physically strong or not inclined to generosity, for example, could nonetheless instil these traits in their children by exercising them in themselves, and mothers in particular played a special role in this process. The sins of the fathers, she emphasized, may be overcome through special care on the part of the mother.225

Melendy highlighted five stages of prenatal culture, according to five distinct developmental stages of the unborn child. In the first stage, as the child’s physical constitution was forming, the mother should take care to develop strong physical health and vigour through open air exercise, bathing, riding, and proper dress. Then, as the child next developed the domestic and social affections, the mother should endeavour to keep “her own personal affections… in lively and well-balanced exercise.”226 Similarly, as the observing and perceptive powers were developed in the child, the mother should exercise these faculties in herself, with an emphasis on any of those in which she may be deficient. Finally, in the fourth and fifth stages of prenatal culture, Melendy recommended exercising the development of the intellectual, benevolent, and spiritual faculties — those highest attributes of human nature — with especial attention given in the final weeks of gestation. As well, throughout pregnancy, the mother should also avoid anxiety, and other negative emotions,

“since all readers of the foregoing pages must understand the danger that such emotions, if indulged, may implant in the embryo the subtle germs, from which will grow in after years the bitterest fruits.”227 By living according to these precepts, the reader of Melendy’s books was assured they would be able to produce beautiful and noble offspring and moreover,

225 Melendy, Perfect Womanhood, 137-141. 226 Melendy, Perfect Womanhood, 144-146. 227 Melendy, Perfect Womanhood, 146-150.

111 contribute to the uplift of the race. Emma Drake’s What a Young Wife Ought to Know, part of

Sylvanus Stall’s “Self and Sex” series, and published the same year as Melendy’s Perfect

Womanhood, highlighted five very similar stages of prenatal influence, also with tips for mothers on how to direct those influences for the benefit of their future children. Moreover,

Drake, like Melendy, also emphasized the moral responsibility of parents in heredity, and in particular the role of the mother, who she described as having the potential to be either the

Nemesis or the redeemer of heredity within their families.228

In some cases, it is difficult to separate tips for prenatal culture from more general advice for healthy living that was based on the belief that habits and traits acquired during ones’ lifetime, whether good or bad, could be passed on to the next generation. Many manuals cited the power of lifestyle and environmental reforms to shape the direction of one’s hereditary lineage. Yet, rather than citing prenatal influences, these manuals instead promoted specific lifestyle advice motivated by a more general belief in the heredity of acquired characteristics. Some authors warned about the potentially damaging hereditary effects of poor health and behaviour. Allen Chase’s 1894 Home Advisor, posthumously compiled from his papers by his son, E.L. Chase, cautioned that “one of the signal facts connected with many forms of physical transgression is its tendency to weaken the vital stamina of the transgressor’s offspring,” and Henry Hartshorne agreed that unhealthy living generally had a degenerating influence in families and populations.229 Other authors expressed a more sustained concern about the importance of living properly for the sake of

228 Drake, Young Wife, 109-112, 139-142. 229 Chase, Dr. Chase’s Home Advisor, 53; Hartshorne, Practical Household Physician, 205.

112 the next generation’s inheritance. Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, for example, offered an assortment of advice throughout his domestic medical manuals for producing the best possible children. Pregnant mothers were advised to be happy, surround themselves with works of art, abstain from sex, and maintain a good diet and regular exercise.230 But he also cautioned that children begotten in lust would display abnormal passions as they grew older, and that men and women who yielded to sin and vice at any point in their lives would develop deformities of mind and character that could be passed on hereditarily.231 Considered together, Kellogg’s books advocated a lifetime of pure and healthy living in the name of better offspring, and by extension, of a healthy race. Similarly, the works of Sylvanus Stall and Dr. Mary Wood-Allen, who wrote sexual hygiene manuals for men and women of all ages, respectively, can be considered an extended effort to reform the behaviours of the

American population so that they might be able to produce a better generation of happier, healthier, and holier children. The advice on health, nutrition, marriage, leisure, and even childhood friendships embedded in their “Self and Sex” series was in large part rationalized by the hereditary effects these factors would have on the quality of one’s offspring, and they frequently appealed to readers to consider the fate of their future children and grandchildren in conducting their everyday lives.

In this way, domestic medical manuals encouraged readers to consider the role of heredity in not only the state of their own lives, health, and mentality, but also those of their children and future descendants. Heredity was understood to be a powerful force in

230 Kellogg, Ladies’ Guide, 484. 231 Kellogg, Plain Facts Sexual Life, 68; Kellogg, Ladies’ Guide, 169.

113 determining the characteristics and contours of our lives, but, according to many domestic medical manuals, heredity was also something that could be consciously altered through lifestyle modifications and prenatal culture. In large part, considerations of prenatal culture and the relative strength of prenatal influences were characteristic of sexual hygiene and sex- specific manuals. This is perhaps unsurprising, as these manuals were especially concerned with elaborating the proper relations between the sexes and with articulating socially acceptable forms of sexuality. These manuals were particularly concerned with the social consequences of sexuality, and were often interested in reforming society at least in part through the changing of sexual practices: abstinence formed an important pillar of Kellogg’s program of social reform, as did personal purity in Stall’s. Similarly, sexual hygiene and sex- specific texts were also the strongest advocates of healthy and proper lifestyles in the belief that heredity was modified by behaviour and mentality. Sexual hygiene manuals in particular found in heredity a powerful site of social reform, and hence were preoccupied with considering the relation of heredity to prenatal influences and its susceptibility to modification through lifestyle choices — in particular, those surrounding health and sexuality. The power of heredity to function as a site of social reform in this context depended both on its important role in shaping the physical and emotional characteristics of our lives, but also its ability to be shaped in turn through conscious action; a more strictly rigid view of heredity as unchangeable across generations leaves fewer concrete means of action for reforming society on the basis of its hereditary makeup.

In general, medical manuals did not discuss explicitly the issue of whether heredity and prenatal influences were separate or related forces that shaped development. Some (as did George Napheys, for instance) claimed that the effects of maternal influences cannot be

114 considered hereditary. Others, emphasized the effects on the germ cells of changes in the parents made prior to conception on the sex cells, and, thus, blurred the distinction between hereditary and prenatal influences. Still others included in the category of prenatal influences lifestyle changes made closer to the moment of conception or in anticipation of a pregnancy, but not the general practice of good living. Yet, all noted the potential ability of changes in parental behaviours to modify heredity. Sexual hygiene and sex-specific domestic medical manuals exhibited a greater interest than general medical manuals in the ways that prenatal culture and lifestyle modifications could alter hereditary lineages. And in many cases, the implications of a malleable heredity within these manuals were also tied to broader concerns about the nation and the race.

2.3.3 Heredity, Marriage, and Race While many domestic medical manuals emphasized the malleability of heredity by focusing on the ways that heredity could be improved or altered through personal habits and hygiene, many of these same manuals also underscored the unyielding influence of heredity in sections and passages that offered marriage advice to their readers. Here, readers were cautioned about the dangers of marrying into a family with a history of disease or of marrying their own cousins, for example, for fear of inflicting lasting hereditary damage on their descendants. Moreover, the counsel these manuals offered in relation to questions of marriage was often explicitly tied to concerns about the state of the nation or the race.

The most common theme among manuals offering advice for readers about marriage was to urge caution from marrying someone who had a known history of hereditary disease or deformity, or came from a family with such tendencies. Authors frequently discouraged

115 readers from marrying persons suffering from consumption, scrofula, epilepsy, and insanity, and to refrain from marriage themselves if they were so afflicted. John Gunn, for example, believed that much idiocy, madness, and nervous disease was hereditary, and thus cautioned his readers to be careful in their selection of marriage partners, lest they bestow these unhappy inheritances upon their future children.232 Writing to young men, Kellogg advised that epileptics, consumptives, thieves, murderers, and drinkers should voluntarily avoid marriage because of the heredity of these conditions, and, writing to young women, he urged that any young woman “who is herself subject to hereditary physical or mental disease or physical deformity of a serious character, ought to consider it her duty to refuse an offer of marriage on this account.”233 Sylvanus Stall encouraged his young readers to consult their family records and those of their prospective spouses before marrying to ensure that there is no hereditary tendency to consumption or insanity entering into the relation. Moreover, it was particularly emphasized that individuals suffering from the same diseases should especially not marry one another. Henry Lyman asserted in his 1884 Practical Home

Physician, that “it cannot be too emphatically insisted upon, that a man and a woman presenting the same hereditary taints, suffering from the same constitutional disease, or tendency to disease, should not, as they value their own happiness and that of their possible children, marry.”234 The anonymously authored 1889 Canadian publication The Family

Physician, agreed, adding that the child’s chance of suffering from the diseases of their parents are greater if both parents have it, and furthermore, that “the most aggravated and

232 Gunn, New Domestic Physician (1863), 36. 233 Kellogg, Man the Masterpiece, 169-174; Kellogg, Ladies’ Guide, 313. 234 Lyman, et al. Practical Home Physician, 910

116 numerous cases of obstinate nervous diseases” for example, “are found in families where both parents exhibit a tendency to the disease.”235

For this reason, the question of whether cousins should be able to marry or not was also frequently considered in medical manuals. Most seemed to agree that the real problem was marriage among individuals with similar hereditary defects, and that if both parties were healthy and entirely free of hereditary taints, the fact of being cousins should not necessarily be a problem. “Marrying first cousins,” Jefferis and Nichols warned, “is dangerous to offspring. The observation is universal, the children of married first cousins are too often idiots, insane, clump-footed [sic], crippled, blind, or variously diseased. First cousins are always sure to impart all the hereditary disease in both families to their children. If both are healthy, there is less danger.”236 Yet most authors were not so anxious. In his Physical Life of

Woman, George Napheys, for example, discussed the question “warmly” debated among medical men, and asserted that those who fear the results of cousin-marriages need not worry, as long as there was no hereditary taint present in the family. If there was, he pointed out, it would be no different than marrying into a different family with the same tendencies.

He cautioned however, that few families were truly free of “lurking predispositions to disease;” The Family Physician similarly asserted that “there will usually be found upon closer scrutiny a family tendency, the aggravation of which by inter-marriage, would be disastrous to happiness.”237 In a later manual written for men, Napheys mentioned that his opinions on cousin-marriage expressed in Physical Life of Woman, incited criticism and

235 The Family Physician, 199-200. 236 Jefferis and Nichols, Search Lights on Health, 146. 237 Napheys, Physical Life of Woman, 55-56; Family Physician, 200.

117 controversy from statisticians and medical writers, but that further investigations on his part, and supportive evidence recently published in London’s the Lancet, compelled him to maintain his position.238

The general opinion among medical manuals at this time seems to be that it is the marrying of individuals with hereditary taints — or worse, similar hereditary taints — that is most dangerous to offspring. Consequently, many manuals also argued that couples who differed from one another were those most likely to produce the healthiest marriages and most vigorous offspring. In some cases, this translated into a belief that parents of contrasting temperaments or physical characteristics would yield productive and happy marriages. Prof. and Mrs. Gibson’s Social Purity, for example, suggested that children inherited an even development from parents with a proper balance of temperaments.239 In his Plain Facts about

Sexual Life, Dr. Kellogg disputed the phrenological doctrine “of some writer of note” that people should marry others as nearly like them as possible. He argued that this would backfire, as any imbalance in the parties’ temperaments would only be magnified in their offspring, to disastrous results — and indeed, that “a few generations of such a degenerating process would either exterminate the race or drive it back to Darwin’s ancestral ape.”240 Yet, marrying opposite extremes would do no good either; Kellogg highlighted as ideal something in between these two extremes. Raymond Pierce’s phrenologically-influenced Common

Sense Medical Advisor also argued that a constitutional similarity between parents was

238 Napheys, Transmission of Life, 138-140. Historian Diane Paul and professor of Zoology Hamish Spencer have illustrated how medical writers and phrenologists in the early 19th century in Britain and the US were concerned about the hereditary effects of close intermarriage. In so doing, they revise the historical narrative which attributes these concerns to the advent of Darwin’s evolutionary theory and later eugenic ideas. 239 Gibson and Gibson, Social Purity, 301. 240 Kellogg, Plain Facts Sexual Life, 81-85.

118 undesirable. To prevent such marriages, he outlined a typology of temperaments based on the four humours, and explained which combinations of temperaments resulted in what he called

“physiological marriages” — i.e. those most likely to produce vigorous and healthy offspring. Pierce also pointed out that “breeding in and in” — a term borrowed from breeders to refer to repeated matings, or in his case, marriages, within a family line — led to diminished vigour and fertility because of a lack of variety.241 Such use of breeders’ language in these discussions was common; many referred to the “stocks” of prospective parents when considering their relevant hereditary backgrounds. The use of the idea of familial stock, however, came up most frequently in discussions of another kind of difference between parents — that is, racial or national, rather than temperamental difference.

John Gunn, for example, held no doubt that if it were practically possible, the systematic marriage of individuals from different countries would produce “a vigorous race of people, both physically and mentally,” and cited the advantages of cross-breeding plants and animals as evidence that this would be the case. Furthermore, he went on to remark that

“if the same amount of knowledge and care, which has been taken to improve the domestic animals (as I have heretofore remarked), had been bestowed upon the human species in the last century, there would not have been so many moral patients for the lunatic asylum, or for our prisons, at present. That the human species are as susceptible of improvement as the domestic animal, who can deny?”242 This is a refrain recognizable to those familiar with eugenic arguments and slogans of the early 20th century, but it is also one that repeatedly

241 Pierce, People’s Common Sense Advisor, 182-186. 242 Gunn, New Domestic Physician (1863), 120.

119 appears in discussions of marriage among domestic medical manuals as early as 1863.

Keeping up the breeding theme, Henry Lyman asserted in his 1884 Practical Home

Physician that “it is a law, true of man as of other animals, that the most vigorous qualities of a given stock are best maintained by a certain admixture of foreign blood,” and suggested that marriages among Americans whose ancestors have lived in the country for many generations are not as productive as those between a native-born American and a

European.243 And in a nice example of the borrowing that took place among domestic medical manuals, this same passage was lifted and included word-for-word five years later in the Family Physician (“compiled by leading Canadian medical men”) published by the Rose

Publishing Company in Toronto, 1889.244

The appropriate differences between parents were expressed not only in national, but also racial terms, although when it came to marriages between different races, the authors of domestic medical manuals were more hesitant. Mary Melendy’s 1904 Vivilore, for example, argued that opposites tend to attract, and that this is beneficial: tall people tend to marry shorter people, and their offspring are balanced as a result. However, with regard to certain forms of difference, such as race or religion, she believed people should not diverge in their marriage partners. “True, these are progressive days,” she admitted, but irreconcilable differences would soon arise that would prevent any hope of a happy or productive marriage:

“the robin mates with a robin, never with an oriole.”245 On more physiological than cultural grounds, Napheys similarly opposed the marriage of different races, although he only

243 Lyman, et al. Practical Home Physician, 911. 244 Family Physician, 199-200. 245 Melendy, Vivilore, 216-218.

120 specifically addressed the question he saw as most relevant in America, which was the union between a black and a white person. He objected to such marriages by pointing out what he believed to be certain inherent deficiencies entering the union: “it is well known,” he pointed out, euphemistically, “that the black race cannot survive in a northern climate.” The children of such marriages, by implication, would be hereditarily disadvantaged to surviving in

America, and moreover, he argued that they are often sickly and short-lived. Intermarriage within nations of the same race, however, he saw as highly advantageous.246 In this case,

Napheys offered a hereditary justification for racial segregation, at least in terms of marriage.

Thus, considerations of marriage within domestic medical manuals were strongly informed by ideas about heredity, and in their cautionary discussions, tended to emphasize the determinism of the heredity of disease, temperament, and physical and mental traits, over its malleability. Discussions of prenatal culture and marriage advice were separate, and at times their implications were contradictory: the former explained all the ways one could consciously alter the hereditary endowments of one’s offspring, while the latter espoused special caution in marriage partners for fear of irrevocably damaging one’s hereditary lineage. In some respects, the objects of concern within discussions of prenatal culture and marriage advice differed. Prenatal culture was largely focused on the shaping of personality and character — although it was also certainly interested in general physical strength and vigour as well — while marriage advice was predominantly (although certainly not exclusively) anxious to curb the transmission of disease. Indeed, among these discussions, disease appears to be seen as the more intractable problem than personality flaws; a

246 Napheys, Physical Life of Woman, 57.

121 tremendous exertion of will might conceivably be sufficient to overcome an inherited habit, but some diseases were without doubt understood to be incurable. Moreover, it is also apparent that the marriage advice these manuals offered consciously considered the racial and national hereditary consequences of different forms of marriage, and implored readers to keep these broader frameworks in mind when thinking about future marriage partners — or one’s qualifications for, or right to marriage in the first place.

Indeed, authors at times urged readers to “consider the rights of your children under the laws of heredity.” It is doubtful, Jefferis and Nichols’ Search Lights on Health asserted,

“whether you have a right to increase the number of invalids and cripples” in the world.247

Many lamented the carelessness with which so many parents brought their children into the world. This reflects a concern evidenced in many manuals not only about the importance of prenatal culture, but also about the extent to which improper marriages and careless reproduction appeared to be the norm among the hereditarily afflicted. Pye Chavasse’s

Advice to a Wife, for example, regretted those innocent children born of diseased parents, doomed to suffer a life of illness because of their parents’ mere thoughtlessness in bringing them into the world.248 Jefferis and Nichols’ Search Lights on Health employed a much more vivid imagery to convey the same opinion:

See those miserable and depraved scape-goats of humanity, the demented simpletons, the half-crazy, unbalanced multitudes which infest our earth, and fill our prisons with criminals and our poor-houses with paupers. Oh! the boundless capabilities and perfections of our God-like nature and, alas! its deformities! All is the result of the ignorance or indifference of parents.249

247 Jefferis and Nichols, Search Lights on Health, 177. 248 Chavasse, Advice to a Wife, 91. 249 Jefferis and Nichols, Search Lights on Health, 226.

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In some cases, this disappointment led to calls for marriage laws — the Family

Physician suggested if our laws were made with due regard for our physical health, it would be forbidden for consumptives to marry — or social reforms based on heredity: Prof. and

Mrs. Gibson’s Social Purity asserted that it could only be by bringing reproduction under rational thought that we might rid society of criminals.250 And here again, we also see reference to the knowledge of breeders. Dr. John Wesley Daily and Dr. Kellogg, like Gunn earlier, deplored the fact that human reproduction was given less thought — and fewer resources — than that of horses, dogs, and cattle.251 In spite of the extensive knowledge we had from breeders’ experience about the transmission of physical and mental traits, Kellogg asserted, the race was daily deteriorating as a result of the fact that prospective spouses do not inquire into their respective hereditary histories.252

In addition to outlining who should not marry, and commenting on the ideal kind of difference between parents to ensure healthy descendants, domestic medical manuals also offered various other tips for choosing a suitable marriage partner. Some of this advice was related to personality and morality. Dr. Emma Drake’s advice manual for young wives told readers they should expect their husbands to be pure, and to also see how he behaved around his mother and siblings. A family physician, she pointed out, could also be a good resource for making sure he was appropriately healthy and strong.253 Dr. Mary Wood-Allen’s manual for young women similarly advised readers to consider carefully a prospective husband’s

250 Family Physician, 199; Gibson and Gibson, Social Purity, 36. 251 Daily, Home Practice of Medicine, 296; Kellogg, Home Hand-Book, 342-343; Kellogg, Man the Masterpiece, 65. 252 Kellogg, Ladies’ Guide, 383-387. 253 Drake, Young Wife, 63-68.

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“talents, capacities, habits, [and] inherited tendencies.”254 Gibson and Gibson’s Social Purity put the matter more clearly, imploring readers to ensure that the person with whom they might plan to spend their life be “a fit subject to transmit his qualities and characteristics to your children… do not rely on appearances alone,” they insisted, “but seek to know the truth by careful inquiry.”255

The appropriate age at which to get married was also a matter of concern among domestic health tracts. Jefferis and Nichols’ Search Lights on Health warned that women who married too young never fully matured, and produced only weak and feeble children. It is best, they suggested, to wait until women are fully developed in body and mind, usually between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-five. Similarly for young men, the best ages to marry are between twenty-three and twenty-eight. Moreover, one should not wait too long for marriage: if either partner was older than between thirty to forty-five, the offspring would be small and especially liable to disease.256 Dr. Kellogg explained why young men and women needed to be of a certain age to marry in his 1877 Plain Facts about Sexual Life: reproduction — that inevitable outcome of marriage — would consume excessive and damaging amounts of energy from a body that was still in the process of maturing. Yet,

Kellogg also considered the physiology of heredity in his justification. He explained that reproduction involved the union of an ovum with a zoosperm, each of which was composed of multitudes of minute gemmules. Taken together, these gemmules were full representatives of the parents producing them (you can see here the influence of Darwin’s theory of

254 Wood-Allen, Young Woman, 209. 255 Gibson and Gibson, Social Purity, 102. 256 Jefferis and Nichols, Search Lights on Health, 144.

124 pangenesis, which he also cited elsewhere as the mechanism behind heredity, albeit without ever naming Darwin himself as the author). It followed, then, that if the parents were not yet fully developed, their offspring would similarly be weakly and small. Hence, he recommended marriage no earlier than age twenty for women, and twenty-four for men.257

This advice he also repeated in different forms in his books for men and women, Man the

Masterpiece, and Ladies’ Guide to Health.258 In Ladies’ Guide, Kellogg further justified his argument by pointing out that stock-breeders were aware of the problems associated with breeding too early, and consequently never bred animals until they were fully mature. He also drew upon anthropological and historical data to support his point: “it is a notable fact,” he explained, “that among nations who are degenerating and whose national characteristics present the marks of race deterioration in operation for many centuries, marriages occur at a very early age.” He cited Japan, “nearly all other Eastern countries,” and nations in the interior of Africa as evidence, and contrasted them with the ancient Greeks, who typically married much later as a result of “wholesome advice” from Plato, and who were by contrast an intellectually and physically superior nation.259 Thus, here again we see a concern with broader questions about the quality of the race influencing the advice offered by domestic medical manuals with respect to marriage and heredity.

It was not only sexual hygiene and sex-specific texts, but also general domestic medical manuals that contained discussions of marriage and heredity. Yet, the audiences to whom this marriage advice was addressed, and the aspects of marriage with which these

257 Kellogg, Plain Facts Sexual Life, 85-88. 258 Kellogg, Man, the Masterpiece, 167-168; Kellogg, Ladies’ Guide, 294-295. 259 Kellogg, Ladies’ Guide, 293-296.

125 manuals were concerned, varied. General medical manuals had a more general intended audience than sexual hygiene or sex-specific texts, although, despite typically presenting themselves as “knowledge for everyone,” in practice, general manuals would have been read most by those individuals administering to the health of their families, i.e. women and mothers. Nonetheless, their inclusive nature is reflected in the fact that these manuals were more involved in general discussions — of who should not marry, the admissibility of cousin-marriage, and the ideal differences between parents, for example — and in lamenting that not enough rational thought has been given to marriage and reproduction among the masses, than they were inclined to give specific advice for choosing marriage partners or on the best age to marry. Sexual hygiene and sex-specific medical manuals, on the other hand, dominated the conversation on the details of marriage advice, and the advice they offered was tailored to their specific audiences; Kellogg’s Ladies Guide, and Man the Masterpiece explained which women and men should avoid marriage, for example, and Wood-Allen and

Drake’s manuals for young girls and young wives, respectively, gave specific advice for choosing a proper husband. Together, these manuals presented marriage as a decision fraught with not only personal emotional and spiritual significance, but also broader social, and even racial significance, based on the facts of hereditary transmission. Readers were told that decisions about who they marry, when they marry, and even if they marry, hold far-reaching hereditary consequences for their families and nations. In contrast to the discussions on pre- natal influences present in many of these same manuals, which assumed the general malleability of heredity, underlying these conversations about marriage was a belief in the deterministic power of heredity to influence the future of readers’ families and races.

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2.3.4 Heredity and Alcoholism The societal problem of intemperance was a particular topic that reappeared in many domestic medical manuals and that deserves closer examination. In some cases, manuals merely explained that the negative effects of the abuse of alcohol or tobacco were passed on.

Canadian educators Henderson and Fraser’s text for “fourth classes,” Physiology and

Hygiene Notes, for example, explained that it created “an appetite which disgraces the person, destroys the soul, robs the family, and curses the community and succeeding generations.”260 Here, they did not rely on biological notions of heredity, but instead merely took it for granted that the effects of intemperance spanned generations. Most, however, were more explicit in explaining that these trans-generational effects were the outcome of hereditary mechanisms. Health Reader no. 2, the Maritime school textbook that particularly focused on the effects of alcohol and tobacco, asserted that drinking was an important source of bad inheritance, and explained the general facts of heredity to students specifically to illustrate the dangers of drinking and tobacco-use.261 It was generally accepted that a disordered appetite for alcohol could be either acquired or hereditary, and furthermore, that an acquired habit could in turn become hereditary.

Drinking in parents was also frequently understood to cause various other diseases and problems in children, in addition to merely an unhealthy appetite for alcohol. The offspring of alcohol-abusers were thought to inherit generally weaker wills — reflecting the weak wills of their parents — and were therefore thought to be more susceptible to abuse of

260 Henderson and Fraser, Physiology and Hygiene, 48. 261 Heath Reader no. 2, 137-140.

127 other narcotics as well, such as tobacco and opium. Children were also assumed to be more susceptible to nervous disorders and other forms of disease in general, in the belief that the physical damage parents inflicted on their own bodies — whether specific, or merely in the form of general weakness — was transmitted to their children. Dr. Kellogg, for example, referred to opinion of the “eminent Dr. Parker,” who explained that drunkards also produced the tendency to “insanity, idiocy, epilepsy, [and] other affections of the brain and nervous system” in their children. Moreover, these “frail, nervous, imbecile, [and] idiotic” children,

Kellogg lamented, were “poor specimens of the race” — a race which might in fact be deteriorating as a result of intemperance. Indeed, Kellogg asserted that the abuse of alcohol in Norway and Sweden was the cause of these nations’ degeneration.262 Health Reader no. 2 also claimed that the English and Americans of today, descendants of hard-drinking old

Northmen, inherited from their ancestors a craving for alcohol from which they were only safe through a lifetime complete abstinence.263 Alcoholism, it seems, was blamed for a host of social ills — from the local level of familial disease and amorality, to the wider level of national or racial degeneration — and heredity was understood to be the mechanism by which these ill-effects were enabled.

These concerns about alcoholism, and about the special role of heredity in perpetuating and even expanding the negative effects of intemperance across generations, were found among all genres of domestic medical manuals. This includes school textbooks, which did not exhibit a sustained attention to heredity otherwise. This can in part be

262 Kellogg, Home Hand-Book, 471-472. 263 Health Reader no. 2, 139-140.

128 explained by the fact that there were explicit efforts at this time to educate the young about the dangers of alcohol; the Ontario Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) launched a campaign in the 1880’s to create a curriculum dedicated to the subject of alcohol and tobacco use. They succeeded in 1887 in petitioning the Ontario government to pass legislation introducing a voluntary course on scientific temperance instruction (STI), and in

1893, this course was made compulsory. Also a result of pressure from the WCTU, William

Nattress’ Public School Physiology and Temperance was officially recognized as the recommended textbook.264 Among discussions of the physiological effects of alcohol consumption on the various systems of the body, Nattress' text explained to students the degenerative hereditary effects of intemperance.265 Indeed, as the next chapter of this dissertation will explore in greater detail, the WCTU held similar ideas about the relationship between alcoholism and hereditary transmission as was found in contemporary domestic medical manuals.

The fact that these ideas about alcohol and heredity were found across all genres of domestic medical manual perhaps reflects the fact that drinking was seen as an important social problem of relevance for young and old alike. It might also be explained in other ways: intemperance represented a practical entry point from which to get at a host of broader social problems — the abuse of alcohol being affiliated with not only petty crime but also national degeneration, as we have seen — and moreover, it represented a means of intersecting with the process of heredity itself. If we could curb the abuse of alcohol, it was believed, we might

264 Cook, Sunshine and Shadow, 43, 117-120. 265 Nattress, Physiology and Temperance, 38, 123-124, 166-167.

129 also halt the process of hereditary degeneration thought to be behind what was perceived to be a rapid rise of insanity and criminality, for example. Moreover, the relatively consistent interpretation of alcoholism and its social and medical effects in hereditary terms also suggests that heredity was an important frame for understanding the nature of intemperance at this time. That this is the case will be explored more extensively in the following chapter.

2.3.5 Heredity and Domestic Medical Manuals As we have seen, domestic medical manuals exposed Canadian readers to the concept of heredity in the context of several discussions — namely, in relation to the aetiology and causation of disease, in the context of discussions about prenatal culture and marriage advice, and in terms of the hereditary degeneration thought to be caused by the abuse of alcohol. Yet, as we have seen, the manuals here examined were far from monolithic in the backgrounds of their authors, place of publication, targeted audience, and ideas about the nature of heredity.

In an attempt to understand how the heredity was both understood and functioned as a social and biological concept in the late 19th century, it is worthy to ask if any of these parameters corresponded with variations in conceptions of heredity within the broad genre of domestic medical manuals as a whole. Authors of domestic medical manuals came from a variety of backgrounds, although for the most part they were physicians. A few, such as

Alvin Chase and Mary Melendy identified as eclectic, others, such as Pye Chavasse, Calvin

Cutter, and John Daily were surgeons or specialized in the diseases of children or nervous diseases. Some manuals were also written by non-medical professionals: G.E. Henderson, author of the school text Physiology and Hygiene was an educator, Sylvanus Stall was a

Lutheran pastor, and Prof. Gibson appears to have been a historian. A handful of authors

130 have also been identified as entrepreneurs: Alvin Chase was known for his patent medicines, as was Raymond Pierce. The authors of Viavi Hygiene for Women, Men, and Children were entrepreneurs who appear to have falsely posed as a chemist and physician pair for the purposes of promoting the value of their products,266 and Benjamin Jefferis’ co-author of

Search Lights on Health and The Household Guide, James Nichols, was an author and book publisher — in fact, a number of the sexual hygiene manuals I examined were published by his company, J.L. Nichols, located in Toronto, On. and Naperville, Ill.267 Most authors were also men; those few authors who were women — Dr. Mary Wood-Allen, Dr. Ellen Drake,

Dr. Mary Melendy, and Mrs. Gibson — were restricted to writing sexual hygiene or sex- specific manuals for women or young girls; none of the general medical manuals I examined were written by women. For the most part, presentations of heredity did not vary substantially according to the backgrounds of their authors. The similarities that did arise, for example among the manuals of female authors, are more readily explained by their association with the sexual hygiene genre than they are by their authors being women per se.

The vast majority of manuals I examined were American; while a number of manuals were published in Canada, I could identify very few specifically Canadian-made domestic medical manuals.268 Yet, aside from a few recommendations for Canadians specific to their unique (and colder) climate, the content of these manuals with respect to heredity also did not vary much according to the nationality of their author or country of publication. Some

266 Collins “Medicine Barrel”; “Notes, Comments, Answers,” 211. 267 e.g. Hartshorne, Practical Household Physician; Jefferis and Nichols, Household Guide; Jefferis and Nichols, Search Lights on Health; Gibson and Gibson, Social Purity; and Melendy, Vivilore. 268 See note 166.

131 publishers displayed a preference for a particular genre of manual — J.L. Nichols published a number sexual hygiene manuals, as well as manuals written by the publisher’s friend,

Benjamin Jefferis, and Sylvanus Stall’s Self and Sex Series was published exclusively by the

Vir Publishing Company in the United States and Britain, and William Briggs in Canada — yet, for the most part, manuals were produced by an array of different publishing companies and displayed no significant correlation to heredity. In these few exceptions, the correlation of a publishing house with specific ideas about heredity can be once again explained by their relationship with a particular type of manual, such as, sexual hygiene. Finally, over the time period examined, there was a small change in the number of manuals that included discussions of heredity. The percentage of manuals per decade that contained some or much discussion of heredity (as opposed to little or none) rose over time.269

In what seems to be an emerging pattern, part of this rise can be attributed to the emergence of sexual hygiene manuals in my sample in the late 1870s. This was a historically contingent phenomenon, as the rise of these manuals reflects the emergence of the social purity movement in the United States and Canada in the late 1860’s and 1870’s. This movement was concerned, in the broadest sense, with eliminating negative — in particular amoral — mental and physical habits from human social and individual life.270 In practice, this took many forms, such as the attempts to curb prostitution, intemperance, sexual excess, masturbation, impure literature, and improper dress. As historian Sharon Cook has pointed out, there was no single issue or group that can be identified with the movement; instead, it

269 This was a rough classification that I imposed on my sample of manuals; while not precise, it affords a reasonable approximation of the extent to which heredity permeated or not the content of home manuals. 270 Bliss, “Pure Books,” 102-103.

132 took different forms in different places, reflecting and responding to the diverse range of hopes and fears that characterized the late 19th century in North America and Britain.271

Sexuality, however, was a particularly important subject of concern and object of reform within the social purity movement. Because many of the sexual hygiene manuals were permeated with concerns about heredity, the greater presence of heredity in the manuals I examined after 1880 can in part be explained by the rise of the social purity movement, and the attendant rise in the number of domestic medical manuals written with these motivating interests and concerns.

The type of the manual was therefore most closely related to the kinds of answers they gave with respect to questions about the role of heredity in disease causation, the relation of heredity to the strength of the environment, prenatal influences, and personal lifestyle, as well as the significance of heredity for national and racial concerns. In other words, the motivating interests of authors — whether they be to improve the general health of the public or to promote social and sexual purity, for example — and their intended audiences had much to do with the way that heredity was understood, explained, and translated into concrete practical advice for readers of domestic medical manuals.

Importantly, this suggests that heredity functioned as a malleable concept that could be and was applied to conflicting conclusions about medicine and social reform. In other words, in the last four decades of the 19th century, heredity served as a useful — and commonly used

— concept for making sense of and ordering both the natural and social world.

271 Cook, “Gender and Social Purity,” 217-218.

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2.4 Sources of Knowledge about Heredity Authors of domestic medical manuals had to contend with the problem of authority.

How were their readers to trust what they were being told? To forestall suspicions that they were writing manuals merely to profit from selling books, or advertising specific services, products, or medical facilities, authors usually prefaced their works by explaining that they were writing for the benefit of the common person, to make easily accessible medical knowledge that was previously held in the hands of an elite few or was difficult to access.

Often, they would additionally explain that not only were they not profiting from this venture, but that in fact, producing their manual had come at considerable economic and personal expense; yet, they persevered out of a sense of medical and social duty. While these humble entreaties may have assuaged concerns about motivation, authors still needed to convince readers of the value of the content of their manuals.272 This latter requirement was often facilitated by compiling testimonials and reviews from eminent readers in the opening pages, or by referencing various recognized or perceived authorities or the extent of their own personal experience throughout the contents of the manual. Finally, readers were also encouraged to conduct their own observations on heredity. In other words, medical manuals relied on an extensive and eclectic evidential basis for their understanding of heredity and were influenced by a range of scientific and popular ideas about heredity. Yet, what kinds of authorities — scientific or otherwise — did they rely upon, reference, compile? Moreover, where did domestic medical manuals obtain their information about heredity? In what

272 Unlike the readers of agricultural periodicals, the readers of domestic medical manuals were not engaged in the same sort of daily practical engagement with the phenomena of heredity. They were not relying on their own senses or the expanded personal horizons of experience that the agricultural periodicals offered their readers.

134 follows, I examine the important sources of information on heredity referenced by authors of domestic medical manuals — namely, scientists, physicians, and breeders, as well as religion, history, and folklore.

Contemporary scientific investigations formed an important source of authority for domestic medical manuals. Many manuals referred to the works of Charles Darwin and

Francis Galton, for example, in explaining the nature of heredity, or in backing up their positions on the subject. As we have seen earlier, Dr. Kellogg believed that Darwin’s theory of pangenesis explained the phenomena of heredity, and he described it to readers in some of his works.273 Interestingly, Kellogg did not actually attribute the theory to Darwin himself, but instead to the euphemistic designation of “one of the most distinguished scientists of the age.” The absence of Darwin’s name is notable given that he mentioned “Darwin’s ancestral ape” elsewhere,274 and one is led to speculate that this was meant to avoid offending any readers who might have found some of Darwin’s ideas about human evolution distasteful.

Other authors showed a change in their views on Darwin. In the 1869 version of his Our

Home Physician, George Beard suggested that Darwin’s theory (of evolution) was “rendered plausible by a large array of startling and suggestive facts,” but whether these facts were sufficient to prove the theory, he maintained, “many of us must doubt.”275 Yet, by the 1881 version of Our Home Physician, his discussion of hereditary descent remained the same, but in the section on Darwin, he added a few words about the recent progress of the theory of evolution, mentioning Darwin’s Descent of Man, first published in 1871, and the writings of

273 Kellogg, Plain Facts Sexual Life, 61-62; Kellogg, Home Hand-Book, 341-342. 274 Kellogg, Plain Facts Sexual Life, 84. 275 Beard, Our Home Physician (1869), 166.

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Herbert Spencer and Prof. Huxley. He finished his discussion by conceding that “evolution is opposed by some of the older naturalists [but by implication, not himself], and by some though not all theologians. Its general principles are doubtless true.”276 Still other author authors, such as Emma Drake, were more than happy to refer to Darwin’s theory of pangenesis; she quoted him directly in her explanation, asserting that “we might go on indefinitely making quotations from undisputed authorities on this great science of heredity, for to-day it has become almost an exact science.”277

Francis Galton — British polymath, cousin of Darwin, author of Hereditary Genius, and coiner of the term “eugenics” — was, with his cousin, another frequently referenced source of authority on matters related to heredity. Gibson and Gibson’s Social Purity, for example, reviewed contemporary hereditary science, beginning with Darwin’s theory of pangenesis. They then explained Galton’s experimental refutation of this theory of gemmules, and briefly mentioned the subsequent theories of Prof. W.K. Brooks and August

Weismann. “Whatever the theory,” they concluded, “the facts remain” about hereditary transmission.278 Others drew on the work of Galton to support their claims about the heredity of mental ability.279 Mary Wood-Allen asserted in her What a Young Woman Ought to Know that “Galten” agreed that not only physical but also mental and moral traits were hereditarily transmissible, for example. Elsewhere, she betrayed what might be another influence of

Galton in her thinking; in describing the inheritance of human traits as rendering us

276 Beard, Our Home Physician (1881), 166. 277 Drake, Young Wife, 140-141. 278 Gibson and Gibson, Social Purity, 22-23. 279 e.g. Napheys, Transmission Life, 217; Kellogg, Ladies’ Guide, 389.

136 something akin to patchwork quilts, she said Nature had been doing for ages what the modern photographer thought was new: making composite photographs of us all. It was

Galton who pioneered the use of this technique in the late 1870’s in an attempt to discern a criminal (and hereditary) “type” of facial structure.280

Other less prominent experimentalists and researchers were referenced as well. Both

Wood-Allen’s book for young women and Stall’s manual for young husbands referenced the work of American scientist and inventor Elmer Gates. Wood-Allen described the experiments he conducted on dogs that found that areas of the brain enlarged after learning to discriminate different colours were passed on to the fifth generation. Stall, in considering how emotional states of the mother might affect the foetus, referred to Gates’ research on how mental condition affects patterns found in the residuum left behind when subjects breathed on pieces of glass.281 Dr. Kellogg referred on a couple of occasions to the experimental research of physiologist and neurologist Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard in which he was able to artificially induce epilepsy in guinea pigs that was also passed on to offspring.282 At other times, manuals referred simply to unnamed “authorities” of science in asserting certain claims about heredity. Whether these statements reflected the ideas of specific scientists, or whether they were meant to be claims about the state of scientific research at the time is left ambiguous; we can only assume they were meant to encapsulate what authors believed to be current “scientific” opinion on the subject of heredity.283

280 Wood-Allen, Young Woman, 217-218; Galton, Composite Portraits, 5-6. 281 Wood-Allen, Young Woman, 95-96; Stall, Young Husband, 269-270. 282 Kellogg, Man the Masterpiece, 185-186; Kellogg, Ladies’ Guide, 388. 283 e.g. Daily, Home Practice of Medicine, 229; Napheys, Physical Life of Woman, 117-118.

137

Domestic medical manuals also relied heavily on the work of physicians and psychiatrists as sources for understanding and illustrating the nature of heredity. The work of

English psychiatrist Dr. Henry Maudsley on the heredity of insanity, for example, was referred to by McGregor Robertson’s Household Physician, Napheys’ Transmission of Life, and Gibson and Gibson’s Social Purity.284 Similarly, the last two both quoted the same passage from a “M. Morel” — likely the French psychiatrist Benedict Morel — on the heredity of alcoholism.285 American physicians Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. and Samuel G.

Howe, for example, as well as the London medical journal the Lancet were cited as authorities in more than one medical manual, and the experience or opinion of numerous other obscure or unknown physicians was also frequently appealed to in discussions of heredity. Commonly, the knowledge of these physicians was referred to in the form of personal observations or experience: that they had observed that x out of y cases of this disease are hereditary in origin, or that a particular trait is often found to run in families. In discussions of heredity and otherwise, physicians were frequently cited as authorities in popular health books — in most cases without any explanation of who they were. This is either because it was assumed readers would know who they were, or because the designation of “Doctor” or “Professor” was enough to convey legitimacy to the fact or mechanism being explained. And at other times, authors referred to their own experience as physicians in explaining how they knew that certain diseases or traits are hereditary or knew certain facts about the nature of heredity transmission.

284 McGregor-Robertson, Household Physician, 106; Napheys, Transmission of Life, 83, 218-219; Gibson and Gibson, Social Purity, Introduction. 285 Napheys, Transmission of Life, 219; Gibson and Gibson, Social Purity, 27.

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The evidential basis upon which domestic medical manuals’ understanding of heredity was based extended beyond merely physicians and scientists, however. As we have seen already, manuals also relied heavily on the knowledge of breeders. In many cases, these references to the knowledge of breeders or fanciers was nonspecific: authors would explain some feature of heredity, such as the phenomenon of atavism or indirect inheritance, for example, and then assert that “breeders know this law well,” or that “stock raisers are careful with this.” In such cases, breeders were relied upon more as sources of authority than as sources of specific information about heredity; as they did with Darwin — and as Darwin did himself — authors were able to place the strength of a long tradition of breeding and agricultural practices behind their assertions about human heredity. Yet, in other cases, breeding knowledge was referred to more specifically to illustrate some feature of heredity.

George Napheys, for example, explained the differential role played by parents in transmitting qualities to offspring: that fathers tended to transmit the external features and muscular condition, while the size, temperament, and constitution was influenced by the mother. He illustrated this principle using the contrasting cases of the mule and the hinny:

the mule, which is the produce [sic] of the male ass and the mare, is essentially a modified ass, having the general configuration of its sire but the rounded trunk and larger size of its dam. On the other hand, the hinny, which is the offspring of the stallion and the she ass, is essentially a modified horse, having the general configuration of the horse, but being a much smaller animal than its sire, and therefore approaching the dam in size as well as in the comparative narrowness of its trunk.286

John Kellogg also drew on a variety of examples from animal breeding and natural history in his Ladies’ Guide to illustrate the heredity of both good and bad traits, from the behavioural

286 Napheys, Physical Life of Woman, 109.

139 tendencies of different dog breeds to the crooked legs of ancon sheep.287 Sylvanus Stall attributed much of the recent insight into the nature of heredity to the work of breeders: he cited specifically the work of Thomas Andrew Knight (1758-1836) — whom he cited as the founder of the science of horticulture — on improving fruits, vegetables, and domestic animals, and the “marvelous [sic] improvements in the new Leicester sheep” accomplished by Robert Bakewell (1725-1795) as crucial. Stall also referred to the work of those numerous unnamed breeders and horticulturalists who shaped wild boar into improved breeds of swine, wild roses into the beautiful flowers now seen in hot-houses, and the many varieties of poultry and pigeons as further illustrations of the extent to which our knowledge of heredity has emerged from these practices.288 He concluded his chapter on heredity with advice from the farmer: to raise a good crop, you need “good seed… good soil; and … good care.”289

Finally, manuals also referred to the knowledge and practices of breeders in a call to action, to impress upon readers the benefit that would come from giving as much attention and thought to human reproduction as breeders give to the mating of their stocks. Jefferis and

Nichols quoted Francis Galton optimistically on this subject in their Search Lights on Health:

“the time may hereafter arrive in far distant years, when the population of this earth shall be kept as strictly within bounds of number and suitability of race, as the sheep of a well- ordered moor, or the plants in an orchard-house.”290

287 Kellogg, Ladies’ Guide, 386-387. The story of ancon sheep were discussed both by Darwin as well as mentioned by breeders in their agricultural periodical. e.g. Can. Poultry Rev. 14.2 (1891), 18. 288 Stall, Young Husband, 271-273. 289 Stall, Young Husband, 275. 290 Jefferis and Nichols, Search Lights on Health, 235.

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Popular health manuals also relied on sources of knowledge about heredity additional to science, medicine, and breeding. Although these contexts were less influential than the former, many manuals also drew on examples from religion, history, and folklore to illustrate principles of hereditary transmission. In addition to the common allusion to the sins of the fathers being passed on to the third and fourth generations used as evidence of hereditary transmission, for example, many manuals also drew on passages from the Bible to explain or illustrate hereditary phenomena. Both the Chavasse’s Advice to a Wife and the Gibson’s

Social Purity referenced the same psalm to illustrate the fact that we are not all born equal due to our differential inheritances: “behold, I was shapen in wickedness, and in sin hath my mother conceived me!”291 In her manual for young women, Mary Wood-Allen explained that the law of heredity and the Gospel of heredity were described in the Bible, and encouraged readers to study these passages. Moreover, after her analysis of heredity, she appended a list of Bible texts bearing on the subjects of natural and divine heredity for readers to consider for themselves.292 Similarly, describing to young boys how and why children tend to resemble their parents, Sylvanus Stall explained that “God has not only ordained that every plant shall bear seed “after his kind,” but shall also transmit to its successors its own minor characteristics.”293

Other manuals drew on examples from history and folklore to illustrate the principles of hereditary transmission. One historical example, well known especially to scholars of eugenics is the case of the American family known as “the Jukes.” In the 1870s sociologist

291 Chavasse, Advice to a Wife, 3; Gibson and Gibson, Social Purity, 19. 292 Wood-Allen, Young Woman, 241-246. 293 Stall, Young Boy, 68.

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Richard Dugdale conducted a study of New York prisons and noticed that they were populated by many members of the same family. Giving them the pseudonym of “the Jukes,”

Dugdale traced their ancestry back to a few individuals and in 1877 published The Jukes: A

Study in Crime, Pauperism, Disease, and Heredity, which described the history of the family over several generations and highlighted the disproportionate number of them that were afflicted with disease and pauperism and overrepresented in asylums and prisons. While

Dugdale himself took the case of the Jukes as an example of the importance of environment and poverty in perpetuating the crime and disease that characterized their family, as early as

1883, many people took his study to be an example of the determinism of hereditary influences in the problems of crime and pauperism.294 This view was only further solidified in 1898 by the reading of David Starr Jordan — evolutionist and founding member of the eugenics organization, the Human Betterment Foundation — who interpreted the case of the

Jukes in explicitly hereditarian terms, and the family subsequently came to be used as a central example of the necessity of eugenic measures among supporters of the movement in the 20th century.295 The Jukes came up in discussions of heredity in manuals written by

Kellogg, Jefferis and Nichols, and Gibson and Gibson. In 1886, Kellogg used the family to illustrate the heredity of vice and crime, and in 1894, Jefferis and Nichols referred to the

Jukes while considering both the heredity of crime and mental deficiency, as well as the role of insane ancestry and sexual excess in perpetuating crime, disease and pauperism. In 1903,

Gibson and Gibson explained the story of the Jukes in order for readers to “judge for

294 Carlson, “Commentary,” 536. 295 Carlson, “Commentary,” 537.

142 themselves” whether it was ever right to prevent conception; based on the tone of the passage, it appears they believed it was — indeed this would be an effective way of conveying this position without being accused of explicitly supporting contraception or sterilization.296 Thus, it appears that Dugdale’s study was being interpreted in largely hereditarian terms as early as 1886 in popular medical advice manuals, in particular, those concerned with sexual hygiene and purity. Moreover, the tale of the Jukes had become well- known enough by this time to serve as an effective illustration of the principles of heredity that did not require too much explanation.

A second historical anecdote that also reappears in some of the same manuals involves the case of President James Garfield’s assassin, Charles Guiteau. As the story goes,

Guiteau came from a relatively good family, but his mother was overburdened with many young children in a short period of time. When she was pregnant with Charles, she attempted unsuccessfully to terminate the pregnancy, and as a result of her murderous intentions toward her unborn son, the child was born with these very same tendencies, along with a general lack of self-control and shame. These tendencies, it was claimed, ultimately led to his own murderous behaviour in 1881. This story was relayed and interpreted by Kellogg, Stall, and

Gibson and Gibson as evidence of the power of maternal impressions and the importance of proper prenatal culture.297 In addition to the above examples, many other curious folkloric anecdotes of uncertain origin were compiled by medical manuals to support claims about hereditary transmission, such as the story of a whaler who was injured by a whale, and whose

296 Kellogg, Ladies’ Guide, 389-390; Jefferis and Nichols, Search Lights on Health, 246-247; Gibson and Gibson, Social Purity, 28, 340-343. 297 Kellogg, Ladies’ Guide, 390-391; Stall, Young Husband, 277-278; Gibson and Gibson, Social Purity, 58.

143 daughter, born years later, had a “weak and sore place corresponding in location with that of the injury of her father.”298

In an interesting illustration of both the variety of evidential bases relied upon by popular health books, and of the borrowing that took place between them, George Beard in

1869 highlighted an eclectic variety of cases of hereditary transmission in a section on the laws of hereditary descent. As an example of the heredity of physical peculiarities, Beard described the curious case of Edward Lambert, or the “porcupine man,” whose skin resembled bark, and who was displayed before the Royal Society in 1731 at the age of fourteen. As an adult, Lambert had six children, each of whom had his same peculiar skin condition. Shortly after, Beard described the historical case of King Frederick of Prussia, who assembled an army of exceptionally tall men in Potsdam. It was later noticed that the offspring of these men were also unusually tall, and he took this to be an example of the heredity of physical strength and health.299 In 1871, George Napheys cited these same two examples as illustrations of heredity, adding a few more contextual details than Beard had included.300 Further evidence of Napheys’ borrowing from Beard is the fact that they both also referred within the same few pages to a certain Mr. Youatt — likely William Youatt, an

English veterinarian — whom they described as the eminent authority on animal diseases, to discuss the heredity of diseases in animals. In 1886, John Harvey Kellogg also referred to the case of Edward Lambert among a collection of interesting illustrations of heredity.301 Indeed,

298 Jefferis and Nichols, Search Lights on Health, 227. 299 Beard, Our Home Physician (1869), 383-385. 300 Napheys, Transmission of Life, 203-205. 301 Kellogg, Ladies’ Guide, 387.

144 it was not uncommon for manuals to refer to each other and to use some of the same material, both with and without attribution. Gibson and Gibson’s Social Purity, for example, drew heavily on the works of others, including Kellogg, Napheys, and Wood-Allen. George

Napheys was also referenced frequently in the works of Jefferis and Nichols and Stall, and

Napheys in turn, as we have seen, borrowed passages from the George Beard before him.

Much of this obvious borrowing and cross-referencing takes place between sexual hygiene and sex-specific manuals. Yet, whether this was because these manuals belonged to an emerging genre that was still relatively new, or because the genre was smaller and more clearly defined than general medical manuals, for example — or both — is unclear.

A final and interesting source by which domestic medical manuals conveyed knowledge about heredity was in encouraging readers to adopt their own research and observational practices. Emma Drake, for example, implored her young women readers to

“not stop in your research” until they knew the principles of hereditary transmission and how to give their unborn children the best inheritances possible.302 In 1878, George Napheys outlined to his readers the importance of keeping detailed family health records in an appendix to his Handbook of Popular Medicine. Their value could not be under-estimated, he asserted, and among their virtues, he pointed out that they could bring to light hereditary tendencies that might not otherwise have been noticed; “predispositions to certain ailments frequently lurk in individuals and families, unseen by all but the old family physician, whose knowledge of them cannot always be made available; these records will make them apparent

302 Drake, Young Wife, 149.

145 to every ordinary intelligence.”303 To facilitate the process for his readers, Napheys appended

15 pages of forms which the reader (by which he means the mother) could simply fill in, and offered practical advice for how to begin. Significantly, the first section of the register had to do with hereditary descent and it contained columns to record the health, tendencies to disease, and the age and cause of death, if deceased, of immediate ancestors and relations. He gave short codes to use when filling out this section. Under the column of health, the record- keeper was given the options of V.G. (very good), G. (good), etc, to F. (feeble) and I.

(confirmed invalid), and under the column devoted to “tendencies,” readers were presented with the following options: “tendency to brain disease (B.); to nervous afflictions (N.); to coughs, colds, and chest affections (C.); to rheumatism (R.)”304 Presumably, readers were also meant to include abbreviations for relevant conditions not listed here. Other charts in the family health record were dedicated to growth charts for weight and height, sight and hearing, ailments, accidents, and operations, and hygienic habits. The final section was an obituary to record cause, date, and age of death.305 Thus, both Drake and Napheys encouraged readers to take up the study of heredity themselves, whether that be of the general principles of heredity, or of the specific hereditary tendencies of their own families; both also assumed that it would benefit not only readers themselves, but the wider community as well.

Thus, as we have seen, domestic medical manuals relied on a wide range of sources of information on heredity, from academic science and medicine to the knowledge of

303 Napheys, Handbook Popular Medicine, 372. 304 Napheys, Handbook Popular Medicine, 374. 305 Napheys, Handbook Popular Medicine, 371-388.

146 breeders and horticulturalists, and the personal and professional experience of authors as physicians to curious anecdotes from history and folklore, and Bible texts. Manuals also encouraged readers to adopt the study of heredity themselves, emphasizing the importance therein for both personal and public health. Popular health books therefore represented importance sources of information for the average person about medical and biological science, and in particular, the nature of heredity and its relation to human health, biology, and society. Moreover, they exposed readers to a range of different ideas and ways of knowing about heredity.

2.5 Conclusion The home medical manual affords us a glimpse at the contours of popular thought about the nature of heredity in late 19th century Canada and North America for a certain group of Canadians, namely those people (largely women) who made use of domestic medical manuals as a resource for providing home health care to themselves, their friends, and families. Moreover, it represents an important medium by which these Canadians came to be exposed to ideas about heredity, as well as about biology and medicine more broadly.

Indeed, these manuals represented a rich site of discussion about the nature of heredity and its implications for individual and societal health and happiness, and further functioned as a source of practical living advice for the average person based on knowledge of heredity.

In the first place, heredity was considered in relation to the aetiology and causation of disease. Whether heredity constituted a “real” cause of disease, and the role of heredity in the origin of a variety of specific diseases was a common subject of discussion, and these questions were primarily addressed by general medical manuals. The ideas about heredity

147 considered by these manuals informed some of the practical advice manuals offered to readers — to live abstemiously if one knew of familial tendencies to gout, for example — and readers also learned how the facts of heredity affected how physicians themselves diagnosed and treated some diseases; hereditary diseases, for example, were often thought to be less amenable to a cure than acquired conditions. Moreover, within this context, heredity was frequently appealed to in considering difficult-to-explain diseases — those of uncertain origin, such as gout or consumption — which suggests that heredity was a concept significantly widespread and well-known to be a useful resource for making sense of the oftentimes confusing world of health and disease.

Readers were also exposed to ideas about heredity in the context of discussions about prenatal culture and marriage advice. In the case of the former, the malleability of heredity was emphasized. Readers were given advice for prenatal culture — to think happy thoughts and strengthen your weaknesses, for example — and general good living in the belief that these changes could not only counteract hereditary tendencies in readers themselves, but also be transmitted as positive inheritances to their children and grandchildren. Primarily a concern of sexual hygiene and sex-specific manuals, discussion of prenatal culture and lifestyle reforms reflected the belief that heredity represented a powerful force in our lives; yet one that could be altered through conscious action and decision. In this context, heredity, and its susceptibility to change, was presented to readers as a site of social reform which deserved our attention.

Heredity similarly represented a site of reform in the context of discussions about marriage within domestic medical manuals, albeit with a different emphasis. Here, instead of the malleability, the rigidity of heredity underlay the marriage advice manuals offered. While

148 considerations of prenatal culture were largely focused on the transmission of personality and character, marriage advice was mostly concerned with the transmission of disease. Readers were urged to avoid marrying into families with known histories of hereditary disease, and to avoid marriage themselves if so afflicted. Marriage of cousins was generally considered safe, as long as both parties were completely free of hereditary taints, yet this was acknowledged to be a rare situation. Instead, readers were encouraged to marry people dissimilar from them

— but of course, not too dissimilar: marriages between different nations of the same race were seen as beneficial, but between races as dangerous. Yet, all this advice was founded on the belief that decisions about marriage held far-reaching and perhaps irreversible hereditary consequences for one’s family and nation. Both general medical manuals as well as sex- specific and sexual hygiene manuals were preoccupied with marriage; yet general manuals were most interested in broader discussions — of such issues as who should not marry, and the admissibility of cousin-marriage — while specific advice, such as when to marry and how to choose a partner, was primarily offered by sexual hygiene manuals.

Finally, the connection between alcohol abuse and hereditary degeneration was made in manuals of all genres. Here, intemperance represented a practical means of addressing social problems at the level of the individual intemperate as well as the body politic through the mechanisms of heredity. Moreover, the relatively consistent interpretation of the problem of intemperance in hereditary terms suggests that heredity was an important frame for understanding both the biological and social implications of alcoholism at this time.

Heredity was thus a malleable concept, one that was applicable to various domains of human life and sociality. Different facets of heredity were highlighted and discussed by the different genres of manuals I examined: for some, heredity was primarily a site of concern

149 about our biology and bodies, while for others, it represented more of a point of access for the conscious management of our personalities and moral selves. In both cases, these foci reflected both readers’ and authors’ personal interests in individual or familial welfare, as well as broader concerns about the state of the body politic or the race. Perhaps because of this malleability, heredity represented a widely available, commonly used, and useful concept for making sense of the social and biological world.

As we have also seen, domestic medical manuals compiled information about heredity from a wide range of sources, including academic science, physicians and psychiatrists, breeders and breeding practices, history, religion, and folklore. Moreover, they encouraged readers to conduct their own research on heredity. This eclectic evidential basis has implications for recent work in the cultural history of heredity. As we have seen, the overarching narrative emerging from this body of literature emphasizes a process by which the study of heredity emerged in the 19th century only once the convergence of three domains of study — law/politics, medicine, and natural history/breeding/anthropology — made it possible to conceive of heredity as a natural object of inquiry. Yet, this literature does not significantly examine the popular interpretation and integration of these ideas about heredity in the late 19th century, nor in Canada. This study of domestic medical manuals — popular sources of information for the average person on medical and scientific information related to the body and reproduction — begins to address some of these questions. It appears that not only did a science of heredity emerge from the confluence of the domains of law/politics, medicine, and natural history/breeding/anthropology, as Müller-Wille and

Rheinberger have shown, but popular media considering the nature of heredity for consumption by the public also relied at least two of these contexts — that is, medicine and

150 natural history/breeding — in addition to drawing on the content of academic scientific research. Indeed, this study shows that popular understandings of heredity mediated through the domestic medical manual drew on a wide range of ways of knowing and forms of evidence; it was no one-way path from heredity science to the public. Additionally, neither was it a unidirectional influence from medicine/breeding/law to heredity science: many of the authors of popular health tracts were incorporating the results of recent scientific investigations on heredity into their medical knowledge and practices in turn. Thus, this study also suggests a continuing communication between the science of heredity and some of the contexts from which the study of heredity emerged.

Through the medium of the domestic medical manual, the average person came to be exposed to ideas about heredity as it related to medicine and human affairs derived from a range of sources. Rather than assuming that these popular ideas about heredity were inconsequential, the extent to which common themes and concerns emerged within the context of popular health tracts suggests that these ideas represented an important — and perhaps even widespread — set of beliefs. Moreover, they constituted a context in which continuing scientific research, breeding, and medical practices were situated and evolved.

This study therefore complicates our understanding of the travel of scientific ideas through society by showing the multidirectional ways that knowledge about heredity moved between different social domains — and indeed, even blurs the distinction between “cultural” and

“scientific” concepts such as heredity. Domestic medical manuals therefore served as a medium of communication between “science” and “medicine” and the lay person. Yet, rather than acting as a straightforward conduit that passed information directly from scientists to society, or that introduced certain biases or simplifications along this linear trajectory, these

151 manuals instead served as more dynamic nodes in what is perhaps better characterized as a complex network of exchange between different ways of knowing about the world. Through the medium of the domestic medical manual, Canadians were encouraged to think about their bodies and the body politic at least in part through such notions of heredity.

Chapter 3 — Heredity and Morality: the Canadian WCTU and Social Reform

3.1 Introduction “The laws of heredity are the laws of God, and cannot be violated with impunity, nor regarded without the most blessed results, and ought not the mothers of our land to inform themselves with regard to them?”306 With these words, Mrs. Adelia Lucas, superintendent of the Department of Hygiene and Heredity of the Ontario Woman’s Christian Temperance

Union (WCTU), implored members to consider the importance of heredity to the work of their temperance organization. The women to whom Lucas was appealing in 1890 had joined together in 1877 as the Ontario WCTU — and merged with other provincial unions to form the Canadian Dominion Union in 1883 — to fight the evils of alcoholism, although their work was never strictly confined to anti-alcohol campaigning. The WCTU in Canada engaged in a wide variety of social projects at the local, provincial, and national levels, ranging from mandatory scientific temperance instruction in schools and Sabbath observance to women’s franchise and dress reform. Remarkably, between the 1880’s and the 1910’s, many of these unions had departments dedicated specifically to the study and care of heredity. The history of the WCTU in Canada and the United States has been documented

306 “Report of the Annual Meeting of the Ontario WCTU, 1890” (hereafter RAM [year]), p. 76, Ontario Provincial Union Papers.

152 153 extensively.307 Still, one feature of their project remains relatively unexplored, with one exception — the WCTU’s interest in heredity as an aspect of their program of social reform.308

A few historians have discussed the Canadian WCTU’s departments of heredity, typically in relation to eugenics. Mariana Valverde and Sharon Cook both have suggested that the Ontario Department of Hygiene and Heredity was responsible for teaching the principles of eugenics. This chapter reveals, however, that an interest in heredity did not necessarily equate an interest in eugenics in the case of the Ontario WCTU. Thus, while

Valverde and Cook have provided excellent analyses of the WCTU in Canada, they have not examined the details of the organization’s ideas about heredity. Wendy Mitchinson has similarly skipped over the particulars of their ideas, arguing that the Department of Hygiene and Heredity was meant to disseminate knowledge about the heredity of intemperance. She points out, however, that this hereditary nature posed a problem for the WCTU, for if it was truly “inherited,” there was little that their education program could do about it. Yet,

Mitchinson conflates two meanings of heredity: the first refers to the transmission of acquired traits (e.g. that impure living is passed on as degeneracy of some sort to offspring), while the second presupposes a strictly hereditarian view (e.g. that intemperance is innate

307 On the history of the WCTU in Canada, see Cook, Sunshine and Shadow; Valverde, Light, Soap, and Water; and Mitchinson, “The WCTU,” for example. On the WCTU in the United States, see Bordin, Woman and Temperance; Blocker, Cycles of Reform; and Fletcher, Gender and Temperance, for example. On the role of heredity in the Ontario and American National WCTU, see Bedford, “Heredity as Ideology.” 308 The contents of much of this chapter have been published as an article and are used here with permission by the Canadian Bulletin of Medical History / Bulletin canadien d’histoire de la médicine (CBMH/BCHM). Bedford, “Heredity as Ideology.”

154 and transmitted to offspring directly and necessarily).309 Thus, Mitchinson, Valverde, and

Cook’s analyses of the WCTU in Canada comment on, but do not engage explicitly with the

WCTU’s theories about the nature of heredity. Yet, it is the assertion of this chapter that such an examination is illuminating not only of the history of the WCTU, but also of the history of heredity and of the circulation and even production of scientific knowledge.

As my study of domestic medical manuals and breeder’s magazines has shown, heredity was already an important cultural concept by the turn of the 20th century. Indeed, as

Lucas’ statement — and the very existence of these Departments of Heredity — makes clear, the WCTU was not immune to its allure. Yet, what forms did heredity assume in the minds of these Canadian women reformers? This chapter focuses on the role of heredity within the

Ontario Provincial WCTU between the 1880s, when the first departments dedicated to heredity were established in Canadian and American unions, and 1910, by which point the interest in heredity of WCTU had noticeably diminished.310 Of all the departments of heredity in the Canadian WCTU, the Ontario union was the most outspoken about the importance of heredity to their organization. For this reason, it is the primary focus of my investigation. More specifically, I ask: how did the Ontario WCTU understand the nature of heredity, how did this relate to their particular program for social reform, and what sources influenced the development of these ideas? To this aim, I examined not only the annual reports submitted by the Department of Hygiene and Heredity of the Ontario WCTU to their annual conventions, but also the annual reports of the Dominion Department of Health and

309 Mitchinson, “The WCTU”, p. 163; Valverde, Light, Soap, and Water, p. 58-60; Cook, Sunshine and Shadow, p. 48-49. 310 The Department of Hygiene and Heredity was organized within the Ontario WCTU in 1886.

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Heredity, and reports submitted by various county and local unions in Ontario. Thus, this investigation necessarily takes me beyond the boundaries of the Ontario Union. Moreover, in investigating the written materials being read and recommended by these departments, I was led to many American-authored works, including, among others, the Journal of Heredity, published by the Department of Heredity of the American National WCTU between 1885-

1889.311 Because of the interesting contrast the contents of this journal reveal between the ideas about heredity propagated by the Ontario and the American WCTUs, this chapter will also explore the Journal of Heredity — and by extension, some of the activities and ideas of their American patrons — in detail.

This chapter consists of four parts. In the first, I review the history of the WCTU in

Canada, including the origins of the department of Hygiene and Heredity. I then consider in detail the ideas of the Ontario WCTU about heredity, and show how their particular notion of heredity correlated with their program for the reform of Canadian society. The third part of this chapter examines the contrasting ideas of the American National WCTU. Here, I explore in more detail the contents of the Journal of Heredity — a fascinating source unexamined by historians of heredity or of the WCTU — and highlight the very different notion of heredity developed within the context of the American National WCTU. For the Ontario WCTU, heredity was conceptualized as a God-given law with a very specific moral and religious

(evangelical) meaning — as the lawful transmission of simultaneously physical and moral constitutions. In contrast, for the American WCTU, heredity was understood to be a

311 I will refer to the American National WCTU interchangeably as the American WCTU and the National WCTU.

156 conservative force that established ties between the present generation and its ancestors, whose exact nature and strength remained largely ambiguous and open for interpretation.

Thus, by illustrating how an array of ideas about heredity were disseminated, discussed, and translated into practical advice in different ways by two groups of actors, this study accords with the work of Jon Turney, Nancy Tomes, James Secord, and others who have asserted that there is no single “public understanding of science” — but that science instead takes many forms in the lives of different groups of individuals.312 In the final section of this chapter, I explore the various sources and forms of knowledge from which the WCTU drew when articulating their ideas about heredity. Here, I consider the role of the WCTU as an active mediator of information about heredity. The WCTU in Canada drew on an eclectic variety of sources of information about heredity — one largely shared with their American sisters — yet, the two organizations did not espouse identical ideas about heredity. In the process, this chapter also illustrates the importance of a lay organization, such as the WCTU, in the circulation, and even production, of scientific knowledge in late 19th century Canada. The

WCTU at this time represented an important and dynamic means through which women reformers — and by extension, their families and the communities in which they were active

— were exposed to ideas about heredity. Through the WCTU, these individuals were impelled to consider the relation of heredity to the moral and spiritual uplift of both the body and the body politic.

312 Turney, Frankenstein’s Footsteps; Tomes, Gospels of the Germ; Secord, Victorian Sensation.

157

3.2 History of the WCTU in Canada The history of the WCTU begins in the United States. The National American WCTU was founded in the fall of 1874, in part motivated by the recent successes of the Woman’s

Crusades of 1873-1874. Many of the same women who had marched into saloons, pleading to patrons to stop drinking and demanding barkeepers to arrest the sale of alcohol during the

Crusades had gathered in Lake Chautauqua, New York, for a Sabbath School Convention in

August 1874. There, “conscious of having received a mighty power, a special baptism at the hands of God, for a special work,”313 it occurred to some of these participants that they should unite in their struggle for temperance. A newly created Committee of Organization, composed of representatives from across the country, sent out a call for a national meeting to be held in Cleveland, Ohio in two month’s time. During November 18th-20th of 1874, delegates from seventeen states inaugurated a new national woman’s temperance organization, with former Civil War Sanitary Commission worker and founder of the

Methodist Home Missionary Society, Annie Wittenmeyer, as president, and educator Frances

Willard as corresponding secretary.314 A plan of work and set of resolutions were adopted, emphasizing the organization’s commitment to the principle of total abstinence. After the national inauguration, representatives began to set up state- and local-level organizations.315

Membership of the WCTU was open exclusively to women, and although men were occasionally asked to participate as guests or contribute financially as honorary members,

313 Chisholm, Why and How, p. 12. 314 Chisholm, Why and How, p. 12; Bordin, Woman and Temperance, p. 34-39; Gordon, Women Torch Bearers, p. 13; Stevenson, A Brief History, p. 94. 315 Stevenson, Brief History, p. 19-20.

158 they were neither allowed to vote nor to hold office.316 As with the temperance movement more broadly (with the exception of the all-female membership), the WCTU was largely composed of middle-class, native-born women, who were also typically members of an evangelical Protestant church.317

Present at both the Sabbath School Convention at which the idea for a national temperance association had been conceived, as well as at the National WCTU’s inaugural convention, was school teacher Letitia Youmans (1827-1896) of Picton, Ontario. A long-time advocate of temperance, and inspired by the events she witnessed in the United States,

Youmans wasted no time organizing a local union in her hometown in December of 1874 — the first such organization in Canada. In 1877, the Ontario Provincial Union was formed with the convening of a number of local branches that had since been established throughout the province, and in 1883, a Dominion Union was organized. Youmans, as recognized leader of the Canadian WCTU, was elected president to both of these organizations in succession.318

The organization’s practical work was channeled through a series of “Departments of Work,” which were overseen by an elected superintendent at each level of the organization.

Departments adopted at one level or by any particular union were not necessarily adopted by all; instead, they were created in accordance with the interests of the members, and provide a good indication of the breadth of the WCTU’s interests. They represented such varied interests as “Social Purity”, “Scientific Temperance Instruction,” “Work Among

Lumbermen,” “Prisons and Police,” “Unfermented Wine,” and “Health and Heredity,”

316 Bordin, Woman and Temperance, p. 36-37. 317 Blocker, Cycles of Reform, p. 81. 318 McKee, Jubilee History, p. 8-10; Cook, Sunshine and Shadow, p. 7.

159 among many others. Departments fell into one of six classes — preventative, educational, evangelistic, social, legislative, and organization — according to the methods of their work and nature of their objectives.319 The WCTU in Canada pursued their goal of the extermination of intemperance by campaigning directly for prohibition by political means, for example, through the Department of Legislation, Franchise and Petitions. In fact, they became one of the most vocal supporters of women’s franchise in Canada, believing women’s voice to be necessary to pass prohibition legislation. The Ontario WCTU also followed a program of social reform and educational campaigning that aimed to create a thoroughly temperate society by altering individual attitudes and behaviours in a range of areas not limited to the consumption of alcohol. The work of the various departments of heredity in Canada fell under this strategy.

3.2.1 Departments of Heredity A department devoted to the “Study of Heredity Tendencies” was first recommended at the 8th annual convention of the American National WCTU in Washington, D.C., 1881.

The following year, Dr. Mary Weeks Burnett took over as national superintendent of the department reduced to simply “Heredity”, and Mrs. E.E. Kellogg, wife of Dr. John Harvey

Kellogg, took over as the superintendent of the Department of Hygiene. Both Heredity and

Hygiene were classed under the “preventative” category of departments. Their historical

319 Gordon, Women Torch Bearers, p. 30.

160 trajectories in the American WCTU during the late 19th century were intertwined, as they were variously combined and separated until Heredity was finally dropped in 1913.320

As early as 1884, three years after a department devoted to heredity was first recommended in the United States, the Quebec provincial union reported on the activities of their Department of Heredity and Hygiene from the previous year. Superintendent Adelia

Lucas reported the distribution of literature as the department’s main activity that year.

Although she strongly asserted the importance of this department and of studying the great laws of Heredity, she explained that the department’s activities were regretfully preliminary because several months had passed before its work was properly defined.321 This comment suggests that the Quebec Department of Heredity and Hygiene was relatively new at the time. That this is the case is further suggested by her strong exhortations about the importance of heredity to the WCTU in the reports of this and the next couple of years, which subsided as the department became increasingly active and popular in the province.

Two years later, in 1886, a department of Hygiene and Heredity was established in the Ontario WCTU. Provincial superintendent Mrs. Dr. Anderson concluded her report at the annual convention of that year by asserting that “by the addition of the department of hygiene and heredity to the W.C.T. Union, this society wish[es] to aid in the reform which has hitherto advanced so slowly… I hope every one present will make an effort to get the young

320 Stevenson, Brief History, p. 37. 321 Report of the Annual Meeting of the Quebec Union, 1884, (hereafter RAQ [year]), p. 45-46. Provincial Unions Papers.

161 ladies interested with us in this department of work.”322 She further added that circulars on hygiene and heredity had been sent to all the local Unions.

I was unable to find records of the Dominion union prior to 1890, but the report of the

1890 annual convention indicates an active Department of Heredity and Hygiene at this time, with Adelia Lucas as national superintendent.323 At this time, Lucas was also superintendent of the departments of Heredity and Hygiene of the Toronto District union, as well as the

Ontario and Quebec provincial unions. As a department of Heredity and Hygiene was already established in Quebec the year that the Dominion union was formed, it is likely that it had been with the national union from its inception as well. By 1900, departments of Heredity and Health had also been formed in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island,

Manitoba, British Columbia, and the North West Territories, displaying varying amounts of activity and enthusiasm for the subject. A leaflet circulated among local unions indicates that departments of heredity had been organized abroad, in England, Germany, and Russia as well.324

The national Department of Heredity and Hygiene continued well into the 20th century, with a few name changes along the way. After 1890, it was changed to Heredity and

Health, and in 1895, it was recommended that its name be modified to Health and Heredity, to reflect the more immediate importance of health to the union’s work. Superintendent

Maria Craig (who also went by S.J. Craig) explained that “while working for and teaching

322 RAM (1886), p. 63. 323 Report of the Annual Meeting of the Dominion WCTU, 1890, (hereafter RAD [year]), p. 66-70. Canadian Union Papers. 324 Craig, “Health and Heredity,” p. 2.

162 the laws of Heredity, still the problem of Health seems of vital importance to the life that now is, as well as laying the true basis for a good Heredity for future generations. Therefore we believe it should be given pre-eminence.”325 In the provincial and local unions, departments of heredity largely adopted similar names, although with regional variations that likely reflected the interests of the different unions. The Ontario union in particular went through a series of mergers with, and separations from, other related departments, including

Social Purity, Physical Culture, White Shield, Domestic Science, Mothers’ Meetings, and

Medical Temperance. These associations are revealing of the types of activities thought to be related to hygiene and heredity. Domestic science, physical culture and social purity work were aimed at encouraging healthier maintenance of the home, body, and soul, respectively.

The White Cross and the White Shield were independent temperance societies for young men and women, whose (largely American and British) literature was read at WCTU youth meetings, while the department of Mothers’ Meetings aimed to educate WCTU mothers on topics relating to child-rearing and home-keeping.326 Finally, Medical Temperance took up the issue of alcohol in prescriptions and medical preparations.327 Thus, the subjects included over time with hygiene and heredity in Ontario were one of two types: those concerned with maintaining physical and moral strength (Physical Culture, Domestic Science, Social Purity,

Medical Temperance), and those aimed at educating youth and mothers about the importance

325 RAD (1893), p. 63. 326 Cook, Sunshine and Shadow, p. 55, 95. 327 e.g. see Allen, Alcohol.

163 of this maintenance (White Shield, Mothers’ Meetings). Other unions also combined variously with these departments, but none with the same frequency as the Ontario union.328

The January 1891 issue of the Canadian WCTU’s national publication and educational mouthpiece, The Woman’s Journal (which in 1904 became the Canadian White

Ribbon Tidings), classified the Department of Hygiene and Heredity as preventative and indicated that its methods were primarily educational.329 Indeed, much of the actual activity of the departments of heredity in Canada consisted of standard set of educational activities: the distribution of literature — in the form of leaflets, brochures, circulars, journals, and the occasional manuscript — the reading of essays, and the holding of public lectures and dedicated discussions at mother’s and parlour meetings. In several years, departments also reported the “memorializing” of physicians, by which they appear to have meant lecturing physicians about the dangers of prescribing alcoholic medications, although physicians themselves were also asked to give various lectures to members on subjects related to health and heredity.

These were largely the activities that characterized the Ontario department of

Hygiene and Heredity as well. However, in 1891-1892, the department involved itself in the practical problem of the sanitary working conditions of female workers in mercantile establishments by drafting an Amendment to the Factory Act. Of particular concern was the securing of proper seating arrangements and separate washroom facilities for women

328 Because of these frequent name changes, I will speak of “departments of heredity” when referring in general to departments related to heredity at any level of the WCTU in Canada, and I will use the specific department name when referring to that of a particular union (such as the Ontario Department of Hygiene and Heredity, or the Dominion Department of Health and Heredity). 329 Woman’s Journal, January 1891, supplement.

164 workers, for the sake of their health and morality.330 The following year, the department also took up the issue of dress reform. In this regard, superintendent Dr. Davis corresponded with the American physician, Dr. John H. Kellogg, who donated 1,000 copies of his 1891 pamphlet, The Influence of Dress in Producing the Physical Decadence of American

Women.331 Davis’ own pamphlet on the subject, Woman’s Dress, was also circulated nationally along with Kellogg’s.332 The departments of heredity in Ontario and the rest of

Canada, then, were associated with a varied range of activities and interests, some of which seem, on the surface, to be more related to questions of hygiene or health than of heredity.

Yet, reports from the various superintendents of the department reveal a continuing emphasis on the theme of heredity — one that tied these seemingly disparate sets of activities into a coherent program of reform.

3.3 Ontario WCTU’s Conception of Heredity According to the annual reports of the Dominion WCTU, the most active provincial departments of heredity were those of Ontario and Quebec. Quebec had the most extensive system of departments of heredity, with about half of the departments of heredity in Canada residing in the province by 1892.333 Moreover, Maria Craig was superintendent of the

Quebec Department of Health and Heredity between 1890-1902, as well as superintendent of

330 RAM (1892), 62-64. 331 RAM (1894), p. 62-63; Kellogg, The Influence of Dress. 332 RAD (1894), p. 61-62. 333 RAD (1892), p. 77.

165 the Dominion Department of Health and Heredity between 1892-1902. Yet, it was the

Ontario Union that was ultimately the most engaged and outspoken about the importance of heredity to the work of the WCTU. That this is the case can be seen in the reports submitted by the Department of Hygiene and Heredity to the union’s annual conventions. These reports reveal a sustained and, importantly, coherent discussion about the importance of heredity to the work of the WCTU in Canada — one that was not evident in the reports submitted by the

Departments of Health and Heredity to the Dominion or Quebec unions. Indeed, the centrality of heredity to the Ontario union is reflected in the fact that the subject was taken up in the president’s address to the annual convention of 1887, which, due to constraints of time, focused only on issues thought to be of particular relevance to the organization. President of the Ontario WCTU Addie Chrisholm, offered the following compelling justification for the department of Hygiene and Heredity:

If it be true that we are what we are to-day because our fathers and mothers were what they were in their day and generation, if from father and mother, to son and daughter, descend not only the form and feature but mental, moral and physical traits, how important it is that this law of heredity be turned in the right direction, and that men and women shall be taught, that, in this sense, none liveth to himself, and shall be shown how to make the best of themselves for those who may come after them.334

Further emphasizing the significance of the department, she added, “something has been done in the department of hygiene and heredity, but not all that its importance demands.”335

For this reason, in what follows, I examine in particular the ideas of the Ontario Department of Hygiene and Heredity about alcoholism, heredity, and social reform, revealing in the

334 RAM (1887), p. 35. Emphasis mine. 335 RAM (1887), p. 35.

166 process how the Ontario WCTU’s particular understanding of heredity was intimately tied to their specific visions and strategies for the reform of Canadian society.

3.3.1 Alcoholism and Heredity There were believed to be a variety of potential causes of alcoholism. The President of the Ontario WCTU made this clear in her 1887 annual address when she asserted that “the highway of drunkenness is reached by many cross roads and paths and one of the broadest of these is entered through the gate of physical transgression.”336 Not only physical transgression, but also over-work, over-eating, improper clothing, improper diet, or “neglect or abuse of hygienic laws” — all were cautioned as potential causes of alcoholism.337

Moreover, the obverse to these perils held true as well: a strong, healthy body was thought to be an important preventative to intemperance. In other words, “the well man or woman stands a better chance… It is the broken-down nervous system that craves stimulants.”338

Heredity fit into this picture of the aetiology of alcoholism with the idea of degeneration. The WCTU believed that the abuse of alcohol caused physical deterioration, which could in turn be transmitted to future generations. The WCTU therefore espoused a neo-Lamarckian view of the inheritance of acquired characteristics, both physical and moral.

However, alcohol-induced deterioration was not thought to be necessarily passed on directly, as dipsomania or alcoholism. Rather, it could take the form of any number of degenerate traits among descendants, such as mania, idiocy, and hallucinations. The 1890 department

336 RAM (1887), p. 35. 337 RAM (1886), p. 62; RAM (1887), p. 35. 338 RAM (1897), p. 91.

167 superintendent warned, “it is not necessary that children should inherit the actual alcoholic tendencies of the parents in order to show a type of progressive degradations. They may either inherit the original vice or some of its countless transformations.”339 Moreover, the opposite could happen as well: “insanity in parents may become alcoholism in descendants.”340

Alcoholism as both a cause and a consequence of hereditary degeneracy was a focal point for the WCTU and their Department of Hygiene and Heredity. That alcoholism (both acquired and inherited) was believed to be hereditary is further reflected in anecdotes from the Woman’s Journal. In 1886, the Journal told the story of Charlie Selwyn and why he signed the pledge of temperance, a significant symbolic gesture to commit oneself to life- long abstinence that involved signing a piece of paper, but which was regarded very much like a moment of religious conversion among members of the WCTU. Upon the approach of his twenty-first birthday, Charlie’s guardian, Uncle Robert, urged him to sign a temperance pledge. When asked why, Charlie was relayed a series of tragic stories in which various people close to Uncle Robert — his childhood friend, sister, and only love — were ultimately consumed by an alcoholic habit. One of these individuals, Robert’s friend, was a “smart man”, who, after his gradual demise brought on by what began as indulging in a single glass of wine a day, was able to leave for his two sons nothing save for his diseased appetite. The eldest, it appeared, was hastening toward his father’s fate.341 These moral tales were meant to instil a sense of fear in the reader, to frighten them into abstinence; the message was that

339 RAM (1890), p. 77. Emphasis mine. 340 RAM (1890), p. 77. 341 “Charlie Selwyn,” p. 1.

168 alcohol would destroy not only their own health and happiness, but also that of their friends, family, and descendants. A local union reported with approval in 1907 that during a discussion on the heredity of drunkenness, “one girl who did not believe in Heredity admitted that her father drank 12 years and two of his sons are going the same way.”342

Thus, alcoholism was hereditary; yet, all was not lost. The WCTU believed that alcoholism, whether inherited or acquired, could be overcome. The department maintained in

1893 that “more and more, good physical conditions are being recognized as essential to the successful pursuit of temperance and good morals.”343 With these claims, the role of the

WCTU, and especially the department of Hygiene and Heredity was made clear: to keep the body and mind healthy so that it could successfully ward off the temptations of alcohol.

Heredity was not necessarily destiny. In many respects, the WCTU revealed a strong belief that heredity could be transcended, and that it was not “a tyrant from which there is no escape.”344 Through proper eating, comportment, and dress, one could “in great measure, overcome and rise above the mischief done by heredity.”345 It is perhaps in this sense of lifestyle reform that Chisholm thought the “law of heredity” could be “turned in the right direction.”346

The view that proper living could improve the quality of future generations was not unique to the WCTU — this practice of better living in the name of racial advancement sometimes went by the name of euthenics, and was a popular subject of discussion among the

342 RAM (1907), p. 159. 343 RAM (1893), p. 102. 344 RAM (1890), p. 77. This quote was from a recent Report of the Prison Commission reviewed in the Toronto Globe. 345 RAM (1886), p. 62. 346 RAM (1887), p. 35.

169 participants of the 1914 National Congress on Race Betterment.347 But what was proper living? And how exactly did it relate to heredity? There was a further dimension to the

Ontario WCTU’s notion of inheritance, beyond Lamarck and euthenics, that made it noteworthy, and which points towards a solution to these questions: for the WCTU, heredity held a specific religious meaning.

3.3.2 Heredity as a Religious Concept The WCTU annual reports depicted the fight against inebriety as a religious battle.

For an evangelical Christian organization (with a predominantly Methodist membership, although officially non-denominational), such use of religious metaphors is unsurprising. The

Promised Land towards which the women steadily trudged was “the land of pure lives, healthy bodies, and lofty ideals.”348 Drunkenness was an ancestral sin that had been revisited upon children and grandchildren, and that would continue to cause destruction unless some force intervened. However, what is noteworthy is that their vision of this crusade was formulated in the terms of hygiene and heredity.349 They warned, “one born in an ancestral line, in an hereditary line, where the influences have been bad, and there has been a coming down over a moral declivity, unless such one has supernatural aid afforded him, he will go down under the overmastering gravitation.”350 Alcohol was perhaps the original vice, but

347 Representatives from American branches of the WCTU were in attendance at this conference. 348 RAM (1898), p. 93. 349 The centrality of evangelicalism to the Ontario WCTU has been analyzed by Cook, Sunshine and Shadow. 350 e.g. RAM (1886), p. 62.

170 poor habits have continued the propagation of this sin.351 Superintendent Adelia Lucas expressed this view with clarity in 1896:

It is impossible to conceive of the grandeur and purity of man, as he came forth from the hand of his Creator; but that glory has passed away, dwarfed and deformed by sin and disease, he has become a moral and physical wreck. The laws of God concerning life, health, and purity have been violated, and the sins of the fathers have been visited upon the children.352

We can see from this passage and others not only an anxiety about the state of humanity, but also a conflation of health and goodness, and disease and sin — that is, an overlaying of concepts of health and heredity onto established religious tenets. Heredity functioned as the mechanism by which these simultaneously physiological and religious states of purity or degeneration were thought to be transmitted. But how was this hereditary taint to be overcome? How did the WCTU view their own role in rectifying this historical process of degeneration? The answer to these questions can be found in their preoccupation with laws.

Proper living, as we have already seen, was thought to be crucial. For the Ontario WCTU, proper living meant respecting and living according to laws.

A striking feature of the annual reports of the Department of Hygiene and Heredity is the frequency with which they referred to laws: laws of hygiene, of heredity, of living, and importantly, of God. In introducing the subject in the department’s first report, superintendent Anderson described heredity as “a law of terrible, yet mysterious force.”353

The ill physical and moral effects of living in defiance of the known laws of hygiene were frequently stressed in annual reports (especially when defending the importance of this

351 RAM (1890), p. 77. 352 RAM (1896), p. 85. Emphasis mine. 353 RAM (1886), p. 62.

171 particular department). Furthermore, it was also emphasized that living in accordance with these laws would reduce incidence of disease and suffering. It is through this emphasis on lawful living that the Ontario WCTU’s methodological vision for societal rejuvenation and reform becomes clear, as does their coupling of hygiene with heredity.

Moreover, laws also represented a key point of conjunction between the religious and scientific dimensions of their program. Living according to hygienic laws was understood to restore the health of the individual. In other words, “by a thorough knowledge of hygiene, which comprises a knowledge of instituting such a mode of living as is best calculated to preserve health, we may in a great measure overcome and rise above the mischief done by heredity.”354 This notion, combined with their dualistic categories of health/morality and disease/sin, explains the diverse activities subsumed under the banner of hygiene and heredity. Thus, it was towards hygiene, as “mode of living best calculated to preserve” their health/morality duality, that many of the Department’s activities, interests, and suggested readings were directed. Members were urged to consider the subject of dress reform so as to prevent and reverse physical degeneration caused by overly constrictive fashions. E.E.

Kellogg’s book on scientific cookery, whose culinary domestic science was published with the aim of averting the desires for strong drink that were thought to result from improperly cooked foods or poor nutrition, was also recommended reading to members.355 Significantly, both of these issues — dress and food reform — also placed great agency in the hands of women in the process of social rejuvenation. The Department of Hygiene and Heredity

354 RAM (1886), p. 62. 355 Kellogg, Science in the Kitchen.

172 subsumed measures to preserve moral well-being under the banner of hygiene. The practice of hygiene thus meant living in accordance with known laws that would ensure the maintenance of healthy bodies, minds, and souls. The observance of hygienic laws — by members, their families, and ideally, of all of Canadian society — was the goal of much of the work of the Department of Hygiene and Heredity.

Hygienic “law” in the above sense functioned as an imperative, and consisted of various ideas about how to live. But since the laws of heredity (now, as laws of nature) functioned necessarily, the improved health that resulted from living according to principles of hygiene would also be transmitted to coming generations, provided they continued to live according to them. Moreover, to live hygienically was also to live by God — a tenet that was reflected in the tendency of the WCTU’s annual reports and the Woman’s Journal to portray salvation from drunkenness and hereditary degeneration as a simultaneous religious conversion and personal salvation.

For the WCTU, reform was therefore to be effected ultimately through the individual, as each person aligned themselves with religion and the laws of God. The rejuvenation of society necessarily followed — not immediately, but over time. However, people needed help. Some had to be taught the laws according to which they should live, others needed to be guided in the right direction. This was the role of the Ontario WCTU — a role that was grounded not only in evangelicalism, but also in an ideology of heredity. When considered in this light, the varied activities of the Department of Hygiene and Heredity make sense: the maintenance of physical, moral, and spiritual well-being, and education on the proper way to achieve this maintenance. As the department’s first superintendent, Adelia Lucas, put it in

1886: “the laws of Heredity are the laws of God, and cannot be violated with impunity, nor

173 regarded without the most blessed results, and ought not the mothers of our land to inform themselves with regard to them?”356

3.4 The National (American) WCTU For the Ontario WCTU’s southern sisters, the American National WCTU, heredity similarly grounded its program for reform, yet, as we will see, in a very different way. The history of the American WCTU is similar in many ways to that of the Canadian union. Under the guidance of the organization’s first president, Annie Wittenmeyer, between 1874-1878, the American national WCTU was more focused on the single issue of temperance, making use of educative and evangelical, rather than political methods. However, Frances Willard’s election to presidency in 1879 brought a new set of objectives and methods to the organization, over which she presided until her death in 1898. Willard’s “Do Everything” policy came to characterize the work of the National WCTU, as she expanded the organization’s purview to cover a wide range of issues beyond temperance, such as woman’s suffrage, impure literature, and the working conditions of women and children, among others.357 Believing the causes of intemperance to be multiple and scattered throughout the body politic, and likening the role of the social reformer to a surgeon “dissecting out the alcohol nerve,”358 her advice for reformers was to engage in a wide range of social activism.

The structure of the American WCTU supported this broad strategy of reform. Local unions were autonomous in choosing their own projects, and while recommendations for action

356 RAM (1890), p. 76. 357 Cook, Sunshine and Shadow, p. 31-33. 358 Willard, Do Everything, p. 4-5.

174 would be issued from above at the national conventions, local chapters were not compelled to engage in any specific activities, aside from maintaining a commitment to total abstinence.359

This eclecticism not only made the WCTU appealing to a wide variety of women, but it also provided a buffer for potential programmatic conflicts arising from ideological differences among local unions.360 Moreover, Willard encouraged the use of a variety of methods, including political techniques, which led her to promote woman’s suffrage as among one of the prominent objectives of the WCTU. Like the WCTU in Canada, for which it served as inspiration, the organization’s practical work was channelled through a series of

“Departments of Work,” including a department devoted to the study of heredity.

3.4.1 Department of Heredity The American union’s Department of Heredity, established in 1882, engaged in a wide variety of activities. From the beginning of her tenure as its national superintendent, Dr.

Mary Weeks Burnett placed a strong emphasis on education. Annual reports indicate that much of the actual activity of the local and state unions consisted of educational initiatives — indeed, this represented an important aspect of many of the WCTU’s departments in both

Canada and the United States. Superintendents reported with satisfaction at annual conferences the number of mothers’ meetings and parlour meetings — both semi-regular gatherings in which members discussed various subjects — at which heredity was the subject of consideration. Moreover, local and state superintendents were active in distributing

359 Bordin, Woman and Temperance, p. 95-97. 360 Fletcher, Gender, p. 110-112.

175 literature and pamphlets on the subjects to interested members, as well as in arranging public lectures and sermons on the subject of heredity. The importance of these educational efforts is illustrated by the fact that Burnett established and edited a scientific journal of heredity, the

Journal of Heredity: A Popular Scientific Quarterly (1885-1889).361 Published in Chicago,

IL., the Journal went through four volumes, each with four issues. Contributors were sought from a variety of disciplines and contexts. There were articles from anthropologists, asylum psychiatrists, educators, eugenicists, historians, physicians, sociologists, and temperance activists, among others. These contributors addressed a range of topics, from the development of teeth to the heredity of alcoholism.

In addition to educational efforts, the department made a range of specific calls for reform and recommendations for action. Importantly, these indicate a change in their interests over time. For example, in 1886 and again in 1888, Burnett made a call to members to urge “all Charity Boards, State Boards of Health, Medical and Legal Societies… to secure legislation against the propagation of the criminal and vagrant classes by such measures as may be considered most wise and prudent.”362 In 1892, superintendent Armstrong appealed to members: “let us press onward in our work for a purer humanity until the same knowledge of heredity and care of environment can be applied to the human family that is at present given to the raising of stock. It should be the duty of a government to foster and protect and encourage all agencies that tend to the full development of her people, and to suppress those

361 Journal of Heredity (Chicago: Journal of Heredity Publishing Co., 1885-1889). 362 Burnett, “Report of the Superintendent 1886,” p. 92; Burnett, “Heredity Departmental Report,” p. 47.

176 agencies that deteriorate the same.”363 Yet, only six years later, superintendent Dr. Purington, who in 1895 assumed the role of national superintendent of the Department of Heredity and

Health (combined permanently in 1893), revealed that members had been active in studies of

“the questions of diet, household economy, school hygiene, municipal, town, and village, sanitary conditions.”364 A series of “practical hints” appended to the end of the annual report of 1902 suggested engaging with projects like milk inspection, school hygiene, petitioning state legislators for health ordinances, and urging that “every union should be a committee on sanitary conditions.”365

Over the period examined, the Department of Heredity advanced a range of educative campaigns and calls for reform — from what sound very much like traditional eugenic proposals, to appeals to improve the sanitary conditions at homes and schools in the name of health. This variety suggests a fluid understanding of the nature of heredity on the part of the

WCTU, and necessitates a deeper examination of the department’s use of the concepts of heredity and health. To this end, it is useful to turn to the Journal of Heredity, as it was this organ that was designed to inculcate a sense of the importance of heredity to temperance reform, and to initiate its study among members. Here, the American WCTU’s ambivalence about the nature of heredity is revealed.

363 Report of the National WCTU Annual Meeting, 1892 (hereafter RNAM [year]), p. 312. Reports of the National WCTU Annual Meetings. 364 RNAM (1898), p. 198. 365 RNAM (1902), p. 229.

177

3.4.2 Ambiguity of Heredity Notions of heredity varied among different articles contributed to the journal. Some of them described heredity as a stabilizing or conservative force. For these authors, heredity dictated to a great extent what we would become as adults. For Dr. Owens-Adair, state superintendent of the Oregon Department of Heredity, “it would be [just] as well to preach moderation to a hurricane as to talk philosophy to one whose antecedent life has led him to the precipice of madness” — in other words, we are unable to alter the paths of a life pre- destined by heredity.366 Others conceived of heredity as a sort of continuous existence, material or otherwise, that provided stability through the generations. Francis Galton, for example, asserted in an article “Photographs,” that “the world is beginning to awaken to the fact that the life of the individual is in some real sense a prolongation of those of his ancestry.”367 In this view, heredity not only determined the features of an individual, but also maintained the stability of these features over time.

Yet, the more common approach was to emphasize the malleability of heredity, both within individuals and over time, and especially as a result of individual actions. Dr. Mary

Allen West, editor of the National WCTU’s newspaper, the Union Signal, asserted: “sin can cancel good inheritance, [and] grace may cancel a bad inheritance.”368 That is, we may overcome some of our inherited tendencies by the way that we live and comport ourselves.

Others took this a step further, suggesting that not only can we overcome some of our own hereditary tendencies, but we can also improve the inheritance we pass on to our offspring. In

366 Owens-Adair, “untitled,” p. 21. 367 Galton, “Photographs,”, p. 60. 368 West, “Character Building,” p. 96.

178 this sense, readers were encouraged to “learn what tendencies you inherit, then cultivate all that are good, and educate away from all that are evil,”369 and were reminded that “heredity is not the mere heavy weight that nature employs to load wretched human beings with. On the other hand, it is the agency by which to improve, become better and happier.”370 This neo-

Lamarckian approach to heredity — according to which it was believed that characteristics acquired during one’s life time could be passed on to one’s offspring — was reflected in a number of case studies published in the Journal, such as the remarkable story of a family, who, determined to have a gifted child, prior to conceiving and during pregnancy adopted a rigorous regimen of exercise and took into their home a talented musician for the “refinement of their home-life.”371 As a result their daughter was born of a physique and musical ability far superior to that of her parents. Articles in this vein presupposed a great agency on the part of parents to shape the hereditary endowments of their offspring, and further, an agency on the part of the current generation to improve the next. Indeed, many of the arguments for women’s equality forwarded in the Journal depended on this line of reasoning, since women bore most of the burden of raising children, and were responsible for the health and morality of their families.

Yet, this has taken us a far step from those articles that emphasized the strength of an unchanging heredity over environment or lifestyle in shaping not only the characteristics of the individual, but also those of future generations. Indeed the definitions, and implications, of heredity varied widely among the articles included in the Journal for consideration by

369 Leech, “Department of Organization,” p. 85. 370 Wilder, “Physiology of Heredity,” p. 167. 371 C.B.W., “Black Sheep,” p. 184.

179 readers. When we consider that Burnett’s mandate was to initiate critical thinking among members — that is, for articles to be suggestive rather than authoritative — this diversity in opinion reveals that the nature of heredity was a pressing question, which Burnett wished readers to consider. A tension existed within the pages of the Journal about the role of heredity as something that maintained constancy, but also transmitted variations.

Importantly, however, these discussions do reveal a general underlying theory about the nature of heredity; that is, that heredity was a force.

3.4.3 Heredity as Force In an article titled “Natural Law,” Scottish writer and evangelist, Henry Drummond, who a decade later would write the evolutionary epic, The Ascent of Man, explained that

“heredity and environment are the master influences of the organic world... these forces are still ceaseless playing upon all our lives.” Characterizing them as forces which could be made to both oppose one another or to cooperate, Drummond suggested that their proper balancing was the secret to a successful life.372 A piece by professor of anthropology J.L.A.

De Quatrefages similarly posited heredity against environment as opposing forces shaping human lives, but at the level of the species instead. In his article on “The Formation of

Human Races,” he explained that every species appeared to be subject to two forces: “one which tends to maintain,” that is, heredity, “and the other which tends to modify its characters,” which he identified as the environment, or conditions of life.373 Other

372 Drummond, “Natural Law,” p. 89-90. 373 De Quatrefages, “Formation of Human Races,” p. 42.

180 contributors made a similar, but distinct opposition: between the power of ancestral forces and one’s own free will, rather than environmental circumstances. In this vein, the unknown author of “Heredity, not Fatalism” suggested that humans were not bound by their inheritances. Instead, one’s own personal power “manifests itself in every free act, which is a protestation against the law of heredity” — that while heredity conserves, liberty creates variation.374 A Bible study contributed by professor of Christian theology George Harris provided a comparable analysis. In discussing the widespread belief in the transmission of

“the sins of the fathers unto the third and fourth generations,” he argued that “there is another law, if I may so call it, of human nature, which is found by the side of these laws and tendencies, and which is that any single propensity can be controlled if a motive sufficiently strong is presented.”375 This motive, he argued, is religious gospel, and that “those who truly become the servants of Christ are changed in this very respect, [in] that they obtain genuine control over their inherited faults.”376 In other words, we are endowed with an agency, with which we are able to combat our inherited tendencies. While Harris was referring to the transmission of moral or mental, rather than physical, traits, these articles had two features in common. First, is the assumption that heredity is a force, and second, is the presupposition of some other force or aspect — whether that be free will or control over environmental conditions — that is distinct from heredity, that serves as a tool with which to combat “our inherited faults” during the course of our lifetimes, and which served to generate variation in opposition to the ultimately conservative function of heredity.

374 “Heredity, Not Fatalism,” p. 67. 375 Harris, “Bible Study,” p. 140. 376 Harris, “Bible Study,” p. 141.

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Burnett’s regular column, “The Study of Heredity,” further underlined the importance of the “force” understanding of heredity to the WCTU. The column, which remained virtually unchanged from issue to issue — and hence can be taken as indicative of the views of the Department of Heredity — was always prefaced by the same set of facts about heredity. Here, heredity was defined as “the sum of all ancestral forces — plus Life,” and life defined as “the unknown quantity, the imponderable force, entering into all inheritance —

God’s plan for each individual.”377 Moreover, it was also explained that “Heredity culminates in the individual at birth. (Here differentiate from Hygiene or environment, which BEGINS at birth.)”378 In other words, the Department viewed heredity as something that entered into human development, along with other elements, such as environmental conditions

(education, nutrition, climate, etc.), or some factors from God’s grace — life, soul, or free will.

Thus, by making heredity a distinct factor in individual development, one which competed with other factors for supremacy in shaping the individual, and by not commenting on the underlying mechanism of heredity, the WCTU left the role of heredity for their program of reform underdetermined, and open for interpretation. Its importance in shaping human development could be emphasized or diminished, without contradicting this underlying assumption. And neither was the malleability or rigidity of heredity — that is, its susceptibility to change by our own initiatives or in response to changes in the environment

— presupposed by this view. For this reason it was possible for health-related reforms —

377 Burnett, “Study of Heredity,” (1885) p. 33. Emphasis mine. 378 Burnett, “Study of Heredity,” (1885) p. 33. Emphasis in original.

182 health and morality, as we have seen, believed to be passed on to future generations according to a more malleable view of heredity — to be taken to be just as natural to the department as eugenic proposals that are in accordance with more rigid views of heredity.

Thus, despite all their attention to the nature of heredity, heredity remained for the National

WCTU an imprecise concept — loosely understood as a conservative force that created ties between generations, and which, if wielded, could be a powerful force in effecting social change.

Under the auspices of the Department of Heredity, the American WCTU pursued a number of objectives in the name of heredity. These included sanitary reforms, such as pure milk campaigns and the fight against tuberculosis; calls “to limit the propagation of the criminal and vagrant classes,” which sounded very much like later eugenic policies;379 appeals for women’s rights to education, the ballot, a wider range of occupations, etc.; promotion of temperance; and efforts at popular scientific education on the nature of heredity, among others. These objectives were all rooted in an ideology of heredity — one which was sufficiently ambiguous that it could support proposals that assumed the importance and possibility of altering one’s hereditary endowments, alongside others that implied a limit to how much a faulty hereditary legacy could be improved. This ambiguous notion of heredity as an ancestral force (of undetermined importance in shaping individual development) that created ties between generations could be adapted to support a range of

379 Indeed, it is because of such overlap in language that it is easy to interpret the WCTU as a eugenic organization. However, as this analysis suggests, one must be careful in retrospectively applying the label, for “heredity” did not come to reformers with a fixed meaning or set of implications, nor did eugenics comprise a homogeneous set of theories and concepts.

183 objectives, and therefore fit well into the WCTU’s broader “Do Everything” policy.

Moreover, the seemingly “natural” status of heredity as both force of nature and law of God lent it authority, allowing the WCTU to ground their hereditary efforts for reform on the dual footings of both science and religion. As well, by approaching the concept of heredity as a force or as a set of natural phenomena rather than a specific physical mechanism — or indeed by merely avoiding the question as to the mechanism of hereditary phenomena — the WCTU was able to draw upon a wealth of cultural and scientific knowledge about the transmission of traits from parents to offspring, without delimiting the multiplicity of meanings and implications these phenomena suggested. Thus, heredity functioned as a scientific concept that was amenable to a variety of different social and political uses, and was an especially valuable tool for the American National WCTU, whose program of reform was founded on an embracement of a heterogeneity of objectives.

3.4.4 Malleability of Heredity As we have seen, the Ontario and American WCTUs embraced very different understandings of heredity. The Ontario WCTU’s Department of Hygiene and Heredity saw heredity as the lawful transmission of simultaneously physical and moral constitutions. This both explained the current state of degeneracy thought to be plaguing the nation, and pointed a way out of this historical process of moral and physical decline. Moreover, this understanding of heredity provided an ideological justification for the activities of the

Ontario WCTU that was consistent with its evangelical underpinnings. Members saw their role in this process of amelioration as educative and preventative: to provide guidance on good (hygienic) living, and to create an atmosphere conducive to this proper lifestyle.

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This approach to heredity is in contrast with its role in the American organization.

There, the nature of heredity was decidedly more ambiguous. Rather than as the transmission of physical/moral constitutions, which were understood to be altered according to one’s behaviour during life, heredity was conceived instead as a force that entered into the development of individuals along, and in competition with, other factors, such as environmental conditions and a spiritual element such as the soul, or free will. Moreover, it was understood as a conservative force that established ties between the present generation and its ancestors — one which, if wielded properly, could be a powerful agency in effecting social change. Yet, importantly, the nature of the ties that it established, and its strength as a force, remained underdetermined. Thus, the notion of heredity was able to provide ideological support for a wider and less-defined set of reforms than it did for the Ontario

WCTU, including reforms that presupposed both “hard” and “soft” versions of heredity, such as proposals to limit the propagation of undesirable classes as well as efforts to improve the status and conditions of women in society on the basis of their formative role in the bearing and raising of the next generation.380 This ambiguity allowed for the approaches of the

American National Department of Heredity to vary according to the interests of its successive superintendents, which in turn reflected the overall organization’s guiding “Do

Everything” policy.

While the concept of “heredity” came to be used by analogous departments of two organizations linked by name, institutional history, structure, goals, and even demographic

380 The term “soft” suggests a malleability of the hereditary material or substrate, which was also typically assumed to be transmissible to future generations, while “hard” refers to an assumed unalterable hereditary constitution; yet, these divisions were not clear-cut.

185 makeup, it nonetheless functioned very differently in these two contexts. Heredity meant different things to the Ontario and American WCTUs. A number of factors may have contributed to these differences. A smaller, more geographically contained organization such as the Ontario WCTU might achieve a consensus on something like the nature of heredity more easily than an organization as institutionally and geographically dispersed as the

American National WCTU. However, the American heterogeneity of interests and methods among local chapters was more than just a product of size, but was in fact actively sought through Willard’s “Do Everything” program. The imprecision of American interpretations of heredity thus likely indicates more of a positive pragmatic need than a lack of consensus, and further reflects the American WCTU’s noted pragmatic approach in comparison to Ontario’s more evangelical orientation.381 These differences notwithstanding, the two organizations did share in common an agenda for social reform — founded on, but not limited to, a commitment to temperance — at least part of which they legitimated on the basis of an ideology of heredity. In this sense, the activities of both unions reflect the cultural significance the concept of heredity had attained by the late 19th century. Moreover, together, they attest to the malleability of the concept of heredity, in that it could be understood and operationalized in such different ways.

Importantly, however, it cannot be said that a contrast in the availability or content of scientific sources contributed to the different interpretations of heredity adopted by the two organizations. In fact, they were reading and referencing many of the same sources. Ontario members, for example, were frequently urged to read and subscribe to their neighbours’

381 Cook, Sunshine and Shadow, p. 86-87.

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Journal of Heredity,382 and often made reference to the works of some of the authors who were featured in the Journal, such as T.D. Crothers, Th. Ribot, and Francis Galton, among others. A circular sent out to local unions and published in the Woman’s Journal in 1890 by

Adelia Lucas asked for reports on the activities of local departments of Heredity and

Hygiene, including how many people subscribed to the Journal of Heredity.383 As well, members in New Hampshire, for example, were reading a popular leaflet written by Maria

Craig, “Health and Heredity,” just as Ontario members were reading the publications of

American WCTU superintendents. These include, for example, Dr. Mary Wood Allen’s

“Teaching Truth” series, her books, Marvels of our Bodily Dwelling, Almost a Man, and

Almost a Woman, as well as her magazine, The New Crusade. Mrs. E.E. Kellogg’s domestic science texts, and works by Frances Willard were also circulated in Canada.384 Many of these were recommended in both unions. There was also direct communication between Canadian and American unions. Reports from the 1900 and 1901 annual national meetings of the

American WCTU, for example, included updates from the Canadian department of Health and Heredity.385 Thus, the ideas of these unions were not simply passive reflections of prevailing “orthodox” scientific or medical theories about heredity. Instead, we must consider the WCTUs in both the United States and Canada as active agencies involved in the collection, interpretation, and dissemination of information about heredity at this period of

382 Albeit with the caveat that they ignore a certain opinions about divorce, which Ontarian executives felt unfortunately “savoured very strongly of free love sentiments.” RAM (1890), 100. 383 Lucas, “Heredity and Hygiene,” p. 2. 384 see e.g. RAM 1890, 1894, 1896, 1897. 385 RNAM (1900), p. 206; RNAM (1901), p. 211.

187 time. The WCTU represented an important medium through which a certain group of

Canadians — temperance reformers, their families, and the objects of their reform measures

— came to be exposed to ideas about heredity. The next section of this chapter will illustrate this role of the WCTU more fully by examining in detail the range of sources of knowledge that influenced the Ontario union’s conception of heredity.

3.5 Sources of Knowledge about Heredity As we have seen, the Ontario WCTU had a very specific understanding of the meaning of heredity, as the lawful transmission of simultaneously physical and moral constitutions that had the power to be the source of both the uplift as well as the degeneration of society. Yet, where did these ideas about heredity come from? By examining not only the authorities the WCTU referenced but also the sources of information they reported to have read and recommended to members, it becomes clear that members relied on an eclectic variety of evidence in coming to their unique understanding of the nature of heredity and its relation to their reform organization. In their discussions about heredity, the Ontario WCTU drew from the work of physicians and scientists, including some of their fellow reformers, as well as from common religious and evangelical precepts, and a host of personal observations, family histories, and anecdotal or folkloric evidence — a similar set of sources that we have also seen in the case of domestic medical manuals.

The WCTU referenced surprisingly few scientists in their discussions of heredity. In

1891, superintendent Lucas advised members to read more about heredity, and told members

188 that Frances Willard said, “Sir Francis Galton has written the best book she has seen on

“Heredity.””386 In 1896, Galton’s book, Hereditary Genius was on the list of recommended reading of the Department of Hygiene and Heredity.387 First published in 1869, Hereditary

Genius; An Inquiry into its Laws and Consequences represented the result of an extensive examination by Galton into the lineages of various eminent men of the past several hundred years. Assuming that high reputation was a reasonable measure of high mental ability, Galton hoped to show through his study that “a man’s natural abilities are derived by inheritance, under exactly the same limitations as are the form and physical features of the whole organic world.” He saw this as significant, because it also suggested that through judicious marriages, the current generation had the power to shape the qualities of the next.388 In a concluding chapter, Galton explained the facts of hereditary genius through Darwin’s theory of

Pangenesis (which he refuted only a few years later through his own experimentation with rabbits). While I could find no obvious influence of the theory of pangenesis on the WCTU,

Galton’s assertion that mental qualities were transmitted by heredity — and that knowledge of this phenomenon could be used to shape the qualities of future generations — certainly informed, or at least reinforced an important facet of the WCTU’s ideas about heredity and reform. Indeed, members were encouraged to study both their own and well-known families to see the facts of heredity for themselves.389

386 RAM (1891), p. 74. 387 RAM (1896), p. 88. 388 Galton, Hereditary Genius, p. 1. 389 RAD (1890), p. 69.

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The Ontario WCTU also referred to French psychologist Théodule Ribot as an authority on heredity. In 1890, superintendent Lucas used Ribot’s definition of heredity —

“that biological law by which all beings endowed with life tend to repeat themselves in their offspring” — to explain the concept to members, and Maria Craig used the same definition in her widely-circulated pamphlet, “Health and Heredity.”390 This definition stands as the opening sentence of Ribot’s Heredity: A Psychological Study.391 First published in 1875,

Ribot’s book aimed to examine whether mental traits are hereditary just as are the physical traits of the human body — a subject which he said had been largely neglected by psychologists. His argument that they were must have certainly been embraced by the

WCTU, who saw insanity and dipsomania as the heritable effects of alcohol abuse. Heredity also outlined what Ribot described as the four laws of heredity — direct, indirect, reversional

(or atavism), and a last unnamed type in which children were influenced by the traits of their mother’s first husband — the same four outlined by George Napheys five years later in his

Physical Life of Woman.392 Interestingly, Heredity was panned by Galton for not being sufficiently scientific — in its reliance on old anecdotes “of questionable value” and obsolete hypotheses — and for a “large amount of unacknowledged plagiarism,” including that of his own Hereditary Genius.393 Authorial disputes aside, these books were listed side by side as recommended reading for members in 1896.394

390 RAM (1890), p. 76; Craig, “Health and Heredity,” p. 2. 391 Ribot, Heredity, p. 1 392 Ribot, Heredity, p. 147. 393 Galton, “Review: Heredity,” p. 118-119. 394 RAM (1896), p. 88.

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However, a far more significant group of authorities on whom the WCTU relied more than natural scientists of heredity were physicians. For example, when lamenting the ill hereditary effects of poor health and living, superintendent Dr. Anderson mentioned the work of Dr. John Burdell, a dentist from New York, who experimentally demonstrated the toxicity of tea and coffee to animals. Interestingly, the passage about Dr. Burdell in the annual report for that year was lifted without attribution from the book of another physician, Dr. William

Alcott, on the effects of tea and coffee on the human system.395 More specifically with respect to heredity, the WCTU also referred, for example, to the opinion of American physician Dr. Thomas Crothers, editor of the Journal of Inebriety, on the devastating hereditary effects of the abuse of alcohol. “There is no fact more certain,” superintendent

Adelia Lucas quoted in her report to the 1890 annual convention of the Ontario WCTU,

“than that the weakness and disease of the [inebriate] parents will go down to the next generation.”396

Significantly, many of the physicians relied upon by the WCTU as sources of information about heredity were also active reformers and some of them were also authors of domestic medical manuals. Dr. John Harvey Kellogg is a notable example. Kellogg was deeply interested in questions of health, heredity, and, later, eugenics.397 An abstainer himself, he promoted a strict diet and regime of exercise among his patients at his

Sanitarium, with the aim of preventing and reversing physical and racial degeneracy caused

395 RAM (1887), p. 84; Alcott, Tea and Coffee, p. 28. 396 RAM (1890), p. 76. 397 See, e.g. Proceedings of the first National Conference on Race Betterment.

191 by unhealthy habits. His pamphlet, The Influence of Dress in Producing the Physical

Decadence of American Women, was circulated widely within the Canadian WCTU.398

Originally given as an address on obstetrics and gynaecology to the Michigan State Medical

Society, the small book aimed to show that the modern form of dress common among

“civilized” American women (that is, the corset), was responsible for a widespread and

“marked physical deterioration among the women of this country.”399 Moreover, he urged that this deterioration was being passed on; affected women were bearing fewer children than previously, and were less able to care for the ones they had, due to physical weakness and inability to breastfeed.400 In correspondence with the superintendent of the Ontario WCTU of

1894, Kellogg professed, “I do not know of any better missionary work to be done anywhere than work for the reformation of woman’s dress. It is one of the great evils of the age.”401

Additionally, Good Health, a magazine published at Battle Creek, Michigan, and edited by

Kellogg, was used and recommended by several unions throughout both Ontario and the rest of the country. While I was unable to find a copy of this magazine prior to 1914, Kellogg’s other works display a similar and consistent concern to his pamphlet on dress reform about the causes and consequences of hereditary degeneration. His very popular sex education book originally published in 1879, Plain Facts for Young and Old, for example, made the connection between alcoholism and degeneration. Here, he asserted that “it is an established fact that the character of an offspring is influenced by the mental as well as physical

398 RAM (1894), p. 110-112. 399 Kellogg, The Influence of Dress, p. 3. 400 Ibid., 3-5. 401 RAM (1894), p. 110.

192 conditions of the parents at the moment of the performance of the generative act” — for example, that being drunk at the moment of conception will make one’s offspring predisposed to alcoholism as well.402 Moreover, he suggested that the throngs of degenerate people threatening to overwhelm the nation (the blind, dwarfed, constitutionally weak, etc.) were undoubtedly the result of some improper mental, moral, or physical status of their parents, such as drunkenness or selfishness, during the reproductive act. What is implied here and elsewhere among Kellogg’s oeuvre is that even a single transgression of proper sexual behaviour could result in a variety of deplorable consequences for future generations; indeed, this was likely the intended take-home message in urging members to read Kellogg’s works.

The 1914 volume of Good Health not only continued with these themes, but had additionally become explicitly eugenic in content.403

Dr. Mary Wood-Allen, Chicago physician and superintendent of the Purity

Department of the World WCTU, also authored a number of works that were frequently recommended by the Ontario department of Hygiene and Heredity. One of her most popular works, What a Young Girl Ought to Know, first published in 1897 but reissued in 1905 and again 1913, was praised by Willard in its front pages. It addressed questions about physiology, reproduction, adolescence, and proper womanhood in dialogic form between a mother and her daughter. It was written in a “delicate language” that did not offend the pure sensibility.404 An important theme of the book was how the behaviour of a girl throughout

402 Kellogg, Plain Facts, 107-109. 403 Kellogg, Good Health (1914). 404 Wood-Allen, Young Girl, 21.

193 her life would affect the qualities and characters of her offspring. In one passage, the mother tells her daughter, “after you were born, I could not give you any different inheritance. All I can do now is to help you overcome any inherited traits that may be undesirable. But in overcoming your faults you are creating a better inheritance for your children.”405 Wood-

Allen’s message was similar to Kellogg’s — that the efforts of individual women and girls to improve their inheritance by proper living contributed to the improvement of the human race, but that a regression could similarly occur as a result of improper living.406 The sorts of behaviours warned against included “the solitary vice,” consumption of tea, coffee, tobacco, and alcohol, bad posture, and impure thoughts. Praised were the maintenance of virtuous friendships, proper diet and exercise, and a good work ethic. The New Crusade, a magazine for mothers edited by Wood-Allen, and her “Teaching Truth” series, a set of books for young boys and girls with similar messages — Almost a Man and Almost a Woman — were also recommended by the Department as valuable reading, among others.407 In 1898, Wood-Allen visited the Ontario WCTU and gave two lectures on hygiene and heredity to the Oxford union, and as a result, a central White Shield Society was established in Toronto.408 Like the

Ontario WCTU and Kellogg, Wood-Allen fused health with morality, and her ideas about the preservation of health and morality in the name of heredity influenced the WCTU’s thinking about the relation between heredity and social reform.

405 Ibid., 98. 406 Ibid., 94-95. 407 These included such titles as Marvels of our Bodily Dwellings, Almost a Man, and Almost a Woman. 408 RAM (1898), p. 94-95.

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Additionally, many of the superintendents of the departments of heredity in the

Ontario and Dominion Unions were also physicians themselves. Between 1890 and 1900, ten superintendents of departments of heredity were physicians — a remarkable number, given that women had only recently begun to gain access to medical schools in Canada at this time.409 Indeed, one of these physicians, Dr. Augusta Stowe-Gullen (superintendent of the

Toronto District Union Department of Hygiene and Heredity from 1891-1892) was the first woman to graduate from a Canadian medical school.410 These physician-superintendents were active in their unions and departments, giving lectures and writing and distributing articles on the subjects of health and heredity. Moreover, the Canadian WCTU also relied on the works of their physician WCTU neighbours to the south; state president of the Virginia

WCTU Dr. Harriet Jones’ book Heredity, national superintendent of the Department of

Heredity Dr. Mary Weeks-Burnett’s Journal of Heredity, and world superintendent of the

Department of Purity Dr. Mary Wood-Allen’s many books, for example, were all recommended reading by the Ontario WCTU. Here, these members were relying on their own experiences and educations as physicians — and the medical context from which they could speak as authorities — when discussing and exploring with their fellow reformers the importance of heredity to the WCTU.

409 They were — Ontario: Mrs. Dr. Anderson, Dr. Lelia Davis, Dr. Addie Wenig, Dr. Skinner; Toronto District: Dr. Stowe-Gullen, Dr. Ellen Burt Sherritt; Maritime Provinces, Dr. Maria Angwin; New Brunswick: Dr. Anna Brown; Manitoba: Dr. Amelia Yeomans; British Columba: Mrs. Dr. Foote. 410 Stowe-Gullen’s mother, Emily Stowe, was also one of the first practicing female physicians in Canada, who, along with her friend Jenny Trout, had to petition her right to attend medical school classes in the 1870’s. Stowe was also centrally involved in the opening of the first women’s medical college in Canada, The Women’s Medical College, in 1883. See e.g. Hacker, Indomitable Lady Doctors; Strong-Boag, “Canada’s Women Doctors.”

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The Ontario WCTU drew not only on science and medicine, but also on established evangelical precepts and Biblical passages as references for understanding and illustrating the principles and significance of heredity. As we have already seen, the WCTU conflated health with morality and disease with sin. The transmission of these states of health and disease was understood to represent instances of the transmission by God of the sins of the fathers unto the third and fourth generations, and heredity as the mechanism by which these states — such as alcoholism or virtue — were transmitted. In 1896, Ontario superintendent

Mrs. Lucas explained, “the laws of God concerning life, health, and purity have been violated, and the sins of the fathers have been visited upon the children.” That same year the

Dominion union reported that a Dr. McNiel had given a paper soon to be published in leaflet form on “The Sins of the Father” as visited on the children.411 In this case, we see the scientific principles of the hereditary transmission of physical and moral traits illustrated and supported by a well-known Biblical maxim. The nature — and naturalness — of heredity was further explained and justified through reference to the Bible. Lucas began one of her reports as superintendent of the Department of Hygiene and Heredity by explaining to members, “in the Book of Genesis we read: “And God said let us make man in our own image, after our likeness.””412 In 1891, she further described that “from Genesis to

Revelation,” the law of heredity “is set forth as one of God’s primary laws for all living things, and its study is intended to bring out the clear light of God’s truth regarding the power of ancestral forces.” Moreover, she added that the Bible “abounds in illustrations” of the law

411 RAM (1896), p. 85; RAD (1896), p. 67. 412 RAM (1896), p. 85.

196 of heredity, which should be informative for all members to read and consider. Abraham,

Isaac, and Jacob, for example, she asserted were the highest hereditary types, and she recommended that everyone engage in a constant study of their virtues for the benefit of posterity.413 Reports from the Dominion departments of heredity also urged the arrangement of Bible readings as well as mothers’ meetings at which to discuss heredity, while the

Journal of Heredity also contained regular guided Bible readings as well as many articles on heredity and the Bible.414

A typical guided reading in the first issue of the Journal, “A Bible Reading on

Heredity,” for example, listed passages where readers could find discussion of various aspects of heredity, such as the transmission of good and bad traits, and the facts that grace may cancel the inheritance of bad traits and that sin may cancel the inheritance of good traits.415 Other articles, such as “Heredity Principles as Taught in the Bible,” by Mara Bakus,

State Super for the Department of Heredity of Southern California, and “To the Third and

Fourth Generation,” by Rev. Charles F. Deems, similarly explored in more detail what the

Bible could teach members about heredity.416 These studies of heredity in the Bible and the deep intertwinement of their ideas about heredity and spiritual health point to the fact that religion functioned as a significant source of information and authority on heredity for the

Ontario WCTU alongside science and medicine.

413 RAM (1891), p. 74-75. 414 e.g. RAD (1890), p. 68; 415 Willing and Burnett, “Bible Reading,” 35. 416 Bakus, “Heredity Principles,” 189-191; Deems, “Third and Fourth,” 190-192.

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Alongside the primary influences of natural science, medicine, and religion the

WCTU also referred to a range of secondary social scientific and even personal anecdotal evidence in their discussions of heredity. At the first provincial convention after the Ontario

Department of Hygiene and Heredity had been established, for example, Superintendent Mrs.

Dr. Anderson referred to the social research of the New York physician and Corresponding

Secretary of the Prison Association of New York, Dr. Elisha Harris, to illustrate that moral qualities, as well as physical traits are inherited.417 Harris’ research in county prisons on the descendants of “Margaret, the mother of criminals” became the basis for Richard Dugdale’s famous The Jukes: A Study in Crime, Pauperism, Disease, and Heredity, first published in

1877.418 In 1890, the WCTU also quoted extensively from the report of a Prison Reform

Commission, which was covered in the Toronto Globe. The WCTU highlighted sections of the report that suggested that the role of heredity in perpetuating (if not producing) crime was inarguable, and that if this knowledge of heredity were more widespread, it would help prevent the transmission of the mental and moral weaknesses that were behind criminal activity. Incidentally, the report went on to deplore the practice of bringing in “gutter children from the slums of England, Scotland and Ireland” to be adopted in Canada because of the hereditary consequences of bringing in such “diseased” individuals.419 In both of these cases, social research on prison populations were relied upon as important sources of evidence for the heredity of mental and moral features, but also, evidence that targeting bad

417 RAM (1886), p. 623-624. 418 Dugdale, The Jukes. 419 RAM (1890), p. 77.

198 heredity was an effective way of reducing crime. That same year, the WCTU justified the hereditary basis of their temperance goals at a Dominion meeting by referring to evidence from “the native Christians of India and China". The WCTU suggested that it is significant that these Christians base their anti-opium movements on the fact that the harmful effects of the drug are transmitted to the children and grandchildren of users, and in this way injure

“the very life of the people.” Indeed, they concluded, “All this might be said of the liquor traffic.”420 In all of these cases, sociological information was used to situate the role of heredity within the broader goals of the WCTU for social reform.

The WCTU also relied on the power of personal anecdotes in explaining and providing evidence for the nature of heredity. A report from a North West Territories department of Heredity and Hygiene, for example, revealed that the “recital of cases of personal knowledge, by several members,” made a recent local meeting “very interesting and profitable.”421 Finally — and as we have also seen with domestic medical manuals — members were also called upon to do their own research so they could find out for themselves the power of heredity. At that same Dominion meeting, National Superintendent

Adelia Lucas encouraged members to read as much as they could about heredity, and to trace both their own ancestry as well as that of famous individuals. In so doing, she assured, “you will be astonished at the revelations that will come to you, and the mysteries that will be made clear. You will find how one age is linked to another by an endless chain of consequences, good or ill, which encircles the whole human family, for in this sense, “no one

420 RAM (1890), p. 76-77. 421 RAD (1890), 67.

199 liveth to himself.”422 The Journal of Heredity encouraged personal research as well. Editor

Dr. Mary Weeks Burnett’s column, “The Study of Heredity,” classified each issue’s articles according to the aspect of heredity to which they spoke — pathological heredity, general heredity, etc. Readers were further urged to create a “map” of heredity, and hang it on the wall of rooms in which heredity was to be discussed among members.423 Yet that was not enough. Burnett also maintained that it was important to “originate lines of study and effort,” and suggested that members read Galton’s article on photography as an anthropometric tool, published in the same issue of the Journal, and to use some of his suggestions at once.424 The phenomenon of hereditary transmission was thought to be so evident that it was open to non- professional observation.

3.6 Conclusion As with domestic medical manuals and the periodical literature of breeders and farmers, the case of the WCTU publications and activities not only underlines the malleability of the concept of heredity in the late 19th century — in that it could be put to use in such different ways by two related organizations — but it also further emphasizes the extent to which heredity represented a common and salient cultural concept. This chapter also illustrates the importance of the WCTU as yet another rich source of information about heredity for a specific group of Canadians — in this case, women temperance reformers,

422 RAD (1890), 67. 423 See, for example, Burnett, “Study of Heredity” (1885), p. 33–35. 424 Burnett, “Study of Heredity,” (1886), p. 78; Galton, “Photographs,” p. 58-60.

200 their families, and the circles in which they were active. More specifically, this case of the

WCTU points to the importance of a lay organization in disseminating and actively shaping ideas about heredity derived from a range of ecclesiastical, scientific, medical, and other sources.

One particularly illuminating example — the leaflet, “Health and Heredity,” by Maria

Craig, superintendent of the both the Dominion and Quebec departments of heredity — illustrates these features of the organization. It both highlights the vast circulation of materials among the WCTU chapters and also captures the eclectic sources of knowledge upon which the WCTU drew in their understanding of heredity. Two years after it was first published in the Woman’s Journal in 1890, 1,100 copies of “Health and Heredity” were circulated in Quebec alone, and by 1894, 6,900 copies had been distributed throughout the country. It was so popular that it went through a second reprinting, and continued to be circulated and recommended for several years afterward, including being ordered across the border in New Hampshire.425 As well, the superintendent of the Ontario Department of

Hygiene and Heredity quoted from it without attribution in her report to the 1981 Ontario provincial convention.426

The leaflet also illustrates the variety of sources of knowledge undergirding the notions of heredity propagated therein. It begins by offering two definitions of heredity — one from Ribot’s Heredity, and the other from Dr. Mary Weeks Burnett, published in the

Journal of Heredity — before explaining that heredity was “one of God’s primal laws for all

425 RAQ (1893), p. 32; RAD (1894), p. 63; RAD (1896), p. 69. 426 RAM (1891), p. 74-75.

201 living things” that can be traced back to Adam and Eve. Thus, we can see here already the simultaneous influence of science, medicine and religion in Craig’s understanding and exposition of heredity. In fact, she drew upon a range of authorities in supporting her thesis about the importance of heredity for their organization. In addition to those above, she also referenced the work of another female physician and member of the WCTU, Dr. Harriet

Jones; quoted the poet Alfred Tennyson about the importance of self-knowledge, by which she took it to mean knowing our family inheritances; and referred to a paper read at an annual meeting of the American Social Science Association about the heredity of inebriety.

To demonstrate the heredity of intellectual as well as moral and physical traits, Craig referred to the lineages of various eminent people including Bach and Darwin, taking cue from

Galton’s 1869 Hereditary Genius. Craig told a typical generational story about the decline of an honest, industrious family to illustrate in a more immediate way the dangerous hereditary consequences of alcohol use.427 Much like the WCTU more broadly, Craig drew upon evidence from natural scientists, physicians, and fellow reformers, as well as the Bible and social science research. She also made reference to the lineages of eminent people and disgraced families. Moreover, we can see how these categories overlapped — Dr. Harriet

Jones, for example, was not only a physician but also an active member of the WCTU— and how many of the authorities the WCTU relied upon were themselves reading and interpreting a range of sources on heredity. Thus, “Health and Heredity” neatly encapsulates the diverse and interrelated set of authorities and ways of knowing that influenced the WCTU as they

427 Craig, “Health and Heredity,” p. 2.

202 developed a coherent set of beliefs about heredity that were tied with their visions for the reform of society.

By organizing national and provincial meetings, as well as lectures, sermons, and intimate discussions, and by circulating vast quantities of literature, the WCTU functioned as an important medium through which Canadians came to be exposed to certain scientific and non-scientific ideas about heredity. Indeed, this case illustrates some of the mechanisms by which a lay organization could, and did, function as important site of the production and circulation of knowledge about heredity in late 19th century North America. As the largest women’s organization in Canada — with a membership by 1900 of over 10,000 country- wide, and 5,500 in Ontario alone — this was not an insignificant medium of knowledge transmission.428 The WCTU thus served as a dynamic node through which these various ideas about heredity came to be amassed, negotiated, and made available to a large group of

Canadian women. Here, ideas about heredity were framed in terms of the WCTU’s aspirations for the moral and physical reform of society, and, conversely, members were also encouraged to consider the problem of intemperance and social reform more broadly at least in part through the scientific and cultural concept of heredity.

428 Cook, “Sowing seed,” p. 175.

Conclusion

There existed in the second half of the 19th century in Canada a range of popular ideas, and ways of knowing, about heredity. These ideas were rooted in concrete practices, interests, and ideologies. One of the aims of this dissertation has been to try to illustrate some of the contours of popular thought about heredity as found in three sites in late 19th century

Canadian culture: breeders and farmers’ magazines, domestic medical manuals, and the

WCTU. As I was excavating these ideas, I found that I was at the same time unable to ignore the sources of knowledge from which these notions of heredity were derived. In the process of examining these ideas and their sources, my research has revealed that popular understandings of heredity did not come straight, or even slightly modified, from the results of scientific research. Instead, these ideas came from a range of sources, which together highlighted the variety of ways that lay audiences in the second half of the 19th century understood and operationalized both the nature and the implications of heredity. Yet, I have attempted to focus not directly on the popularization of scientific notions of heredity, but instead on the circulation of ideas about heredity within and between different areas of

Canadian society. In this sense, this dissertation has studied the cultural life of heredity. In particular, it has revealed the role played by three bodies of literature — agricultural periodicals, medical manuals, and the WCTU publications — in the circulation of knowledge about heredity, and in the active discussion and negotiation about its broader social meanings.

This dissertation has illustrated some of the ways that heredity was understood in late

19th century Canada. Here, we see that heredity was a malleable concept that meant different

203 204 things to different groups of people. For breeders, heredity was characterized as a process of transmission of traits from ancestors to offspring — described as “like begets like” — that varied in strength between different animals and was rooted in some way in the blood. The strength of heredity, referred to as prepotency, was understood to be an inborn capacity that could be weakened or strengthened in animals through different breeding practices. In- breeding was thought to “concentrate” the blood in animals and thereby render them more prepotent, while cross-breeding was said to dilute the blood and thereby render animals more likely to breed in unpredictable ways. In this way, ideas about specific breeding practices, blood, and prepotency as the strength of hereditary transmission were deeply intertwined.

Breeders were also concerned with the different sets of traits that were transmitted between ancestors and offspring, including those both desirable and undesirable. They recognized that mothers and fathers typically transmitted different types of traits to their offspring. In cases of telegony, breeders observed that a female animal’s first mate could shape the traits she passed on to offspring for the rest of her reproductive years, no matter who she was subsequently mated with. Finally, breeders agreed that sometimes traits came not from the immediate parents, but from more distant ancestors, a phenomenon referred to as atavism.

Thus, hereditary transmission was understood to vary in strength and in form, in ways that were at times capricious.

For the authors of domestic medical manuals, heredity meant broadly the process by which children came to resemble their parents. However, the understanding of the exact nature of this process, and its possible implications for human health, reproduction, and social progress, varied in different types of manuals. General medical manuals were most concerned with the nature of the relationship between heredity and disease, and discussed in

205 great detail the role of heredity in the nature, aetiology, and the possibility of cure or prevention of a wide range of particular ailments. Sexual hygiene and sex-specific manuals largely took the heredity of disease for granted and focused on providing marriage, prenatal, and lifestyle advice with the aim of preventing the spread of hereditary disease. In some ways, this reflects a difference in the ways these manuals considered heredity: general medical manuals referred to it more as a process of transmission of traits, whose mechanisms remained to be worked out, while sexual hygiene manuals often referred to heredity as a

“thing” — good heredity, tainted heredity, etc. — that needed to be controlled.

Domestic medical manuals also considered the relative power of heredity over environmental influences in shaping the biological and social features of human life. A few authors maintained that heredity prevailed. However, many others emphasized prenatal culture and lifestyle modifications as important means by which hereditary influences may be overcome. In large part, the conversation about the power of prenatal influences was dominated by sexual hygiene and sex-specific manuals. These types of manuals found in heredity a powerful site of social reform that depended on its important role in shaping our lives, but also on its susceptibility to change as a result of the conscious modification of lifestyle factors. Here, the implications of a malleable heredity were tied to broader concerns about the nation and the race. Yet, many of these same manuals also underscored the deterministic aspects of heredity, particularly in offering marriage advice. Readers were cautioned about the lasting and irreversible consequences of marrying into a family with a history of disease, or of marrying one’s own cousins, for example. This advice was also tied to explicit concerns about the race. Thus, discussions about prenatal culture and marriage advice were at times contradictory, although both were framed in terms of their broader

206 social implications. In some ways, these discussions reflected different objects of interest: advice for prenatal culture was more focused on the shaping of personality and temperament, while marriage advice was largely framed in terms of the transmission of disease. With respect to marriage advice, general medical manuals offered more general advice, while sexual hygiene manuals offered very specific advice, and much more of it.

Finally, a subject considered by many domestic medical manuals was the special role played by heredity in the societal problem of intemperance. Heredity was understood to be the mechanism by which alcoholism and the abuse of tobacco caused a range of social ills: their abuse led to hereditary degeneration. These concerns were found in all types of manuals, including in school textbooks, which did not exhibit a sustained attention to heredity otherwise. The relatively consistent way that manuals interpreted the dangers of alcohol in hereditary terms suggested that heredity was an important frame for understanding intemperance at this time, as the case of WCTU further suggests.

The authors of domestic medical manuals acknowledged the debt they owed to the work of breeders in developing their understanding of heredity. Medical manuals took from breeders a general appreciation of the significant consequences that could come from paying greater attention to reproduction, in this case, human reproduction. They also took specific information from breeders, such as for example, insights about the differential contribution of parents to offspring. In this respect, breeders were referred to as unquestionable authorities on matters related to heredity. Similarly to breeders, the authors of domestic medical manuals understood heredity to be a process of transmission of traits whereby offspring came to resemble their parents or ancestors. Yet, breeders and the authors of domestic medical

207 manuals focused on different aspects of heredity, and drew different implications from their notions of heredity.

Aside from a common interest in the heredity of disease, breeders and the authors of domestic medical manuals were interested in different aspects of the nature of heredity. Some of the specific concerns of breeders did not appear in domestic medical manuals. Prepotency was not a subject that appeared in domestic medical manuals, and nor were these manuals particularly interested in breeding methods, such as in-breeding, cross-breeding, or line- breeding. This likely reflects prevailing social concerns about marriage between close relations. In-breeding was therefore not considered by medical manuals as a method to shape the hereditary qualities of the next generation. Prepotency, which was understood to be generated through repeated applications of in-breeding, was also probably not considered in the context of human heredity for this reason.

The authors of domestic medical manuals interpreted the variability that occurred in the transmission of certain traits of personality or temperament not through the lens of prepotency, but of prenatal culture instead, which emphasized the influence of the mental and moral conditions of the parents at the time of conception or during gestation. Animals were not understood to have the same rich internal mental lives as humans, and these prenatal factors did not play as significant a role in breeders’ understanding of animal heredity.429

This difference also represented one reason why some breeders chose not to extend their views of heredity in animals to the case of humans. In both of these cases, we can see how broader cultural assumptions — aversions toward marriage between close relations, and

429 Although breeders did believe in the phenomenon of maternal impressions.

208 assumptions about morality as a uniquely human capacity — shaped what breeders and domestic medical manuals did not think were significant aspects of heredity. Thus, where breeders were concerned with questions such as the nature of prepotency, the positive and negative effects of in-breeding, and whether it was possible to produce offspring of a certain sex at will, domestic medical manuals instead focused on such questions as the relationship between alcoholism and hereditary degeneration, and the effects on heredity of lifestyle choices and prenatal culture.

Finally, breeders considered heredity in the context of a range of practical questions related to the breeding of their animals, but rarely applied these observations to the subject of heredity in humans. What links they did draw between heredity and the nation were in terms of the economic and symbolic implications of Canadian breeders collectively producing strong, healthy, and desirable animals. Domestic medical manuals in contrast, frequently encouraged their readers to think about the nature of human health, disease, and morality in terms of heredity, and additionally drew out the implications of human heredity for the state of the nation or race.

For the Ontario and American National WCTUs, heredity was considered to be important to their work, yet in different ways. The Ontario WCTU understood heredity to be the lawful transmission of our simultaneously physical and moral constitutions. The work of the WCTU was underpinned by this notion of heredity. The various ills plaguing society — intemperance, disease, immorality, crime, etc. — were thought to be caused by a long process of the hereditary degeneration of our moral and physical selves. Yet, it was believed that society could be reformed through heredity as well. Members of the WCTU saw their role in this process of reform as educative and preventative: to provide guidance on good,

209 temperate, living (that would lead to hereditary improvement), and to create a societal atmosphere conducive to this proper lifestyle. In contrast, the nature of heredity for the

American WCTU was decidedly more ambiguous. There, heredity was understood to be a force that entered into the development of the individual along with other factors, such as environmental conditions and a spiritual element, such as the soul or free will. Heredity was understood to establish ties between the generations, and if yielded properly, could be a powerful force in effecting social change. However, its strength as a force, and the nature of the ties it created between generations remained underdetermined. Heredity therefore supported a wider range of reforms than it did for the Ontario WCTU, as the interests of successive superintendents called for different approaches to reform in an organization that supported a heterogeneity of objectives. In both cases, concepts of heredity were used to explain the nature of the reforms that members of the WCTU were aiming to implement, and thus shaped the ways that members understood the dynamics of social change and the effects of their actions in the world. Social change was in some important ways understood to be mediated through heredity, and members of the WCTU saw in hereditary transmission an effective way to intervene positively in society.

The WCTUs shared with the authors of medical manuals this general concern about the broader national and racial implications of heredity. They also referred specifically to the work of physicians who highlighted the relationship between hereditary degeneration and alcohol and tobacco abuse and shared with domestic medical manuals this specific interest.

Based on these concerns, the Ontario WCTU offered practical living advice that aimed to reverse, and eventually ameliorate, hereditary degeneration through the positive hereditary effects of good living and prenatal culture. They also cautioned against marrying inebriates.

210

In this respect, the Ontario WCTU reflected some of the same ideas about heredity as domestic medical manuals, and in particular, sexual hygiene manuals. Indeed, some of the authors of sexual hygiene publications were affiliated with, or members of the WCTU themselves. Yet, there were differences as well between the ideas of the WCTU and domestic medical texts, including sexual hygiene manuals. The Ontario WCTU did not focus on the transmission of specific diseases, other than those which were in some way related to the effects of intemperance (such as insanity or idiocy), perhaps because their emphasis was on the fundamental malleability of heredity.

The WCTU’s ideas about heredity did not share much in common with those of breeders, aside from the general recognition that children tended to resemble their parents and ancestors. Breeders did not share the WCTU’s focus on the transmission of mental and moral features, particularly as it related to intemperance. Nor were the breeders’ techniques used for controlling the reproductive behaviours of their animals of interest to the WCTU.

Instead, the Ontario WCTU was primarily focused on shaping peoples’ lifestyle choices so that the products of reproduction among already married persons would be superior.

Thus, as we compare the ideas of breeders, the authors of domestic medical manuals, and WCTU members, we see a shift in the ways heredity was understood and applied to the bodies of animals, humans, and nations. The concept of heredity was applied first to the animal and then to the human body. Finally, with the WCTU, it came to encompass even greater social and moral implications as it was conceptualized as an important point of access for the reform of Canadian society. In all cases, however, heredity was seen as a way to make sense of changes to the animal, human, and national body, and as an effective means of controlling the qualities of future generations of Canadians.

211

This dissertation has illustrated the role of agricultural periodicals, medical manuals, and WCTU publications as important sources of information on heredity, as sites of active discussion and negotiation about the broader social meanings of heredity, and as dynamic nodes in a complex network of exchange between different ways of knowing about the world for certain groups of 19th century Canadians. In part, this role was facilitated by the emergence of a national postal system and the expansion of Canadian railroads, which made the travel of these materials (periodicals, manuals, WCTU literature) easier at this time. As these materials were able to circulate more freely across the nation, so too were the ideas that they contained. Those who consumed and contributed to this literature were brought into closer contact with each other and to other ways of knowing about heredity. In what follows,

I will examine more explicitly the exchange and travel of ideas about heredity by sketching a general outline of the web of ideas and sources of knowledge from which popular notions of heredity were constructed and negotiated in the second half of the 19th century in Canada.

Breeders represented an endogenous source of knowledge about heredity that arose from their practical engagement with the animal body. In the context of their collective personal and financial interests in improving the productivity, aesthetic appeal, or health of their animals, breeders paid attention to the ways that their animals transmitted their traits to offspring. Through extensive knowledge sharing, facilitated by the agricultural periodical, breeders amassed a large body of practical information about heredity. This information was used to make breeding decisions on the farm, and was also challenged, extended, and modified according to breeders’ experiences and observations. Their ideas about heredity were largely in-ward looking and self-contained, but they were authoritative, and influential beyond their own spheres of interest. Charles Darwin, notably, drew from this mass of

212 evidence in developing his theories of evolution and hereditary transmission, which in turn were used by breeders to reinforce and explain their ideas about heredity.

This body of information on matters related to heredity was taken up by others outside of the breeding community. The authors of domestic medical manuals were directly and indirectly influenced by the ideas of breeders. They took specific information from them, as well as a more general outlook about the productive possibilities inherent in achieving control over hereditary transmission. Domestic medical manuals also referenced scientists who were influenced by breeders, such as Darwin, or Galton, and who adopted breeders’ language of stocks and breeds in talking about human heredity. Yet, as far as I could tell, while the ideas of breeders about heredity in animals were made relevant to the context of human heredity, physicians’ ideas about human heredity were not largely taken up by breeders in their understanding of heredity in animals.430

Domestic medical manuals themselves amassed a large amount of information about heredity from a wide range of sources. The authors of medical manuals were inclusive in the forms of evidence they accepted in developing an understanding of heredity. Certainly, as with breeders, many physician-authors drew upon their own observations of the reappearance of the same disease within a family. There was also extensive cross-referencing and borrowing that took place between domestic medical manuals, just as there was between agricultural periodicals. However, the authors of medical manuals also relied on a range of other sources of information beyond their own experiences and those of other physicians.

430 One exception that I found was that of reader “K” arguing that breeding too-closely within a family brings out diseases in animals just as it does in humans. Yet, this was a very general application of an insight about heredity in humans to the case of animals.

213

This included, as we have seen, the influence of breeders and natural scientists. Yet, the authors of domestic medical manuals also relied on information about heredity from social science research, passages from the Bible, and anecdotes from history and they encouraged readers to conduct their own observations on the subject.

Finally, the WCTU represented a third cultural site in which notions about heredity circulated. Like the authors of domestic medical manuals, the members of the Ontario

WCTU relied on a wide range of sources and ways of knowing about heredity. Alongside the primary influences of natural science, medicine, and religion the WCTU also referred to a range of social scientific and even personal anecdotal evidence in their discussions of heredity. These areas represented for the WCTU and domestic medical manuals legitimate sources of knowledge about hereditary phenomena, and thus illustrate the extent to which popular conceptions of heredity were both scientific and cultural. Finally, although to a much lesser extent than breeders and physicians, the members of the WCTU represented their own original sources of information on heredity to the extent that members were encouraged to conduct their own research on heredity by examining their family trees and by looking to their communities to examine instances of hereditary transmission of alcoholism.

Unlike in domestic medical manuals, the ideas of heredity held by breeders were not mentioned by the Ontario WCTU. The language of “stocks” employed by authors of domestic medical manuals, for example, did not appear in the reports of the annual meetings of the Ontario WCTU, and neither were there complaints that breeders paid better attention to the laws of heredity in animals than humans did in their choices to marry and reproduce.

This likely reflects in part the fact that the WCTU saw heredity as eminently malleable and open to change through healthy and moral living. They saw their role in society as promoting

214 this sort of proper living, rather than regulating the reproductive behaviours of their fellow citizens. The WCTU was concerned fundamentally with the significance of heredity for our simultaneously physical and moral constitutions. Our conscious moral behaviour was seen as both an important cause and consequence of our hereditary lineages. Since morality was not considered to be an important feature of animal lives, perhaps it is not surprising that the

WCTU did not see the insights of breeders with respect to heredity in animals to be relevant to their analysis of the spiritual implications of heredity for themselves and for society. Yet, while the WCTU did not rely directly on the ideas of breeders, this does not mean that they were isolated from breeders’ ideas. Kellogg’s conception of heredity, for example, was influenced both by Darwin and breeders in his conception of heredity. His works were recommended to members and his ideas about heredity were very closely aligned to those of the WCTU.

While the ideas of breeders were not explicitly significant for the WCTU, physicians represented an important source of knowledge on heredity. Indeed, as we have seen, many of the superintendents of the departments of heredity in Ontario and Canadian WCTU chapters were physicians themselves. Importantly, some of these physicians were also authors of domestic medical manuals. The works of John Harvey Kellogg, for example, were widely recommended within the WCTU, and he had been in contact with members of the WCTU on matters related to dress reform. Significantly, he was an author of several sexual hygiene domestic medical manuals, and was a fellow reformer himself. Mary Wood-Allen, a member of the WCTU, was also an author of sexual hygiene manuals. The WCTU reflected many of the same ideas about heredity as she asserted in her works, in particular with respect to the extent to which it was malleable and affected by the ways we lived. The types of domestic

215 medical manuals that the WCTU referenced were those that typically emphasized the malleability of heredity and its crucial role as a site of social reform, that is, sexual hygiene manuals. The authors of these manuals held similar social interests, and at times, overlapped with members of the WCTU (Kellogg’s wife was a member and Wood-Allen served as superintendent of the Department of Purity of both the American National and the World

WCTU). Therefore, to the extent that these authors’ interests were at least partially shaped by their participation in social reform movements and organizations, and given the extensive cross-referencing that took place between authors of sexual hygiene manuals, the WCTU possibly also shaped some of the ideas about heredity found in domestic medical manuals toward the end of the century. Additionally, the WCTU and domestic medical manuals also referenced some of the same sources, such as for example, Richard Dugdale’s work on the

Jukes and Galton’s Hereditary Genius. Thus, there existed a complex interrelationship and interdependency between the ideas of physician authors of domestic medical manuals

(particularly sexual-hygiene manuals), social reformers, and the members of the WCTU specifically, with respect to heredity.

We can see from the above that popular ideas about heredity did not travel linearly from scientists to the public, or even simply through the medium of popular science magazines or writers. Certainly popularizers were significant, but they do not represent the whole story.431 Indeed, what this dissertation has demonstrated is that the concept of heredity

431 This is not to say that popular science writing was insignificant in disseminating ideas about heredity. For example, beginning shortly after its foundation in 1872, Popular Science (New York: D. Appleton & Co.) contained many articles on a range of issues related to the mechanisms and implications of heredity, including the works of Galton, Ribot, Darwin, Weismann, and others.

216 had a complex cultural presence exemplified by its travel between different domains of

Canadian society in the late 19th century, and by its apparent relevance to a wide range of aspects of human and animal life. The literature on the cultural history of heredity has shown that the scientific study of heredity emerged in the 19th century from a set of different cultural domains — that is, law/politics, medicine, breeding/natural history/anthropology.

This dissertation adds to this narrative a description of the other sense of what it means for heredity to have been a cultural concept. I have revealed that popular notions of heredity were influenced not only by the science of heredity, but also by at least two of the same contexts from which the science of heredity emerged, namely medicine and breeding. Yet, popular ideas about heredity were also influenced by a range of other sources, including the non-scientific. I have shown how these notions articulated, in different ways for different groups of people, with prevailing ideas about the human and animal body in health and illness, the nature of generation, reproduction, and development, and concerns about the state of the nation and even the human race. Finally, the pervasiveness of popular ideas about heredity, and the ways it was thought to be relevant for explaining questions about alcoholism, disease, or social change for example, suggests that these popular notions about heredity constituted a prominent and perhaps significant context in which scientific research about heredity continued to evolve and take shape.

Heredity therefore represented a thoroughly cultural concept for Canadians living during the period between 1860 and 1900. The concept of heredity had ties to a variety of different sites and forms of knowledge production that were themselves interconnected. It existed in a web of ideas that connected the animal body to the human physical and spiritual body, to the human race writ large and even the body politic. It did not mean one thing to

217 everyone, but, as we have seen, the concept of heredity was understood differently by different groups of people. The varying understandings of heredity at least partly reflected contrasting ideological interests or simply practical necessity. For this reason, this research can be used by those looking to understand aspects of late 19th century Canadian society.

The ways heredity was conceptualized and operationalized, for example, are revealing of prevailing ideas and concerns about the body and the body politic. As well, this research can inform those looking to study the ideological uses of science, and of the ways that the ideas of science are dialectically related to social practices. Moreover, the wide range of sources from which groups of Canadians drew in developing their notions of heredity begins to blur the distinction between cultural and scientific concepts, and indeed, between “science” and

“culture.” We have at once notions of heredity that come from systematic investigations of the natural world characteristic of natural science and medicine, as well as the more implicit and practical knowledge of breeders and farmers. Additionally, we have seen that heredity was conceptualized in terms of the dynamics of the social world, as well as in the context of certain religious frameworks. At times, it was all of these things at once. Certainly, it did not belong to one group of people, such as scientists or breeders. Instead, many were able to speak on its behalf.

In late 19th century Canada, as elsewhere, heredity represented not only a significant object of scientific investigation, but it also served as a popular and useful concept for lay audiences to make sense of the natural and biological world. It was a malleable concept that was understood and operationalized in different ways by different groups of people.

Significantly, heredity was understood to be an effective and feasible point of access for individuals to attempt to assert their control over the rapidly changing natural, social, and

218 political scenes that characterized the second half of the 19th century in Canada. Rather than existing only in the minds and laboratories of scientists, heredity structured the ways that at least three groups of Canadians thought about the nature of the health, disease, and morality of not only their own bodies, but also of the Canadian body politic.

Epilogue: Eugenics

This story about popular notions of heredity does not end here. The rediscovery of

Mendel’s works in 1901, and the subsequent rapid formation of the discipline of genetics around the study of the gene signalled the beginning of a new era characterized by the

“hardening” of scientific concepts of heredity around the study of genes and chromosomes.

However, the many popular understandings and connotations of heredity did not simply disappear with these scientific changes. A new social and political climate imbued with an optimistic faith in the value of scientific progress and social engineering provided a new context for making sense of the biological phenomena and social implications that were already associated with heredity in the public mind. In the early decades of the 20th century, a new science of eugenics, which saw our hereditary makeup as the most efficient and scientific means to effect social progress, offered a new venue for those longstanding currents of thought in which concepts of heredity structured popular thinking about human health, illness, and sociality.

Eugenics in Canada represented more of a “checkered” set of local individuals, concerns, and solutions, than a unified movement.432 However, in general, it was characterized by a focus on attempts to restrict immigration, and later, to promote sterilization measures. Supporters of eugenics in Canada were particularly concerned with the economic and racial consequences of growing numbers of “inferior” people populating

432 To borrow the term from Strange and Stephen, “Eugenics in Canada: A Checkered History.”

219 220 the country, and therefore emphasized measures designed to keep such people out, and to limit the propagation of those already in the country. These interests were formalized with the establishment of organizations such as the Canadian National Committee on Mental

Hygiene (CNCMH) in 1918 and the Eugenics Society of Canada (ESC) in 1930. The

CNCMH, which was concerned with the causative role of feeble-mindedness in such problems as crime and prostitution, came to support immigration restrictions for individuals deemed to be feeble-minded and carried out a number of provincial surveys on the extent and care of feeble-mindedness.433 The ESC was formed with many of the same members and concerns as the CNCMH. In practice, the outcome of these organizations did not match the enthusiasm and support they held. Explicitly eugenic immigration policies were not enacted.

However, eugenic reasoning (to remove or prohibit the entry of those deemed

“feebleminded” or generally “unfit”) did shape deportation orders and amendments to the

Immigration Act in the early 20th century to the extent that they effectively constituted eugenic measures.434 With respect to dealing with “defectives” born in Canada, only Alberta and British Columbia passed sterilization laws, in 1928 and 1933, respectively, despite similar bills or commissions of inquiry being introduced in many other provinces.435

Eugenics as a social movement lost momentum and its prominent visibility after 1941, although it by no means disappeared. The CNCMH was renamed the Canadian Mental

Health Association in 1950, and sterilizations continued to be performed in Alberta and

433 McLaren, Our Own Master Race, 59-60, 113; Dowbiggin, Keeping America Sane, 167-179. 434 Strange and Stephen, “Eugenics in Canada,” 528-530. 435 Yet, these were not insignificant: around 3,000 people were sterilized in Alberta and British Columbia as a result of this legislation. The vast majority of these took place in Alberta. Dyck, Facing Eugenics, 1.

221

British Columbia into the 1950’s and 60’s. Indeed, their sterilization laws were not repealed until 1972 and 1973, respectively.436

There was widespread public and professional support for eugenics in Canada in the early decades of the 20th century. Crucially, support for eugenics came from the same groups of Canadian audiences which this thesis has examined — namely, physicians, women social reformers, and farmers, among others. Indeed, physicians, psychiatrists, and public health officials represented many of the significant and visible proponents of eugenics in Canada.

Psychologist Clarence Hincks established the CNCMH, for example, and physician William

Hutton, along with businessman A.R. Kaufman, established the ESC. Helen MacMurchy, physician and Canada’s “inspector of the feeble-minded,” popularized the notion of feeble- mindedness and its pressing dangers for the Canadian population with the publication of her

1920, The Almosts: A Study of the Feebleminded. She was also an outspoken proponent of eugenics in Canada.437 Equally vocal support of eugenic measures came from progressive women social reformers, such as those involved in the temperance and women's suffrage movements. Several of Alberta’s “Famous Five,” for example, were crucially involved in helping pass the province’s sterilization legislation, and members of the WCTU in Alberta were also engaged in the effort. Finally, support for sterilization legislation in Alberta came to fruition only after the United Farmers of Alberta (UFA) was elected to power in 1921.

Established in 1909, the UFA and later, the United Farm Women of Alberta (UFWA), aimed to protect and support the interests of farmers and labourers. The UFA came to support not

436 Strange and Stephen, “Eugenics in Canada,” 532-533. 437 Strange and Stephen, “Eugenics in Canada,” 525-533.

222 only women’s suffrage, but also eugenics and sterilization as means to improve the social conditions and welfare of rural Albertans.438

Given this context, my study of popular notions of heredity in the late 19th century particularly raises questions about how these notions translated or not into eugenic thought in the 20th century. In what follows, I will trace certain continuities and discontinuities in the ideas about heredity of my three groups of audiences as they moved into the context of eugenic thinking in the early 20th century.

Breeders, Farmers, and Agricultural Periodicals Through the use of pedigree analysis and rhetoric about better human breeding and human stocks, eugenicists in North America and elsewhere adopted the tools and language of breeders in establishing their science of better human breeding. In the United States, the connection between breeders, genetics, and eugenics was epitomized by the American

Breeder’s Association (ABA). Founded in 1903, the ABA aimed to bring together practical plant and animal breeders with scientists studying the laws of heredity.439 Its official publication, the Journal of Heredity, formerly the American Breeders’ Magazine, contained a range of articles, including the explicitly eugenic.440 In this case, we see a periodical that combined the interests of plant and animal breeders with eugenics. I did not find any

438 Strange and Stephen, “Eugenics in Canada,” 523-532; Dyck, Facing Eugenics, 9-12. 439 Yet, as Barbara Kimmelman has shown, there were also tensions between the eugenic and agricultural interests in the ABA. Kimmelman, “American Breeders’ Association.” 440 The American Breeders’ Magazine was founded in 1910, and in 1914 it was renamed the Journal of Heredity — the same year the ABA was renamed the American Genetic Association.

223 references to eugenics in the pages of the Canadian agricultural periodicals I examined, even among those that continued well into the 20th century. Yet, while these particular journals might not have been responsible for explicitly popularizing notions of eugenics, they were certainly crucial in making widely available to farmers and breeders notions of heredity and good breeding, and of the population-wide implications of solid breeding programs.

Domestic Medical Manuals More direct links to eugenics could be found among domestic medical manuals. In

1920, J.L. Nichols & Co. published an edition of Jefferis and Nichols’ Search Lights on

Health, with a new subtitle: “The Science of Eugenics.”441 Yet, aside from a few minor changes — such as some new illustrations and the removal of a lengthy section giving home lessons in mesmerism, hypnotism, and animal magnetism — the 1920 eugenics manual remained almost exactly the same in content as the original sexual hygiene manual published in 1894 with the subtitle “A Complete Sexual Science and a Guide to Purity and Physical

Manhood.” In 1925, Jefferis and Nichols completely reworked their manual, giving it a new name — Safe Counsel, or, Practical Eugenics — and adding a new introductory section on the science of eugenics, which included discussions of eugenic marriage licenses, sterilization of the unfit, and birth control. In the preface to this new edition, they asserted that old-fashioned theories had here been replaced with new scientific facts, yet much

441 Jefferis and Nichols, Science of Eugenics.

224 remained the same from their earlier manuals.442 Significantly, these later editions of Jefferis and Nichols’ sexual hygiene manual suggest a clear line of continuity between discussions of heredity taking place in earlier medical manuals and ideas about heredity that were integral to the 20th century eugenic movements. As the addition of a new “eugenic” subtitle in 1920 to

Jefferis and Nichols’ Search Lights without any corresponding modification of its content illustrates, the very same ideas about reproduction, marriage, and heredity that were so characteristic of sexual hygiene manuals in the late 19th century — as well as general medical and sex-specific manuals — only required a new context to be considered “eugenic” ideas in the 20th. This is not an isolated case. In 1917, John Harvey Kellogg released a new edition of his Plain Facts for Old and Young (as Plain Facts about Sexual Life had been renamed) with a new section on eugenics.443 These examples suggest that medical manuals might have served as one means, among others, by which ideas about heredity came to be widespread, and even common sense, by the time the eugenics movement gained full momentum. Hence, the consumption of medical manuals by Canadians (and Americans) could conceivably have paved the way for the introduction of eugenic ideas to Canada in the

20th century, and might help explain in part the ease and rapidity with which eugenic ideas and ideologies were taken up.

442 Jefferis and Nichols, Safe Counsel, 7. 443 I have not been able to find a copy of this edition, but the fact of its eugenic addition is noted in Hoolihan’s annotated catalogue of medical manuals (Hoolihan, Annotated Catalogue V1, p. 579). Here, it is the only Kellogg manual classified under the “eugenics” subheading in this catalogue, despite there being many earlier versions of his work, including of Plain Facts, listed in the index.

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The Ontario WCTU The case of the WCTU illustrates a more complicated relationship between popular ideas about heredity and the eugenics movement. Indeed, the WCTU was situated along the periphery of eugenics precisely because of its belief in the importance of heredity as the mechanism by which social change may be effected. Yet, despite having a department dedicated to the study of hygiene and heredity — which for some historians might implicate them in eugenics444 — the Ontario WCTU did not self-identify as a eugenic organization. In fact, the word eugenics did not appear in any of the reports of the Department of Hygiene and

Heredity between 1886-1910. Yet, other WCTU chapters in Canada, such as those in

Alberta, were involved in eugenic pursuits. As well, the American National WCTU began in the 1910’s to display an interest in eugenics and take note of the burgeoning movement in the

United States. Thus, an interest in heredity did not necessarily imply eugenic intent. The reasons why different WCTU chapters chose to participate in eugenic projects or not likely reflects their unique set of social, political, and organizational contexts, as well as their particular notions of heredity.

To conclude, by examining how scientific knowledge about heredity came to be assimilated into common sense through its incorporation into practical living advice by the

WCTU — as we have also seen with domestic medical manuals — the case of the WCTU contributes to an understanding of the roots of not only eugenic but even contemporary assumptions about the power of heredity. Indeed, the religious interpretations of heredity

444 And has implicated them in eugenics. For example, Valverde argues that the purpose of the Department of Hygiene and Heredity was to teach and popularize the principles of eugenics among ordinary Canadian women (e.g. Valverde, Light, Soap and Water, p. 9-14, 58-61).

226 within the WCTU have contemporary echoes in popular Texas televangelist Joel Osteen's sermon, “Activate the Right Genes.” Osteen espouses an almost identical view to the Ontario

WCTU, brought up-to-date with modern science: genes pass on both physical and moral traits, by living virtuously (that is, through God) or sinfully you activate different genes, and through epigenetic mechanisms these newly activated “good” or “bad” genes are passed on to posterity. Not only does he cite alcoholism as a paradigmatic example of “bad” inheritance, but Osteen even draws upon the infamous example — referenced by eugenicists as well as members of the WCTU — of the “degenerate” Juke family to illustrate the seriousness of his case.445 This suggests that the ideas of the WCTU, rather than representing merely an obscure interpretation of the “proper” science of heredity, captured and articulated a set of wider cultural connotations associated with the concept of heredity that remain significant today.446 Crucially, this also suggests that studying such conceptualizations of heredity during the late 19th century as those of the WCTU — as well as of breeders and the authors of domestic medical manuals — may in fact help us to understand some of the origins of contemporary ideas about the role of heredity in determining the many features of our biological and social existence.

445 Osteen, Joel. “Activate the Right Genes,” video, 23 June 2013, , accessed 22 October 2013. e.g. see Dudgale, The Jukes. 446 Osteen’s sermons are attended by thousands of followers and watched by more online; hence his views represent more than merely a “fringe” belief.

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Copyright Acknowledgement

I would like to thank the Canadian Bulletin of Medical History / Bulletin canadien d'histoire de la médecine (CBMH/BCHM) for allowing me to reproduce parts of an article originally published in the journal in 2015. Bedford, R. “Heredity as Ideology: Ideas of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union of the United States and Ontario on Heredity and Social Reform, 1880-1900” Canadian Bulletin of Medical History, 32.1 (2015): 77-100.