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EUGENICS, HUMAN GENETICS and HUMAN FAILINGS the Eugenics Society, Its Sources and Its Critics in Britain Pauline M.H.Mazumdar

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EUGENICS, HUMAN GENETICS and HUMAN FAILINGS the Eugenics Society, Its Sources and Its Critics in Britain Pauline M.H.Mazumdar EUGENICS, HUMAN GENETICS AND HUMAN FAILINGS The Eugenics Society, its sources and its critics in Britain Pauline M.H.Mazumdar London and New York 1992 CONTENTS List of illustrations vii Preface x INTRODUCTION 1 1 THE EUGENICS EDUCATION SOCIETY: THE TRADITION, THE 5 SETTING AND THE PROGRAMME 2 THE AGE OF PEDIGREES: THE METHODOLOGY OF EUGENICS, 40 1900–20 3 IDEOLOGY AND METHOD: R.A.FISHER AND RESEARCH IN 69 EUGENICS 4 THE ATTACK FROM THE LEFT: MARXISM AND THE NEW 106 MATHEMATICAL TECHN JQUES 5 HUMAN GENETICS AND THE EUGENICS PROBLEMATIC 142 EPILOGUE AND CONCLUSION 184 Notes 193 Bibliography 232 Frontispiece Pedigree of the Wedgwood-Darwin-Galton family, the model family of the eugenics movement EUGENICS, HUMAN GENETICS AND HUMAN FAILINGS What is the history of the British eugeriics movement? Why should it be of interest to how scientists work today? This outstanding study follows the history of the eugeriics movements from its roots to its heyday as the source of a science of human genetics. The primary contributions of the book are fourfold. First, it points to nineteenth-century social reform as contributing to the later eugenics movement. Second, it is based upon important archival material newly available to researchers. This material gives the reader an insight into the inner councils of the Society that could not have been obtained by relying upon published sources alone. Third, it treats the statistical methods involved in human genetics historically, in a way that allows the reader to follow their development and tie them to their context within the eugenics movement. Previous treatment of eugenics has not tended to view it as a science whose methods required serious consideration. Fourth, it provides a historical introduction to the current problems connected with the huge international projects for the mapping of the human genome. New methods developed in the 1980s have created new interest in pinpointing the genes for diseases such as Huntington’s chorea. With this scientific success there has come a renewal of interest in, and fears of, eugenics in both Europe and America. Comprehensive and compelling, this book will be of interest to historians of medicine and science, sociologists, social historians, psychologists and human geneticists. Scholarly and penetrating, Pauline Mazumdar’s study of eugenics is a major contribudon not only to the sociology of science, but to our understanding of the complex relation between science, ideology and class. Bryan S.Turner, Professor in Sociology, University of Essex Pauline M.H.Mazumdar is Associate Professor in the History of Medicine, Toronto University. ILLUSTRATIONS Frontispiece Pedigree of the Wedgwood—Darwin-Galton family, the model family of the eugenics movement FIGURES 1.1 Curves showing the retarded growth of the lower-class 16 schoolchild compared to children from middle-class homes 1.2 The declinirig birth rate in Britain 48 2.1 Pearson’s view of intelligence as a graduated parameter 69 following a normal distribution 2.2 Standardisation disation of the pedigree diagram: a and b 73 Lidbetter’s pauper pedigrees in their original unstandardised form; c The standardised pedigree 2.3 a, b and c Lidbetter’s pauper pedigrees from lantern slides 78 2.4 Two charts by Tredgold showing alcoholism, tuberculosis and 81 town life as causes, and amentia, insanity and epilepsy as effects 2.5 a and b Pedigrees demonstrating the inheritance of feeble- 83 mindedness as a Mendelian recessive 2.6 Pedigrees collected from the medical literature by Pearson and 84 his group 2.7 Part of a six-generation pedigree, showing the prolific breeding 86 and the intermarriages of ‘pauper stocks’ 2.8 Galton’s ‘standard scheme of descent’, showing how regression 88 to the mean population value takes place 2.9 A Lidbetter pedigree used by Frederick Mott 90 2.10 An Ahnentafel showing the inheritance of the peculiar lip, the 91 overshot jaw and flattened skull of the noble Habsburg family 2.11 An Ahnentafel of the type known as Sippschaftstafel, showing 93 the propositus as the focal point of the family’s genetic load 3.1 The Broadbalk experiment: a plan of the plots in 1905 114 3.2 Yields of wheat from Broadbalk Field, Rothamsted, ten-year 117 means, 1852–1922 3.3 Fisher’s experiment on the response of potato varieties to 120 different fertilizers 3.4 The Latin square method of randomising the distribution of 122 fertiliser treatments to correct for heterogeneity in the field environment 3.5 A Lidbetter pedigree showing two families living next door to 141 one another 4.1 John Burdon Sanderson Haldane, a cartoon by Vicky 176 4.2 Haldane’s calculation of the rates of genetic change 180 4.3 Haldane’s map of the homologous part of human sex 184 chromosomes 4.4 Heights of males by social groups 188 5.1 Pedigrees contributed by E.O.Lewis 199 PLATES I Rothamsted Experimental Station 112 II The Broadbalk experiment: Lawes and Gilbert’s demonstration of 115 the effects of a nitrogenous dressing on plant growth III Lionel Sharples Penrose 219 IV Lancelot Hogben 220 TABLES 3.1 The Broadbalk wheat experiment, 1852–1920 113 3.2 Wheat varieties planted in Broadbalk, 1852–1921 116 5.1 Penrose’s model of a population in genetical equilibrium 252 PREFACE The most obvious debt I incurred in writing this book has been to the Eugenics Society itself. I first became interested in the Society through the work of the statistician R.A.Fisher on the genetics of the blood groups; it was this that led me to investigate the background to the setting up of the blood grouping unit at the Galton Laboratory in 1935. When I contacted the Society in 1976, the Secretary, Ms Eileen Walters, made me welcome at its library and offices, and gave me access to many documents that were not public property in any way. I was later elected to a Fellowship of the Society. No one at the Society has seen this text, however. I hope that when they do, they will not feel that their kindness was a mistake. In those days, one felt a certain amount of awkwardness and hesitation in asking to see private materials, in spite of Ms Walters’ politeness. It is otherwise nowadays, when the Society’s papers are beautifully catalogued and easily accessible at the Wellcome Institute. Working in the Society’s library at 69 Eccleston Square, too, is no longer an experience that the historian can have: in 1989, the library was transferred to the Wellcome, and the Society itself has changed its name to the Galton Institute. Besides the Society, many others have helped me in this work. I should particularly mention Ms Julia Sheppard, Archivist at the Wellcome, and Mrs Dorothy Hanks at the National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, MD, who made my summers at the library a pleasure for many years, until her retirement in 1987. She has been greatly missed. Several colleagues read my slowly evolving manuscript and made helpful comments: they include Bruce Sinclair, Charles Rosenberg, Daniel Kevles and Bernard Norton, a deeply admired friend who is now dead. I should also acknowledge the inspiration generated by the lively discussions at the Eugenics Seminar that we organised in 1985 at the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, University of Toronto. Among the participants, Gordon McOuat and Cyril Greenland were of special significance in helping me to straighten out my thoughts on several problems. Funding for my work came at the beginning and the end: at the beginning, from the Wellcome Institute, which very generously funded my early work on R.A.Fisher, and at the end, from the Hannah Institute for the History of Medicine, Toronto, which paid for several long stays in London, as well as from a Leave Fellowship of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Finally, I must thank my husband, Dipak, both for additional insights into the economic problems of the urban poor, and for putting up so patiendy with all kinds of aggro as this work slowly reached its conclusion. INTRODUCTION This book is an account of the eugenics movement in Britain. It is centred mainly on the Eugenics Society, founded in 1907 as the Eugenics Education Society, with the purpose of promoting, to paraphrase Francis Galton, those agencies under social control which might improve the human race. As this definition shows, its interests lay both in human biology and in social problems. Its members were mainly either biological or social scientists, with a proportion of social activists who were not scientists, but who found its social goals important enough to devote themselves to the Society and the eugenics movement. The eugenists, and, as I shall argue, their successors the human geneticists, worked within a well-defined and quite recognisable problematic. A problematic has been defined as a field of concepts which organises a particular science by making it possible to ask some kinds of questions and suppressing others.1 It determines the choice of problems which are to seem significant. In the case of the science of eugenics as it developed in Britain, a central part in the problematic was played by social class, which made itself felt not only in the narrow social group which actually joined the Eugenics Society, but in the Society’s programme of investigation and advocacy. This part of the eugenic problematic reaches far back into the nineteenth century, to the efforts of the reforming middle class to improve the lives of their inferiors in the classes below them. It was established well before the appearance of the hereditarianism associated with Francis Galton, but it was this Galtonian element which provided the particular solution to the problem of the pauper class that distinguished the Society from its sister societies of the middle-class activist network, and it was this element that was critical in bringing the Society into existence.
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