The eugenics movement had established the paradigm that mental illness was genetically inherited
Aaron Rosanoff had adjusted the definition of mental illness to make his inheritance calculations more accurate in order to justify the sterilization of the mentally ill. Twenty-five years later, Boston psychiatrist Abraham Myerson pointed out how laughably bad this science was. “Whole diversities of things are artificially united. Thus, if a father has a sick headache and his descendant has dementia praecox, the two conditions are linked together in a hereditary chain.” Yet in the wake of Rosanoff’s 1911 study, mental illness as a Mendelian disorder became the scientific paradigm presented to the public. The Science of Eugenics, a popular book published in 1917, told readers that “when both parents are normal but belong to insane stock, about one-fourth of their children will become insane.”
The 1920 Manual on Psychiatry, a medical text edited by Rosanoff, declared, “Most of the inherited mental disorders are, like the trait of blue eyes, transmitted in the manner of Mendelian recessives.” Biologist Paul Popenoe, editor of the Journal of Heredity, explained that when an “insane” person “mates with a normal individual, in whose family no taint is found, the offspring (generally speaking) will all be mentally sound, even though one parent is affected. On the other hand, if two people from tainted stocks marry, although neither one may be personally defective, part of their offspring will be affected.” With such scientific dogma in mind, the New York Times editorialized in 1923 that “it is certain that the marriage of two mental defectives ought to be prohibited.”
References
- Whitaker, Robert. (2002). Mad in America Chapter 3. UNFIT TO BREED (p. 81). New York, NY: Basic Books.
Metadata
Type:🔴 Tags: Biology / Psychiatry / History Status:☀️