Sep 17, 2018
The untold story of how hereditary data in mental hospitals gave rise to the science of human heredity
https://press.princeton.edu/titles/11242.html
In the early 1800s, a century before there was any concept of
the gene, physicians in insane asylums began to record causes of
madness in their admission books. Almost from the beginning, they
pointed to heredity as the most important of these causes. As
doctors and state officials steadily lost faith in the capacity of
asylum care to stem the terrible increase of insanity, they began
emphasizing the need to curb the reproduction of the insane. They
became obsessed with identifying weak or tainted families and
anticipating the outcomes of their marriages. Genetics in
the Madhouse is the untold story of how the collection
and sorting of hereditary data in mental hospitals, schools for
"feebleminded" children, and prisons gave rise to a new science of
human heredity.
In this compelling book, Theodore Porter draws on untapped archival
evidence from across Europe and North America to bring to light the
hidden history behind modern genetics. He looks at the
institutional use of pedigree charts, censuses of mental illness,
medical-social surveys, and other data techniques--innovative
quantitative practices that were worked out in the madhouse long
before the manipulation of DNA became possible in the lab. Porter
argues that asylum doctors developed many of the ideologies and
methods of what would come to be known as eugenics, and deepens our
appreciation of the moral issues at stake in data work conducted on
the border of subjectivity and science.
A bold rethinking of asylum work, Genetics in the
Madhouse shows how heredity was a human science as well
as a medical and biological one.
Theodore M. Porter is Distinguished Professor of History and holds the Peter Reill Chair at the University of California, Los Angeles. His books include Karl Pearson: The Scientific Life in a Statistical Age, Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life, and The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820–1900 (all Princeton). He lives in Altadena, California.
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Theodore Porter
http://www.history.ucla.edu/faculty/theodore-porterDistinguished Professor of History & Vice Chair for Academic Personnel
My first book, The Rise of Statistical
Thinking (1986), was
about the development of statistical ideas and methods in fields
ranging from the social science of statistics to biological
evolution and thermodynamics. This interest in the relations of the
natural and the social is also central to my Trust
in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public
Life (1995). There I emphasize that effective
quantification is never a matter simply of discovery, but always
also of administration, hence of social and technological power.
Quantitative objectivity is in a way a form of standardization, the
use of rules to confine and tame the personal and subjective.
Science did not always idealize this mechanical form of
objectivity, but has come to do so (at least in its rhetoric) as an
adaptation to modern political and administrative cultures—which it
at the same time has helped to shape. In both of these books I
invert the usual account of the relations between natural and
social science, by showing how some of the crucial assumptions and
methods of science arose within contexts of application. The
history of quantification is the history of a social technology,
reflecting a sensibility that is as closely linked to fields like
accounting and cost-benefit analysis and to social science as to
physics. The ethic of systematic calculation as a basis for social
decisions—and often, as in inferential statistics, also for
scientific demonstration—responds to a political culture marked by
distrust of elites and even, in a way, of experts.
In 2003, Dorothy Ross and I completed a book on the history of the
social sciences, volume VII of The Cambridge History
of Science volume on The Modern
Social Sciences (2003). This is our pioneering
effort to provide a synthetic history of social science since the
eighteenth century, in relation to each other and to the sciences
of nature. The volume tells a story not of detached knowledge, but
of tools, theories, and images that have helped to create the
modern world.
My most recent book is Karl Pearson: The
Scientific Life in a Statistical Age (2004).
This is a biographical study of a scientist who was ever in revolt
against the confines of this or any professional identity and who
lived his life, with conscious reference to Goethe, as a
bildungsroman. At the age of 23, after his German Wanderjahre, he
published a fictionalized autobiography under the
title The New Werther, and followed it with a passion
play for the nineteenth-century. For a decade after that he threw
himself into writings on socialism, on the cultural history of the
German Reformation (he loathed Martin Luther), and on sexuality,
friendship, and the status of women. I’ve been fascinated by the
continuities between his works and experiences in these years and
the statistical labors that absorbed him after about 1892. I am
interested, too, in his deep relationship to nature as an object of
passionate attraction, which yet, when approached in the true
spirit of science, must always be remote. Pearson’s life displays a
deep and revealing ambivalence between scientific method as a way
of controlling the merely personal and science as an expression of
individuality that is inseparable from wisdom and maturity.
Finally, I think I have learned some new things about the relation
of statistics to all of this, as well as to ether theories in
physics and graphical methods in engineering instruction.
I have advised or am advising graduate students working on a
variety of historical topics: science and rational leisure; social
science and colonial administration; nature and imperialism in the
North Atlantic; Chinese mathematics; the British census; scientific
exchanges in the Eastern Mediterranean; psychical research; museums
and ethnology in imperial Germany..
My current book project, which I intend to finish during my stay at
the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin in 2013-14, is about this history
of human heredity, and more particularly how insane asylums and
related institutions became important sites for recordkeeping on
conditions regarded as hereditary, and for research on their
presumed inheritance. These institutions developed the ideologies
and some of the research methods of eugenics decades before Francis
Galton announced this biological human science. From the beginning
it was a science of data and statistics. The history of data
practices and analysis is as central to the history of genetics and
genomics as is the more familiar story of Mendelian breeding, fruit
flies, and the decoding of DNA. This project highlights the key
role of social and medical institutions, and of the expansion of
state activities, in the rise of genetics, and conversely of
hereditary ideas and practices in the shaping of welfare
states.
On the back burner just now, but likely to develop before too long
into a book, is a project on the contradictions of quantification
at the intersection of science and government. An ethic of the
simple fact, typically in numerical form, grew up over the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, less as an export of science
than as a political and bureaucratic role for which certain tools
of science have been shaped. The ideal has been to reconcile
central control with local autonomy, but the required faith in what
I call “thin description” is often undermined by creative
deception. Ambitions for “evidence-based” practices under the
neo-liberal governance have formed an unprecedented vulnerability
to Funny Numbers (my working
title).