The meaning of heredity in American medicine and popular health advice: 1771-1860

This study focuses on the definition of heredity among regular physicians, authors of popular health advice, and selected health reformers in the United States between 1771 and 1860. Theories of hereditary disease, hereditary predisposition, birth defects, and heredity in relation to race and class are examined. Among the sources analyzed are the Boston Journal of Medicine and Surgery 1828-1860; William Buchan's Domestic Medicine (1771 American edition); Aristotle's Compleat MasterPiece (1684); and selected writings of Henry Clarke Wright, Hester Pendleton, Samuel Gridley Howe, John Bovee Dods, John Humphrey Noyes, and Orson S. Fowler.; No one theory of heredity dominated the thinking of physicians, popular health reformers and the various sects of medical practice during this period. Yet the preponderant view can be summarized quite simply: Hereditary diseases and disorders were ubiquitous. Almost every family carried some form of hereditary taint. Still human beings exercised considerable control over whether or not a hereditary predisposition lay dormant in their systems or developed into a disease.; Virtually all physicians and health reformers assumed that acquired characters were inherited. Given that little was known about germ cells during the period outside of their general morphology, medical practitioners assumed that environmental forces determined the mechanism of inheritance. They did not conceive of any internal mechanism of autonomous development. Thus, health practitioners placed the blame for poor health and the transmission of deleterious traits squarely on the shoulders of men and women. They traced all deformities and imperfections in the offspring to previous deeds or chronic bad habits of the parents. The potency of habitual action behavior was a key concept in hereditary theory at this time.; Physicians and health reformers believed that the turbulent social, political and economic climate contributed to the decline in human health. Both groups singled out the irregularities and disorder of urban life, the stress of career ambitions in a capitalist society, and uncertainties about one's economic future as exciting causes of hereditary disease and degeneration. Regular physicians created a literature that helped to establish the myth that Negroes were biologically and psychologically distinct from European white settlers.