"Polyhybrid Heterogeneous Bastards": Promoting Medical Genetics in America in the 1930s and 1940s

摘要: I examine three American researchers in the 1930s and 1940s who populate no-man's-land of medical genetics, between heyday "mainline" eugenics turn human genetics 1950s. In scientists' narratives, William Allan, Madge Macklin, Laurence Snyder appear as pioneers genetic education. Allan was a country doctor with an interest heredity. Snyder, Harvard-trained geneticist, entered through population-genetic studies blood groups. Macklin came from background academic medicine. believed approach to medicine well before offered clinical benefits. Although hereditary diseases had begun overtake infectious causes death illness, formal little more than few explanatory principles. These made their case by a) listing mostly hopeful potential applications disease; b) blurring distinction heredity; c) engaging preventive medicine, that is, eugenics. Examining careers reveals some texture eugenic thought continuities early phase professional today's practitioners take origin field.