“Social Mendelism: Races, Genes and Cultural Anxieties”

Amir Teicher (Tel Aviv University)

Historical accounts of German and American eugenics routinely confer Darwin’s evolution-through-natural-selection, with its related concepts of struggle, competition, and survival, the role of eugenic’s foundational scientific theory. In these accounts, Mendelism is usually equated with ‘hereditarianism’ or ‘genetic-reductionism’ and symbolizes the final rejection of the inheritance of acquired characters. However, much more than simply a theory of ‘hard heredity’, Mendelism provided a set of ideas, terms, tools, metaphors, images and descriptions of dynamic processes, which not only had tangible impacts on the scientific study of human and biological diversity, but also left a clear imprint on cultural perceptions and on the social imagination as well. Particularly in Germany, Mendelian thought became pivotal for for reshaping fundamental social perceptions after 1900. Notions such as purity and disease, racial difference and social harmony, hereditary burden and medical danger were all re-formulated in light of Mendelian teaching. After 1933, these changes influenced directly Nazi racial-hygienic policies, from the sterilization of the mentally ill to the extermination of Jews and other ‘racial aliens’. Using diverse archival sources - scientists’ notebooks, schoolchildren’s exams and teacher’s manuals, films and other popular media and finally hereditary-courts’ proceedings and governmental correspondences - I will explore the various manifestations of Mendelism in German bio-political thought and analyze the social impacts the rise of modern genetics had on German society from 1900 to 1945.

“’Not Punishment, but Protection’: Eugenics, State-Sponsored Social Welfare, and Industrial Dislocation in North Carolina 1929-1941”

Dana Landress (UC Berkeley)

Between 1929-1941, American eugenic practices and ideologies were critical to state-sponsored social welfare programs, which measured the adaptability of recent agricultural migrants to urban industrial centers, quantified the employability of welfare recipients through mechanical aptitude examinations, and organized industrial training schools for impoverished youth to prepare them for work in cotton textile mills. As one prominent eugenicist remarked, “many of them [unemployables] have a high grade of deficiency…these unfit cannot master abstractions but can often be made into efficient workers.” Social welfare programs, such as those sponsored by the North Carolina State Board of Charities and Public Welfare, administered funds for the “socially inadequate,” worked closely with the Eugenics Board to recommend individuals for sterilization, and allocated significant financial and social resources to the state’s eight industrial training schools. Many industrial training schools required students to receive sterilizations prior to their authorization for work in factories or mill villages. While southern states often left eugenics practices to the discretion of local agencies or individual social workers, all operated on the premise that ‘inherited’ biological traits, such as productivity, adaptability, and efficiency, made some groups more effective than others at navigating social and economic life during the Great Depression. This paper seeks to contribute to the standing literature on American eugenics with an argument about the centrality of industrial dislocation and the crisis of unemployment to eugenics practices in the decade following the stock market crash of 1929.

“Recovering Race in the History of Medicine in Twentieth-Century Mexico”

Steven Server (University of Chicago)

Race has been increasingly relevant in studies aiming to investigate the history of medicine in the Anglo-American context. But what is the status of race in Latin American medicine, a context in which societies have insisted upon their racial democracy, for almost as long as their nations have embraced Western biomedicine? Is the ambivalent or outright missing consideration of race as an analytic in the history of medicine in Mexico a reflection of Mexico’s success in creating racially universal medical approaches? I suggest—based on the work of contemporary social scientists—that the answer is a resounding “no.” In this paper, I argue that race is a salient, if sometimes subtle, factor in the history of Mexican medicine. By rereading of some crucial primary sources in the history of medicine in Mexico of the twentieth century, particularly those dealing with indigenes and Chinese immigrants, I suggest that the racial dynamics of health have often been a hidden referent in analyses of health. I identify what I call “rhetorics of naturalization” employed by historical actors to link the cultural and the biological, and in so doing, to essentialize and naturalize the social. In this way, the cultural has come to behave as race does, while health officials, doctors, and politicians have been able to shunt critique away from the sensitive zone of biological race. I hope that this paper may shed further light on the racial disparities of health, both historically and in contemporary medical practice.

“Caring for the Diseased Nerves of Africa: The Evolution of the Neurosciences and a New Egalitarian Style of Thinking on Human Difference and Susceptibility to Neurological Diseases in Nigeria, 1962-1995”

Frank Blibo (Harvard University)

From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, certain American and European physicians/scientists linked the unequal distribution of neurological diseases between blacks and whites to differences in the anatomical structure of their nervous systems. In 1938, Harvey Cushing wrote that Negroes did not suffer from meningiomas because they had thicker meninges that protected them from cranial injuries. British physicians working in colonial Africa between the 1930s and 1950s held similar assumption. In 1944, Gelfand, from Southern Rhodesia wrote, “gliomas are rare in the Native.” However, four years later, Davies, reporting from the Mulago Hospital in Uganda, argued that although gliomas “are supposed to be seen rarely in Africans,” however, “at Mulago they are the commonest brain tumors.’” From Cushing’s Negroes in North America to Gelfand’s “Natives” in Rhodesia, these claims can be interpreted as calling attention to a particular condition of black peoples:their nerves are insusceptible to neurological diseases. Drawing on the new literature on social neuroscience, the paper contends that what made neurological diseases invisible among African Americans and Africans was not biological difference but health inequities in Jim Crow America and Colonial Africa. In 1962, the Rockefeller Foundation invested into the neurosciences at the University College Hospital-Nigeria. With this, three Nigerian neuroscientists-Odeku, Adeloye, and Osuntokun-worked consciously to make neurological diseases of all types visible among Nigerians,leading to the emergence of an egalitarian style of thinking on neurological diseases and an overthrow of the racist ideology that linked susceptibility to the disease to biological difference. What this shows is the consequences of (un)equal distribution of health resources on neuroscientific knowledge production.