Abstract
The chapter begins with an account of the author’s visit to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. He pauses in front of a photomural depicting the Hadamar Psychiatric Institute, the site of one of the Action T4 centers for killing the mentally ill, organized by Nazi psychiatrists as a part of their efforts to improve the Aryan race. After noting that the idea that mental illness has a hereditary basis goes back a lot further than that, the roots of the idea that mental illnesses are hereditary conditions is traced, going back to the beginning of the asylum era and ending with the admonition of Eugen Bleuler (the psychiatrist who coined the term “schizophrenia”) that we must take drastic action or else “our race must rapidly degenerate.”
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsNotes
- 1.
Hugh Gregory Gallagher, By Trust Betrayed: Patients, Physicians, and the License to Kill in the Third Reich (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1990), 20–21.
- 2.
Ibid., 21.
- 3.
Nicholas Vincent, “Goffredo de Prefettii and the Church of Bethlehem in England,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 49 no. 2 (April 1998):213–235.
- 4.
Basil Clarke, Mental Disorder in Earlier Britain: Exploratory Studies (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1975), 79.
- 5.
Edward Shorter, A History of Psychiatry (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1997), 5–8.
- 6.
Devin Binder, Karl Schaller, and Hans Clusmann, “The Seminal Contributions of Johann Christian Reil to Anatomy, Physiology, and Psychiatry,” Neurosurgery, 61, no. 5 (November 2007): 1092, https://doi.org/10.1227/01.neu.0000303205.15489.23; Andreas Marneros, “Psychiatry’s 200th Birthday,” British Journal of Psychiatry, 193, no. 1 (July 2008): 1, https://doi.org/10.1192/bjp.bp.108.051367
- 7.
John Haslam, Observations on Insanity (London: F. and C. Rivington, 1809), 99.
- 8.
For an account of the era of moral therapy, see Chap. 10 of this volume.
- 9.
Shorter, History, 46–68.
- 10.
For a vivid description of the somatic therapies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, see Elliot S. Valenstein, Great and Desperate Cures: The Rise and Decline of Psychosurgery and Other Radical Treatment for Mental Illness (New York: Basic Books, 1986). A detailed and often shocking account of the career of Henry Cotton can be found in Andrew Scull, Madhouse: A Tragic Tale of Megalomania and Modern Medicine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
- 11.
Shorter, History, 49–52.
- 12.
Ibid., 94.
- 13.
Ian Dowbiggin, “Degeneration and Hereditarianism in French Mental Medicine 1840–90: Psychiatric Theory as Ideological Adaptation,” in The Anatomy of Madness: Essays in the History of Psychiatry, ed. W.F. Bynum, R. Porter, and M. Sheperd (London: Tavistock, 1985), 208.
- 14.
Ibid., 189.
- 15.
Ibid., 208–210.
- 16.
Shorter, History, 96–97.
- 17.
Some nineteenth-century researchers imagined that idiocy, epilepsy, albinism, and deaf-mutism all were manifestations of the same ill-defined hereditary factor. See Theodore M. Porter, Genetics in the Madhouse: The Unknown History of Human Heredity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), 138.
- 18.
For an account of Gregor Mendel’s life and works, see Herbert Wendt, In Search of Adam (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1956), 309–314.
- 19.
John Haslam, Illustrations of Madness (London: F. and C. Rivington, 1810).
- 20.
Shorter, History, 103.
- 21.
Ibid., 105–107.
- 22.
Thomas Szasz, Schizophrenia: The Sacred Symbol of Psychiatry (New York: Basic Books, 1976), 10.
- 23.
Paolo Fusar-Poli and Pierluigi Politi, “Paul Eugen Bleuler and the Birth of Schizophrenia (1908),” American Journal of Psychiatry, 165, no. 11 (November 2008): 1407.
- 24.
Paul Eugen Bleuler, Textbook of Psychiatry, trans. A. A. Brill (New York: Macmillan Press, 1924) 434.
- 25.
Ibid., 214.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Hahn, P.D. (2019). The Beginning. In: Madness and Genetic Determinism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21866-9_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21866-9_1
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-21865-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-21866-9
eBook Packages: Behavioral Science and PsychologyBehavioral Science and Psychology (R0)