Representing Heredity: Asylum Tables of Family Insanity
For at least a century beginning from about 1820, the presentation of data on human heredity was associated mainly with the treatment and confinement of mental patients. These assumed a variety of forms, reflecting both evolving technologies of tabular representation and new ways of framing the problem of inherited illness. Although a quantitative dimension was present from the beginning, early asylum doctors (and statisticians) were usually content to show qualitative associations of mental illness within families.
The focus of this talk by Theodore Porter was on the development of evolving forms of tabular presentation in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, created to get at structures of causes and to measure the effects of parental characteristics on their offspring. From numbered lists of causes to pedigree charts, each of these visual technologies presented problems as well as opportunities for an emerging eugenic project.
About the Historian
Theodore Porter teaches various topics involving the history of science, especially the human sciences. By 1980, he became interested in diverse sites of knowledge-making—not just universities and academics, but mining boards, statistical agencies (notably census offices), engineering corps, and mental hospitals. Most of Porter’s work has involved the use of statistics, calculation, numbers, measures, and data. His most recent book, Genetics in the Madhouse: The Unknown History of Human Heredity (2018), recovers a long-forgotten form of hereditary investigation that took shape in the 1820s.
