Pedigrees and prejudices: Pre-WWII inherited disease classification at the US eugenics record office

Abstract

Pedigree charts became readily used during the era of classical genetics as symbolized recordings of inherited human diseases. They were particularly prominent tools for disseminating the work of the Eugenics Record Office (ERO), in Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island, New York. ERO-trained fieldworkers organized data on pedigree charts that became national inventories of various diseases including tuberculosis, syphilis, and alcoholism. This chapter explores ERO superintendent Harry H. Laughlin's use of pedigree charts to maneuver the flow of information of inherited disease to medical and public audiences. An advocate of the pedagogical power of visual displays since his days as a college professor, Laughlin's ERO work further propagated the use of pedigree charts to visualize the invisible. On one level, the charts served as scientific tools to display spatial arrangements of hereditary patterns of disease. On another level, they were rhetorically used to persuade society that eugenics operated within mainstream science of the era. This chapter analyzes the relationship between inheritance and disease as represented in the pedigree charts that the ERO prepared and distributed during Laughlin's superintendence. The explicit and implicit uses of various formats of ERO pedigrees are examined, including their appearance at the International Eugenics Congresses of 1912, 1921, and 1932, at the Chicago World's Fair of 1933-1934, in many county and state fairs across the USA, in routine ERO mailings across the country and to Europe, in the correspondence between physicians seeking to update classifications of inherited human disease, and in popular biology textbooks and marriage manuals.