Sometimes I can’t believe how long this book took. At other times it seems a wonder that I ever finished it at all. When to my delight I was nominated for a year at the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study, I decided to put forward the project whose outcome you have before you, but with a bad conscience, since I supposed the book would be done by then. Instead, I was barely halfway through the first draft when the fellowship year ended. I rarely wrote a paragraph without being driven back into the sources, and so it remained during the revisions. Patience, not my best attribute, was thrust upon me. Others had still less choice in the matter. Mary Terrall and Soraya de Chadarevian were my best critics, along with two anonymous reviewers and my editor, Brigitta van Rheinberg (who also had her patience taxed). I can never forget how fortunate I am to work at a university that values research alongside teaching and provides time and resources to do both. UCLA also has superb library facilities and librarians, who managed somehow to get every printed document I asked for.
I list below the archives and a few specialist libraries where I consulted manuscripts and rare books. Whether I visited for a few hours or for weeks, I depended on the generosity and expertise of archivists, first for collecting and cataloguing these precious resources, and then for personal guidance in identifying and using them. I benefited particularly from the knowledge and generosity of Russell Johnson and Teresa Johnson in History and Special Collections of the Louise Darling Biomedical Library at UCLA and Jack Eckert at the Countway Medical Library of Harvard University.
I began the project knowing a lot about the social and historical dimensions of data and statistics, but less about the history of heredity, and not much at all concerning asylums and psychiatry. I sent many queries to friends, colleagues, archivists, and librarians, often out of the blue, for help with things I didn’t understand or for advice on sources. Almost everyone responded, and some went to considerable trouble to help me. Other friends provided help with language and translation issues, which I especially needed for the material on Norway. If I tried to thank everyone individually, it would be a very long list, and I would no doubt forget some. I make an exception for Diane Campbell, who, decades ago, taught me much of what I know about measures of phenotypic heredity. Otherwise, it may be appropriate simply to recall how much we depend on one another as colleagues, friends, students, and teachers. You might think we would engage in bitter rivalry, and this is not unknown, but it is overwhelmed by habits of generosity.
Once again, Mary Morgan and Charles Baden Fuller generously put me up in their lovely flat when I worked in London archives. I had the good fortune to be invited for several short-term research appointments in the company of interesting colleagues, and sometimes in proximity to unique archives or library collections. Among them were visits to the ESRC Genomics Policy and Research Forum, University of Edinburgh (April 2007), the Wellcome Trust Centre for History of Medicine and the Wellcome Library in London (June 2009), the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris (November 2008), and the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle, Germany (May 2012). A Norwegian Research Council grant for a project in which I participated, “The Cultural Logic of Facts and Figures” (2013–2015), provided valuable research support as well as stimulating intellectual exchange.
My gratitude to the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, extends beyond its support for a two-month summer residence in the summer of 2008. Lorraine Daston’s division of the MPI has provided superb intellectual resources for generations of researchers for over two decades. A project on history of heredity in Hans-Jörg Rheinberger’s division helped shape the idea for the approach I take here. My career in history of science has often brought me to Germany, and I take this opportunity to recall the important stimulus I received long ago, and still do, from programs and especially friendships formed at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research of the University of Bielefeld.
For research support on this project I acknowledge gratefully two Scholar’s Awards from the National Science Foundation: SES 06–22346 (2006–2010) and SES 10–27100 (2010–2013). Those funds supported much of the travel and leave time that made the work possible. In combination with a grant from the University of California Humanities Society of Fellows, these NSF funds enabled me to spend a happy, collegial, and productive year (2010–2011) as a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University. Three years later, in 2013–2014, I passed another wonderful year at an institute for advanced study, this time the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin, as part of a highly collegial research group with shared interests in numbers, measures, accounts, and rankings. In Berlin and Stanford, I got to trade in my car for a bicycle and to hang out with new people from diverse backgrounds under circumstances that encouraged conversation. Both also offered dedicated, friendly, and resourceful librarians and staff to make the year rewarding. So much to be grateful for!
My son, David Porter, who was in high school when I began this book, is now wrapping up a dissertation in Chinese history. I learn a lot from him these days.
18 September 2017