CHAPTER 10

The Human Science of Heredity Takes On a British Crisis of Feeblemindedness, 1884-1910

It will at first sight appear presumptuous that a layman should venture into a field which has been so much cultivated by the trained medical mind.

—David Heron (1907)

Early in 1875, Francis Galton drew up an inquiry on the resemblance of twins to send around to a group of experts on “morbid heredity.” On the evidence of this circular, he was inspired by a well-known book of 1859, La psychologie morbide, by Jacques-Joseph Moreau de Tours, the source of some remarkable examples of hereditary resemblance.

He speaks “of two twin brothers who had been confined, on account of monomania, at Bicêtre. . . . Physically the two young men are so nearly alike that the one is easily mistaken for the other. Morally, their resemblance is no less complete, and is most remarkable in its details. Thus, their dominant ideas are absolutely the same. They both consider themselves subject to imaginary persecutions; the same enemies have sworn their destruction, and employ the same means to effect it. Both have hallucinations of hearing. They are both of them melancholy and morose; they never address a word to anybody, and will hardly answer the questions that others address to them. They always stay apart and never communicate with one another.

“An extremely curious fact which has been frequently noted by superintendents of their section of the Hospital, and by myself, is this:—From time to time, at very irregular intervals of two, three, and many months, without appreciable cause, and by the purely spontaneous effect of their illness, a very marked change takes place in the condition of the two brothers. Both of them, at the same time, and often on the same day, rouse themselves from their habitual stupor and prostration; they make the same complaints, and they come of their own accord to the physician, with an urgent request to be liberated. I have seen this strange thing occur, even when they were some miles apart, the one being at Bicêtre and the other living at Sainte-Anne.”1

Despite his strong faith in heredity, Galton was suspicious of such uncanny manifestations. His alienist commentators, similarly, did not go all the way with Moreau. Thomas Clouston, though claiming to have witnessed similar instances of family insanity, declared that Moreau had been carried away by his own story. “I confess that I should be much more apt to rely implicitly on a German or English account,” for the Frenchman “cannot help making it as marvelous & dramatic as possible.” It may also be noted that Moreau’s titillating tale turned the patient’s desire to escape his confinement into a proof of his madness. Galton charged Moreau with writing in too offhand a manner, with no evidence of “scrupulous exactness” in investigating the circumstances of the cases. A few months later, in a second phase of the inquiry, he drew on files of the London Orphan Asylum and related institutions to solicit information from the relatives of these children. The responses of parents, doctors, and guardians may be read among the Galton Papers at University College, London.2

Most of the replies were less elaborate than Galton seemed to wish. Henry Maudsley, the noted London alienist, was typical. He could not match Moreau’s fine tales, he said, and described rather abstractly having “met with exactly the same sort of insanity in three brothers and also in two sisters.” Clouston provided one of the better anecdotes, drawn from his experience at the Royal Edinburgh Asylum, which involved brothers growing apart as they reacted to each other and to their environment. Galton was seeking case stories to answer critics who claimed that his quantitative conclusions on “hereditary genius” were vitiated by a neglect of environment. In his published paper he offered these case reports as evidence that twins formed within a single ovum remain highly similar all their lives, even when separated, while twins from two eggs typically diverge, even when living in the same household.3

For well over a century, Galton has been credited—now mostly blamed—as a genetic pioneer and founder of eugenics. He always credited his cousin’s theory of evolution by natural selection as the inspiration for his discovery of the power of heredity and of the urgent need for eugenic action. The inquiry on twins, however, illustrates Galton’s reliance on other sources, in particular on traditions of asylum reporting. Alienists also provided ideological support and even scientific inspiration. Maudsley in 1867 surveyed an international collection of eminent alienists, including Moreau de Tours, concluding that the statistics pointed to heredity as the most important factor.4 In 1864, in the second installment of a paper on “hereditary influence” for the JMS, Maudsley declared that mediocrity, laboring steadily, will never attain genius, which, instead, typically ran in families. Galton at that time was just coming to believe that a few are born great and that the rest must be content with modest achievements. The first installment of Maudsley’s paper is still more striking. It seems to lay out in advance the challenge of Galton’s first great project on human inheritance, Hereditary Genius. Maudsley argued in 1863 that “in almost every nation which possesses a history, families might be selected that have been remarkable for special characteristics.” Two years later, Galton published the first fruit of his own investigation, which surveyed family achievements in a range of endeavors from rowing and wrestling to music and mathematics.5

Galton and Maudsley also seem to have shared a negative provocation for turning to heredity in the form of a much-discussed long footnote in Henry Thomas Buckle’s 1857 bestseller, The History of Civilization in England. Buckle there dismissed claims for heredity as anecdotal and illogical. Many prominent alienists were provoked by Buckle’s note, among them Maudsley, who wondered how Buckle could fail to recognize that hereditary influence made civilization possible. To experts in mental medicine, such as New York asylum director John Gray, this rejection of “the whole theory of hereditary transmission” seemed perverse. The statistical evidence, he said, is overwhelming, as the “entire medical profession” now recognized. Galton’s hereditarianism had a rich medical and alienist background, as he seems to have understood from the outset. He and Maudsley also agreed that madness was somehow allied with genius. Twenty-five years later, Galton published a communication on inherited lunacy in cats.6

By 1892, when he reprinted his book, public interest in his evolving scheme for the cultivation of hereditary talent was much intensified. Yet the primary focus of eugenic ambition remained the inheritance of mental and psychological weakness, not of brilliant achievement.7 The terrible failure of asylum medicine to halt the growth of insanity inspired desperate calls to block somehow the terrible force of degeneration. Statistics of military recruits, factory workers, criminals, and schoolchildren showed that the problem was now quite general.8 “Mental defect,” which took in insanity and “mental deficiency” (or “feeblemindedness”), was the most worrying problem of all. These categories provided a focus for a wave of data-intensive medical-social investigations in prisons, special schools, and asylums.

Following Galton’s lead, Karl Pearson developed a new mathematical basis for the statistics of human heredity. From the standpoint of data, the continuities with prior work are compelling. Pearson and his associates relied on numbers from asylums, special schools, prisons, and the various boards and commissions set up to investigate these populations. Professionals at such institutions were actively engaged in hereditary research long before they learned that statisticians and biologists shared their concerns. Their expertise was roughly on a par with that of the scientists. Mendelian geneticists, too, as they took up these pressing issues, depended on experts at mental institutions for their research tools and topics as well as their data. Many held that the processes identified in Mendel’s pea breeding would demonstrate genetic causes of mental illness and even reconfigure the data on human variation, which had to be discontinuous. That issue, in particular, provoked fiery medical debates.

Galtonian Data of Mental Deficiency

Galton took great pride in his application of new mathematical tools. He had some predecessors in the study of inherited ability, he acknowledged, “but I may claim to be the first to treat the subject in a statistical manner, to arrive at numerical results, and to introduce the ‘law of deviation from an average’ into discussions on heredity.” And yet, for all the fame of the bell curve, his “supreme law of Unreason,” units of diagnosed pathology were the real building blocks of eugenics. The wave of pedigree studies began to accumulate for political, budgetary, and medical reasons, a decade before anyone cared about Mendel.9

Mental hospitals treating insanity housed mainly adults. Institutions for slow-learning children appeared later, when their needs attracted the attention of educational reformers. Special schools for such children were introduced in the same lands that had been first off the mark in developing asylum systems. As Mathew Thomson points out, the “problem of mental deficiency” arose in consequence of a massive expansion of public education. This movement was sealed by legislation in Britain in 1870, and at about the same time across Western Europe and North America.10 The schools, as they enhanced opportunity, made new categories of problem children visible. Noel A. Humphreys, a vital statistician in the General Register Office, remarked that the replacement of “idiot” by the more inclusive label “feeble-minded” in the 1901 census had contributed to a large but spurious increase of mental weakness. For the first time, the census was tallying, as mentally defective, persons unknown to the Lunacy Commissioners because they had never yet been institutionalized. To statisticians, this was a new source of uncertainty in the numbers. To others, it encouraged a sense of teeming mental incapacity. The less disabled were soon taken to constitute a greater danger to society, since most were capable of forming families. They were not, like idiots, incapable of following a curriculum, but they could not keep up. Many were children of poor farmworkers or urban laborers, and many were diagnosed also with physical defects.11

British elites immediately recognized that a crisis like this one cried out for investigation by a distinguished committee, leading, in 1895, to the appearance of Report on the Scientific Study of the Mental and Physical Conditions of Childhood, with Particular Reference to Children of Defective Constitution.12 From its forty-five members was chosen a statistical committee of five, including two fellows of the Royal College of Physicians and two fellows of the Royal Statistical Society. The thirteen-member executive committee also privileged expertise in medicine and practical statistics. It should be no surprise that the chairman bore the name of Galton. Having in his later years made a distinguished career in statistics of health and mental deficiency, he provided counsel to Florence Nightingale on the design of hospitals and served on the Statistical Committee that directed the Metropolitan Asylums Board. He also chaired the organizing committee for the Seventh International Congress of Hygiene and Demography, held in London in 1891, and was president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) in 1895. He had a leading role in the Sanitary Institute of Great Britain, for which he proposed the motto: “Prevention is better than cure.”13

This eminent man of science was Douglas Galton, Francis Galton’s cousin. Both were born in 1822. They were brought up separately, and not as an experiment. Whereas Francis lived on inherited money as a gentleman of science, taking up various research topics within a career that progressed from exploration, geography, and meteorology to heredity and eugenics, Douglas advanced through the Royal Engineers to the rank of captain and then was appointed to a series of high government posts linked mainly to sanitary engineering. These provided his entrée to the elite commissions on which he served in the final decades of his life. His high position in the BAAS is a bit ironical, given his cousin’s attempt in 1877 to expel the statistical Section F as lacking the stuff of true science. The effort failed, and Douglas’s career reveals what respect the premier institution of British science was prepared to grant to elite administrative inquiries, thereby placing data preparation almost on a par with mathematical and experimental science.14

If we open the cover and look inside the 1895 report on defective children, we see that the Galton cousins were brothers beneath the skin. The committee was obsessed with data, not only with its accumulation but also with modes of presentation devised to reveal important relationships. Their report referred to these as “co-relations.”

Francis had published a paper called “Co-relations and Their Measurement” at the end of 1888. This was the moment when he first understood “co-relation” as a general measure of relations between two variables rather than something specifically biological, Georges Cuvier’s “correlation of parts.” His method of drawing lines on graphs to estimate this quantity was supplanted in 1895 by Pearson’s product-moment formula to calculate it. Douglas Galton’s report paid no heed to these tools of a new statistical mathematics, relying instead on tabular reasoning. But he cannot be dismissed as plodding and unoriginal. His committee, which dealt with population counts rather than numerical measurements, employed advanced techniques of enumeration. Appointed in 1888, it began by drawing up “a list of all cases presenting each principal condition.” In 1892, it shifted to more efficient “actuarial” methods involving cards. These call to mind German census techniques, but British life insurance offered a precedent of still longer standing.15 “The Statistical Sub-Committee, taking the Register as the basis of this actuarial work, prepared a card . . . on which the list of defects is printed.”16

Although teachers were not included on the committee, they were needed to assess the “mental state” of the children and to diagnose “mental dulness.” Since the research did not intrude into homes, poor nutrition came down to indicators such as thinness and lack of strength, which, like the many forms of nervous and developmental defect, were revealed by a medical examination. For the sake of planning, the committee needed to identify and to number children in need of special schooling. Universal education was worth nothing to those placed in classes that went beyond their capacities. Although no one spoke of “stigmata,” their heavy reliance on external “signs” or “indications” reminds us of the celebrated Italian criminologist and theorist of hereditary reversion, Cesare Lombroso. The committee however, preferred to rely on measures and statistics. “In the facts here given it is seen that defects in development and abnormal signs are largely co-related with mental dulness.” According to the report, the teachers had been able to pick out almost all dull students from bodily features even before anyone asked. The idealization of normality, often identified with the normal curve, was never so extreme in Francis’s scientific statistics as in Douglas’s medical-administrative reports. It was all for the sake of an updated liberal cause, using knowledge “based upon scientific inquiry” to assign schools according to ability, “fitting each as a citizen to provide for himself,” and to “render the population healthy, long-lived, and prosperous.” The committee proposed policies to “lessen crime, pauperism, and social failure, by removing causes leading to degeneration among the population.” The proposed interventions were educational rather than eugenic, keeping heredity in the background. But it loomed there, nevertheless. “The State becomes heavily burdened by the defectively made portion of the population.”17

Contributing Data

Eugenics for Francis Galton depended on data, and he worked out a multitude of strategies to acquire it. For Hereditary Genius, he scoured biographical dictionaries and memoirs, making lists of members of families who had achieved distinction as judges, statesmen, commanders, literary men, men of science, poets, musicians, painters, divines, oarsmen, or wrestlers. Some of these he assembled into family trees as visual evidence of inherited ability. Such information, though available, had to be taken for what it was. He asked around to check identities and made modest additions and corrections.

At the 1884 International Health Exhibition, held in London and organized in part by cousin Douglas, his Anthropometric Laboratory was attractive enough to induce “no fewer than 9,337” visitors to pay 3 pence to be measured, while thousands more grew weary after waiting in line. He conceived his instruments, which gauged strength, speed, and accuracy of perception as well as bodily dimensions, as prototypes for what he hoped to perfect and systematize in schools. Already, he remarked, foreign governments had ordered some duplicates.18

He kept his laboratory going for a time after the health exhibition closed, but his ultimate goal, to investigate the inheritance of human abilities, required data arranged according to family. He appealed to a spirit of individual initiative for his Record of Family Faculties, also begun in 1884, relying on a printed booklet with instructions and forms for entering family data. He offered prizes for the most thorough pedigrees.19 This liberal-voluntarist mode of eugenic data gathering survived and flourished well into the twentieth century. It was allied to an ideal of raising the standard of human reproduction through appeals to rational self-interest and the public good. Individualism, however, had its limits. Even Galton wanted to unleash the pressure of public opinion on the undeserving and unfit, and stubborn irresponsibility seemed to invite sterner measures, backed up by legitimate expertise.

Solid data did not magically appear when eager volunteers received instructions and standardized forms. The next step was inspection and curation by scientific or medical experts. If, as it seemed, the insane and feebleminded came predominantly from poor and uneducated stocks, they could not well be relied on to provide scientific data on the taints that weighted down their family lines. Here, inquiry into the principles of heredity meant expert identification of superior and defective lines. Even enlightened public opinion was not sufficient for the serious business of reversing hereditary decay. When Pearson took up these questions, he drew up new circulars to incorporate modern ideas of hereditary transmission and techniques of multiple correlation. This was work for mathematicians.20

Galton’s English Men of Science, like Hereditary Genius, employed multiple sources of information to identify high achievers and to retrieve family relationships among notable men. Some scholars have wondered at the looseness of his reasoning, but they fail perhaps to credit his resourcefulness in devising statistical tools to draw conclusions on heredity from data that happened to be available. Compilers of reference works, for example, may have had an idea of distinguished family lines, but not of subjecting them to statistical analysis. By the 1890s, Galton was prepared to endow new institutions for this purpose, and Pearson, to whom he looked as a successor, was already proving to be an exemplary institution-builder at University College, London. Pearson’s passion by this time was evolution, especially human evolution and eugenics. He is known mainly for new mathematical formulations and for eugenic ideologies, but he devoted as much energy and enterprise to constructing appropriate data reserves—and in a great variety of fields—as he did to new tools of analysis. This alliance of mathematics and data depended on copious calculations performed by colleagues and assistants, many of them women.21

One example, very much in the Galtonian tradition, involves a study published in 1906 by Edgar Schuster and Ethel Elderton, respectively Galton Fellow and Galton Scholar in National Eugenics. They mined three reference books of Oxford alumni to compare the level of honors attained by fathers and sons over much of the nineteenth century then calculated correlations to measure the effect of biological inheritance. Schuster pushed the work one step further, drawing on Crockford’s Clerical Dictionary and Forster’s Men at the Bar to assess the relations between quality of degree and professional success.22 In 1907, The Oxford and Cambridge Review printed a proposal for “A Bureau of Biometry” at the great universities to investigate the relationship between physical and mental ability and the importance of both, along with family background, for success after graduation. They presented the work as a model for inquiries in state elementary schools.23

One of Schuster’s first papers, published in Biometrika in 1906, was a study of hereditary deafness based on a compilation by the American doctor Edward Fay, Marriages of the Deaf in America. With an endowment from Alexander Graham Bell, Fay gathered data on 4,471 marriages of the deaf in America, including on deafness in the siblings and other relatives of each partner and on causes. Often the cause was illness, and Fay held that the role of heredity was greatly exaggerated by common opinion. He prepared tables showing the numbers and percentage of deaf children for marriages of various descriptions: for example, one partner hearing, the other deaf, and the hearing partner having deaf relatives; one partner “congenitally deaf,” the other “adventitiously deaf”; or one partner with deaf relatives and no information on the other. Ignoring data that “cannot be regarded as a true fair sample,” Schuster calculated correlations based on fourfold tables of deaf and hearing fathers (or mothers) against deaf and hearing children. His work had none of the fine detail of Fay’s teeming tables, he acknowledged, and could only be approximate. Since, however, the study of rare conditions like deafness depends on a large-scale survey, which is outside the capacity of any private individual, he was grateful even for flawed data. He hoped the British state might proceed with an anthropometric survey recently recommended by the Interdepartmental Committee on Physical Deterioration.24

The Central Metric Office and the Fairly Impartial School Teacher

Much, perhaps most, human data for eugenic and anthropometric use was accumulated without active consent by social and medical institutions. Schools, prisons, and asylums were particular favorites. Such studies often presumed that diverse human defects were linked and then proceeded to stitch them together with threads of data. In 1901, for example, Pearson and Alice Lee gained access to skull measurements taken by the Cambridge Anthropometric Committee. A mathematical friend from his own days at King’s College, W. H. Macaulay, interceded with the university registrar to extract data on the degrees ultimately taken by Cambridge students. They concluded, based on low calculated correlations, that skull size and shape had little or no relationship to “intellectual power.”25

Prison systems were among the richest sites of data on bodily measurements. Most of the measurements were generated within a system of criminal identification based on the match of certain physical dimensions that had been introduced about 1879 by the French criminologist Alphonse Bertillon. Francis Galton and Pearson each had a role in deliberations by the Metropolitan Police in London about data suited to this purpose. In 1901, the first volume of their new journal, Biometrika, included an article on criminal anthropometry by W. R. Macdonell, relying on data from what he called the Central Metric Office of New Scotland Yard. These measurements were supplied by John G. Garson, a Scottish physician and anthropometric expert in the Royal Anthropological Institute, who, during the previous decade, had consulted for the Home Office on implementation of the Bertillon system of measurement and classification. Macdonell fit Garson’s measurements to one of Pearson’s asymmetrical frequency curves to show that a sample of 3,000 criminal measurements were of a single type. They were categorically different, however, from the measures of 1,000 Cambridge undergraduates. He did not conclude that criminality was caused by these differences, but only that the criminal population had its origins in “a different section of the community.”26

A few years later, Pearson backed up his own doubts on the significance of skull size and shape using head measurements of 5,000 school children, which he correlated with assessments of intelligence by their teachers.27 By placing notices in the Journal of Education, School World, and the Schoolmaster, he recruited masters and mistresses of more than 200 schools to fill out detailed schedules of measurements on their pupils. He defined the problem in terms of sibling relationships rather than of parents and children so that he could rely on the judgment of the “fairly impartial school teacher.” The alternative would be unacceptable. “Even if relatives and friends could be trusted to be impartial, the discovery of the preparation of schedules by the subjects of observation might have ruptured the peace of households and broken down life-long friendships.” He interpreted the results as confirming the inheritance of mental ability, but not any causal significance of brain size.28

Pearson’s team relied primarily on medical and educational institutions for their data of human heredity. When he began looking to asylums and special schools, he quickly discovered that their physicians and administrators were already deeply engaged in the analysis of hereditary data. These men, the heirs of Black, Thurnam, and Hood, were now more numerous and professionally diverse. He respected their expertise, accepting without question what they diagnosed as illness or defective intelligence. He also took on faith their data, and even their tabular statistics, provided they did not neglect correlated variables or mix up cause and effect. Of course the numbers had to be large enough to avoid assigning significance to meaningless fluctuations. The design of population surveys and the estimation of statistical error was his business. This led to a few bitter disputes, but doctors and psychologists most often deferred to his authority on statistical questions and often sought out Pearson’s assistance.

Institutional Data on Mental Defect

The British asylum population almost doubled from 1890 to 1910, as the last hopes of relieving this epidemic through treatment melted away.29 The problem of mentally deficient children added a new dimension to the problem. The movement for special schools had been inspired by the French physician and reformer Edouard Séguin, who, in the 1840s, set up such a school and then wrote a book on “moral treatment,” meaning education, of “idiots.” After 1848 he moved to Ohio and then to New York, extending his ideals to another continent and language. Most such institutions were residential, including the pioneering Royal Earlswood Asylum for Idiots and Imbeciles in Surrey, England, which opened in 1848. It modeled its patient records on those of insane asylums. For causes, their sources mentioned fright of mother, injuries at birth, childhood diseases, and convulsions or fevers during teething. By 1859, there was a specific question about family members with cerebral disorders, and from the 1880s, one about whether the disease was hereditary. When answered in the affirmative, these forms asked for information on one or more specific relatives and the condition(s) from which they suffered.30

Up to the end of the century, most of these schools were supported by charity rather than by state funds. The largest and most prominent such institution, the Royal Albert Asylum in Lancaster, became noted for its records on patient heredity. In 1892, its medical superintendent, George Edward Shuttleworth, prepared data on 1,200 patients, which, in combination with 1,180 patient forms from Darenth in the London system of hospitals, supplied the statistical data for an article on idiocy in the monumental Dictionary of Psychological Medicine.31 In 1912, soon after Pearson inherited responsibility for Galton’s Eugenics Laboratory, the Royal Albert Asylum sent him 2,900 information cards on its patients, the results of a long-term investigation of inheritance of feeblemindedness. With this treasure chest of hereditary information, supplemented by 1,200 slips from the Edinburgh Charity Organisation Society, he could delegate eugenics researcher Amy Barrington to construct pedigrees of family illness. Here, as so often, biometric investigation of hereditary defect was intertwined with researches performed by physician-statisticians in asylums or on the commissions that supervised them. Similar records were mobilized for Mendelian research.

The biometricians’ favorite sources for the statistics of insanity and mental deficiency were the commissioners and asylum superintendents of Scotland, who, like Norwegian ones, relied heavily on population surveys and censuses. David Heron, of Galton’s Eugenics Laboratory, complained in 1907 that annual asylum reports were useless for statistical study of hereditary transmission. The percentage of patients with an insane relative meant nothing, he said, without a suitable control showing the probability of encountering mental illness in families of the healthy. Heron favored the hypothesis, convenient for medically untrained statisticians, that mental defect arose from a constitutional susceptibility, or “diathesis.” Such an instability of “degenerate” stocks could be studied and tallied without requiring a precise diagnosis. Even so, the work of compiling rigorous pedigrees was painfully tedious. He longed for a “General Register of the Insane,” to be preserved in the office of the Lunacy Commissioners, and an index number identifying every insane person.32

Heron’s dreams were fulfilled thanks to some Scottish officials whom we met in chapter 9. “At this stage, Dr. John Macpherson of the Scottish Lunacy Commission came to our aid and kindly furnished the Laboratory with a progressive history of 1319 insane patients who were admitted for the first time to Scottish Asylums in 1868.” Next, A. R. Urquhart arrived with 331 family trees based on patients at James Murray’s Royal Asylum in Perth. W. S. Gossett (“Student”), on sabbatical in Pearson’s laboratory from the Guinness Brewery, used these records to estimate the percentage of Scots who had ever been in an asylum. Heron then calculated a coefficient of inheritance for insanity between 0.52 and 0.63. This number was very acceptable to the biometric faithful, just what the statistician ordered. Urquhart, proud to be associated with a scientific project, included measures of correlation in his Morison Lectures at the Royal College of Physicians in Edinburgh in 1907. Although his own calculated figure for inheritance of insanity, at 45%, was disappointingly low, he contrived in his final period of observation to raise it to 48%. “The important biometric system advocated and instituted by Professor Karl Pearson will greatly enlarge our knowledge and correct our prepossessions if the desirable data are forthcoming.”33

Pearson’s exchanges with the Scottish alienists were initiated mainly from their side. The scope of these interactions is dizzying. Macpherson, an Edinburgh physician, wrote Pearson in January 1904 asking permission to reproduce some tables and curves from his philosophical book, The Grammar of Science, and from his Huxley Lecture at the Royal Anthropological Institute, “Laws of Inheritance in Man.” Macpherson was preparing some statistical lectures of his own on human variation in relation to insanity. By 1907, he and Pearson were discussing standard forms for recording its hereditary transmission. Macpherson explained that he was about to issue a thousand blank schedules to be filled out by school teachers. He included two old papers by Sir Arthur Mitchell, well known for his statistical work as commissioner in lunacy, to familiarize Pearson with Scottish censuses of insanity.34 Another key figure here was J. F. Tocher, who paid a visit in 1904 to Pearson’s laboratory and who secured permission from Macpherson, Mitchell, and John Sibbald (the third Lunacy Commissioner) to publish the Scottish lunacy measurements in Biometrika.

Tocher subsequently organized the schoolteachers of Scotland to carry out a “pigmentation survey” of school children, an indicator of “racial” variation, which came to be published in Biometrika in 1908. In 1910, appealing to the memory of Sir John Sinclair and the great Scottish statistical tradition, he sounded the tocsin in the Eugenics Review for a “national eugenic survey” of children throughout the United Kingdom to assist in the “grading of stock” in a racially heterogeneous population. Tocher used the language of race in reference to modest distinctions of skull shape, hair color, and pigmentation. A full eugenic assessment, however, would require data on other variables and for whole families. He would have liked to survey the entire adult population for the information it would provide on longevity and fertility. Alas, this was out of reach.35

In 1910, Heron published a statistical review of the Pioneer School Survey recently released by the London County Council. More insistently even than Tocher, he pressed for studies based on routine medical inspections of school children. That meant putting data into the form required by modern statistics, and he invoked the Edinburgh Charity Organization as a model. There were many differentiating factors, he stressed, that needed to be sorted out, beginning with the “local races” formed by varying proportions of Irish, Jewish, Scandinavian, Anglo-Saxon, and other elements. He firmly rejected any unique standard of normality defined by an average over all parts of the country, since each local race had a distinct character. “It is idle, for example, to compare Lancashire and Devonshire children, or either, with a most misleading ‘British Association Standard’ and to attribute the results to an influence of factories or of the rural environment.” Heron praised Tocher’s Glasgow surveys as exemplary, though he regretted their lack of access to “the pauper, the mentally defective, and the criminal.”36

Degenerates and Degeneration

The frequent appearance of pauperism, mental defect, criminality, and bodily abnormalities together in a single pedigree chart was common knowledge in the new eugenic era. In a 1910 paper, Pearson and Elderton discerned in the statistics a hereditary link of epi.tify to mental defect, deaf-mutism, and dwarfism. “Superficially and for the time being only we may possibly look upon it as the inheritance of some defect in a general development-controlling determinant.”37 Such biological language, unusual for Pearson, supported the statistician’s preferred focus on general disposition or diathesis over specific disease forms. It derived from research for the Treasury of Human Inheritance, an encyclopedic data project of the Eugenics Laboratory. Galton and then Pearson recruited several doctors early in the project to assemble pedigrees of diseases and deformities. One of them was Harold Rischbieth, a Cambridge-educated surgeon and MD, who drew from a large bibliography of case literature in several languages for his material on hare lip and cleft palate. Deformities of architectural form or size, he explained, may be attributed “to a defective developmental determinant in either gamete which leads to an arrest in the development of the zygote.”38

Pearson and Elderton used Heron’s term “general degeneracy” to mean “the correlated appearance of improbable mental and physical defects in a group of blood relations.” This formulation, too, links up with the Treasury. Walter Jobson Horne, also a surgeon and physician out of Cambridge and a specialist in laryngology, wrote up a brief entry, illustrated by pedigrees, on inherited deaf-mutism. Two of his tables, redrawn to conform to the precise specifications of the Galton Laboratory, came from Ludvig Dahl’s 1859 book, including Table 3, the descendants of Ejvind. The conditions Dahl included—deaf-mutism, insanity, idiocy, and epi.tify—were precisely the ones mentioned by Pearson and Elderton. Dahl’s tables provided the most compelling illustration Horne could find of multiple defects in a single lineage. German researchers quickly noticed Dahl’s tables in this English compilation.39

Pearson gave the impression that many or most wrongheaded ideas owed to a failure of physicians, biologists, politicians, and popularizers to give proper heed to statistics. Often, however, the opponents who plagued him were similarly committed to numerical evidence. Almost every topic he took up was already a site of energetic data collection and, often, of distinctive tools of analysis. He more often fixed on enemies for using numbers incorrectly rather than for neglecting to use them. He even waged battles against his own students, dedicated quantifiers like Udny Yule and Major Greenwood at home or Charles Davenport and Raymond Pearl abroad, when they strayed.40

His debates on degeneration were also of this kind. Many of his opponents, heirs to the great tradition of asylum statistics, were now seeking ways to move beyond bureaucratic data-mongering to real statistical science. Physicians who attributed British decline to alcoholic decay or to “causes inherent in the germ plasm” and who set about measuring these effects were among the most influential commentators on insanity and mental weakness of their day.41 European temperance movements were cradles of eugenics, and many who endorsed the noninheritance of acquired characters made an exception for alcohol, which might act directly on the germ plasm. These were matters on which doctors were ill-equipped to judge, Elderton wrote. “The medical man as a rule has no opportunity of dealing with a random sample of the general population; it is the social worker who goes into the homes who alone can appreciate the extent of the drinking habit, and record the economic conditions of the working population.”42

In 1912, Pearson crossed swords with Dr. Frederick W. Mott, a pathologist for the London County asylums, over the doctrine of “ante-dating,” a variety of degeneration whose evidence was strictly statistical. The offspring of insane parents, he found, tend to have their first attack at a younger age than their parents. He credited the finding to Maudsley and cited a handbook of life insurance as well as one of Pearson’s papers on tuberculosis.43 His best evidence consisted of 3,000 data cards documenting the insanity of 750 closely related persons. Pearson and Heron dismissed his result as a statistical artifact. A simple model, they explained, shows that offspring will exhibit a lower mean age of onset than parents even with no impulse from inherited toxins. Insane persons who die young bear no children, and it is hard to get data on ancestors of those who became insane late in life.44

Born Criminals and the Inheritance of Mental Characters

Pearson, a master of craniometry, was contemptuous of Lombroso’s fixation on head shape and other stigmata of hereditary regression. “Whole schools of criminology have arisen based solely on such assertions,” he said, despite a complete failure to demonstrate any association of crime with physical and mental characters. In reality, “nobody knows whether crime is associated with general degeneracy, whether it is a manifestation of certain hereditary qualities, or whether it is a product of environment or tradition.” We expect Pearson to come down on the side of heredity, especially, as here, when speaking under a title like “Nature and Nurture: The Problem of the Future.” Indeed he did, but he was always skeptical of claims for inheritance of particular human actions or behaviors. In place of hereditary tuberculosis, he spoke of diathesis; and of inherited talents and vulnerabilities rather than a specific tendency to literature, mathematics, or crime.45

On the question of criminality, as usual, he went straight to the source for his statistics, and as usual, his contacts had definite ideas already about how to read the numbers. In this case the key figure is Horatio Bryan Donkin, Pearson’s friend from their days in the protofeminist Men and Women’s Club in the late 1880s, an Oxford-educated physician who had treated Karl Marx as well as the club member and author Olive Schreiner.46 Donkin acquired the title Sir Bryan after leaving private practice to become medical director on the Prisons Commission. In 1903, he introduced a paper in Biometrika, an analysis of anthropometric measurements on 130 criminals by the medical officers of the English Convict Prisons. The Pearson archive holds a carbon copy of an eleven-page paper, “Report upon the Aims, Methods, Progress, and Results of a Statistical Investigation now being conducted for the Prison Commissioners at the Biometric Laboratory, University College.”47

That report, written for prison authorities, begins: “Modern statistical discoveries and the recent applications of disinterested and exact methods of enquiry” have shown how much of the current sociological understanding of crime reduces to conventions and assumptions, without evidence. It fingers Lombroso as the inspiration for biased studies that have “found the evidence they sought” and that lead to a denial of criminal responsibility. Donkin put in motion a campaign to acquire the needed evidence and to break the hold of superstition, to be “piloted” by prison inspector Dr. Herbert Smalley. The report goes on to outline a regime of measurements and observations to be entered on a blank form that also appears in the files. This biometric initiative culminated in 1913 with a book by Charles Goring, The English Criminal: A Statistical Study. The preface explains how Goring was put onto statistics in 1901 by Dr. Griffiths, who had been responsible for the measurements in the 1903 Biometrika article. Griffiths at first had in mind a Lombrosian investigation linking bodily abnormalities of criminals to their offenses. Soon the work came to the attention of Donkin, who referred Goring to W.F.R. Weldon, the Linacre Professor of Zoology at Oxford and for a decade Pearson’s closest scientific ally. Weldon, perhaps as anticipated, sent him on to Pearson’s laboratories, where, from 1911 to 1913, he wrote his book. His conclusions seem to be overdetermined. He dismissed the project of reading mental and moral tendencies from bodily traits as misguided. Head size and shape must in no way be interpreted as stigmata of criminal tendencies. Instead, heredity and environment conspired to fashion these men as weak in body and especially in mind, hence vulnerable to bad influences. While Goring thanked Pearson for indispensable contributions to every dimension of the work, the initiative for this statistical-eugenic project came from within the prison system, perhaps first of all from a push for criminal identification at the “Central Metric Office.”48

The story goes on. In October 1910, Donkin delivered the Harveian Lecture, “On the Inheritance of Acquired Characters,” to the Royal College of Physicians in London. The title implied no plea for soft biological heredity, which, he explained, science had properly rejected. He was thinking instead of cultural or moral inheritance. While informed students of crime now reject Lombroso’s and Max Nordau’s idea of the criminal as a hereditary degenerate, he declared, it had seized the public mind. A similar scientific fallacy had arisen closer to home: the claim of a “prominent writer on biology” that there had been no proper genetic knowledge until Mendel demonstrated unit segregation of hereditary factors. But that writer, revealed in a footnote as the pioneering geneticist William Bateson, was applying this insight falsely to criminals, treating them as sharply distinct from normals.

Donkin quoted a claim from the concluding section on eugenics in Mendel’s Principles of Heredity (1909) “that in the light of such knowledge public opinion will welcome measures likely to do more for the extinction of the criminal and degenerate than has been accomplished by ages of penal enactment.” Bateson went on there to assert “that in the extreme cases, unfitness is comparatively definite in its genetic causation, and can, not unfrequently, be recognized as due to the presence of a simple genetic factor.” He then called for “new conceptions of justice” based on genetics, with its power to anticipate. The Mendelian factor for criminality betokened criminal responsibility in advance of any crime.49

Bateson here treated “criminality” as a discrete trait, analogous to round versus wrinkled peas in Mendel’s garden. The social Mendelians, as we may call them, supposed that many human defects, including criminality, were recessive, meaning that the hereditary criminal (a “homozygous recessive”) must carry two hereditary factors (we call them genes) for the recessive trait, criminality. A heterozygous individual, with one normal factor and one criminal one, would he healthy, but if crossed with another such individual, would produce, on average, one criminal offspring for every three normal ones. The cross of a heterozygote with a double recessive (whether pea or criminal), yields on average one normal for each recessive. These ratios, 3:1 and 1:1, were understood from the beginning as necessary and sufficient evidence for a simple Mendelian trait. It was, of course, easier to identify a wrinkled pea than a hereditary criminal. Bateson and the social Mendelians, while recognizing their reliance on the analogy with plant breeding, worked to bolster their conclusions with swelling rivers of data.

To Donkin, a physician and prison reformer, this was a clear instance of the biologist’s indifference to facts of observation. The dangers of misunderstood heredity had been made plain to him, he said, during his service on the Royal Commission on the Control of the Feeble-Minded, where the evidence was ruined by “confusion of thought” and “inaccurate language.” Donkin praised Galton’s biometry and eugenics while dismissing as “meaningless” the opposition of nature to nurture. Nature, he said, has rendered man responsive to nurture.50 He recalled practicing in a children’s hospital, before he took up prison work, and being moved by the image of so many mental defectives, “unable to shift for themselves and very likely to take to a life of misery to themselves and multiform evil to others.” It was reason enough to segregate these children in special schools, as indeed would be ordered in 1913 by the Mental Deficiency Act.51

Donkin’s lecture was in part a commentary on the royal commission he mentioned, which had issued its report in 1908. This consisted of six volumes of evidence from the UK, a seventh volume of observations on American institutions, and a book of findings and recommendations. On some key points, the report was inconclusive. The statistics could not establish how many mentally defective children had a defective parent. The witnesses did not even agree on how to understand or apply the adjective “inherited,” although a majority identified heredity as the most important cause of mental defect. The commission, while complaining of loose definitions of heredity, endorsed the claim by a series of eminent asylum doctors of its “almost overwhelming probability,” from a “biological standpoint.” It now seemed urgent to determine what the correct biological standpoint might be.52

The next year, in 1909, the Royal Society of Medicine took up the charge to provide scientific clarity on these issues, holding a series of discussions devoted to inheritance of mental weakness. Its president declared, on opening the meeting, “There is no class of disease in which the conviction that they are hereditary is more firmly fixed both among the lay public and the profession than many forms of diseases of the nervous system.”53 But what were the mechanisms of human heredity? Both Bateson and Pearson were invited to give evidence. The gestures of deference to their hosts by these proud men suggest how unusual it was to invite mere scientists into the sacred halls of medicine.

The proceedings, seemingly as anticipated, turned into a debate between medical biometry and medical Mendelism. Sir William R. Gowers, a London neurologist, introduced the second day with rejoicing that the mists concealing Mendel’s discoveries were at last being swept away. But these theories, he continued, are not much use to medicine. “The human race is not open to Mendel’s essential methods, and its mere complexity of development involves innumerable differences from lower forms of life.” Gowers, having devoted much of his career to statistics, preferred to count patients rather than genetic factors. He proudly presented data from his practice showing 47% hereditary causation for epi.tify and insanity, much higher than in hospital data. Since even his numbers were incomplete, the true value must be at least 50%. This was just as Pearson wanted it.54

Gowers was selected to challenge Bateson, who responded that he could easily demonstrate, sometimes quite precisely, the applicability of Mendel’s work to diseases and congenital deformities in man. He began with a lecture, using Mendel’s results on peas to explain segregation and dominance and to introduce Mendelian ratios. Next he gave examples involving the color and other conditions of eyes, based on new research by Edward Nettleship and Charles Chamberlain Hurst. He listed some other Mendelian conditions, including brachydactyly (abnormally short fingers and toes) and “hereditary chorea.” Some of his ratios matched well with Mendel’s numbers, while others diverged, on account of imperfect records, he said. Tuberculosis involved an infective organism, so he could not track it fully, and the same might hold for cancer. Insanity depended too often on environmental influences to present clean ratios.55

The third session, one week later, featured Pearson. Charles Mercier, a prolific author on statistics of insanity and mental defect, introduced it with a declaration that Mendel’s law, being a law of probability, required data on a large scale and could be true only in the long run. Sadly, the statistics of the Lunacy Commissioners were pointless, “a gigantic waste of time and labour” and “of no value for scientific purposes.” Dr. Arthur Latham elaborated that official statistics on inheritance of tuberculosis were “based largely on old wives’ recollections, on uncompleted family records,” and so on. Pearson, he added, in relying on these numbers, could not avoid certain basic errors. When Pearson rose to speak, he endorsed every effort to improve the quality of statistics, including Mercier’s call for proper controls. He insisted above all on the need for a storehouse of excellent pedigrees and described the dozens of visits and letters required to check and complete even one. Pedigrees from the north of England and Scotland, he continued, are far superior to anything from a London hospital. People in the north have a stronger memory, and the “pride of family” is far more intense.56

Pearson cast doubt on Bateson’s charts. “My own standpoint is that there is no definite proof of Mendelism applying to any living form at present; the proof has got to be given yet.” He challenged Bateson specifically on albinism, which, he argued, does not divide clearly between presence and absence. Dr. Vilhelm Magnus of Norway had sent to him and to Bateson the record of a woman who had albino children with two unrelated men. This, Pearson declared, was so improbable as to exclude any possibility of albinism as a Mendelian recessive, moving Bateson, in an impromptu discussion, to concede that albinism was “an example of a character that did not follow the rules.”57

Two weeks later, in the final session, Dr. George Percival Mudge, of the London Hospital Medical College, took up the biometric challenge. He gave the impression that many or even most human conditions reduced to Mendelian traits, but cautioned that one had to be wary of superficial resemblances. On this score, Pearson had repeatedly failed, particularly on albinism, a genuine Mendelian trait. What Pearson called partial albinism was always the result of some other cause or disturbance, such as arrested development. Mudge set biometry and Mendelism in radical opposition, contrasting the biometric pursuit of masses of data with the Mendelian’s focus on “individual cases, carefully studied and rigorously analysed.”58

This last claim is hard to square with Mudge’s own practices. He had recourse again and again to Mendelian ratios as proof of determination by a single factor, and his experimental papers on inheritance of rat color were packed with numbers. Bateson understood very well that Mendelism was about quantities, which he deployed with some skill, even as he consigned biometry to the other side of an impassable barrier. “Actuarial” methods, he once wrote, are appropriate only to a science in its infancy. “In nearly every case to which the method of accurate experimental breeding has been applied, it has been possible to show that the phenomena of heredity follow precise laws of remarkable simplicity, which the grosser statistical methods had necessarily failed to reveal.” Bateson and Mudge put their faith in the simplicity that would emerge in biology and medicine when things were properly sorted out. Mudge detected Mendelian segregation even in the skin colors resulting from racial mixing of Europeans with American Indians. Here there was no dominance but intermediate color for heterozygotes, while homozygotes must resemble one or the other racial ancestor.59

Pearson, while conceding that Mendelism might sometimes hold, objected that often, and certainly in the case of interracial skin color, the claimed ratios depended on observational practices that neglected variability. Perhaps unconsciously, Mendelians exploited variation to get the numbers they wanted. This was how Weldon and Pearson had interpreted the unreasonably precise ratios from Mendel’s original paper after Bateson made it famous. Pearson accused Mudge of a more egregious manipulation. When his own study yielded data showing a ratio of 1 to 4, Mudge “hunted up some other experiments, which were made twenty-three years ago on the same subject, in which the ratio given was 1 in 2,” and added them together to get the desired 1 to 3. “A glorious proof of Mendelism,” Pearson sneered. Indeed, Mudge had supplemented his own data with some from a 1906 paper by zoologist Leonard Doncaster, who had in turn incorporated results from 1885 by a German doctor, Hugo Crampe.60

Pearson, though coming off rather well in this exchange, seems to have been troubled by some specific criticisms he had made. Shortly afterward, he inserted a paper on race and skin color into Biometrika, introducing it with the declaration that those who still doubt some claims made for Mendelism are yet “ready to emphasise the paramount service of Mendel in drawing attention to the great factor of segregation in many inheritance problems.” Some traits at least were sufficiently distinct to be sorted and counted. But skin color in racial mixing, which for centuries had exemplified blended inheritance, was certainly not. He chose it to ridicule “theorists” such as Mudge.61

Pearson’s preferred response to critiques by Bateson and Mudge did not focus on Mendelian ratios, nor even on the inheritance of discrete traits, but on the status of biometry as a master discipline. As he insisted to another medical audience at the end of 1908, biometry is no “ism.” It “neither pledged itself to ‘mutations’ nor to continuous variation; it was solely an attempt to apply exact methods to vital statistics of any kind.” Mendelian claims should be demonstrated by the scrupulous application of biometric methods, which require immense patience. “Ten or twelve years of collecting evidence was required, and at the end of that time they would know to what extent Mendelism did or did not apply.” Sadly, he concluded, Bateson and his allies were not willing to wait so long before jumping to conclusions.62

Neither, of course, was Pearson. Both sides looked to hereditary data for a resolution of their conflict and as the foundation for new advances. These data would come from collaborations with doctors, psychologists, teachers, and criminologists in institutions that held hundreds or thousands of individuals. In neither version, Mendelian or biometric, could the new science of human heredity break with tradition of institutional data work on populations of special concern to the medical-social state. Biometricians and geneticists alike depended on stockpiles of data from asylums, schools, prisons, and population surveys and on assessments by special commissions linked to law, medicine, engineering, eugenics, and poor relief. The new genetics was but one element in the mix, and not even the most promising one.