"Genetics in the Madhouse" by Theodore M. Porter

 I was really lucky to get a free copy of this book through the Science, Technology, and Society group at my university, and I am so glad that I did! The book group does have a selection of multiple books most years, but it's not every year that I get something that is so directly related to my actual degree and my interests.

This book looks at the history of asylums and in particular how asylums documented patients and their madness. This forms some of the earliest examples of big data, and directly impacts the study of statistics and heredity. Researchers figured out pretty early on that insanity and mental illness were passed on in families, but their understanding of it and how to treat it varied wildly. The book focuses a lot on Great Britain, Europe, and the US but there are mentions of elsewhere in the world as well. The main thesis though is that eugenics was not simply a misunderstanding of Mendel, it started way before that, with these asylum researchers and the work that they were doing, and it has larger roots in big data itself.

I honestly found this whole history fascinating. As a genetics researcher, I have tried to make it a priority to learn about eugenics and the hooks that it has in our modern understanding of genetics and the way we teach it. (We do not typically get taught this in hard science classrooms, hence branching out to STS.) And I have to say that I am deeply swayed by this argument, I think it makes a lot of sense that eugenics came from the failure of asylums as forced sterilizations were so tied to ablism and still is!

My one critique of the book is that in presenting the history, it focuses just on that. There are very few, if any, elaborations on how these historical figures were wrong. Which maybe if that was included it would be a very different book with a different focus, as that's adding a lot of information, but I was curious going through what was more accurate than others. And part of that is beside the point, a big contention was how different hospitals were defining insanity and cure rates and things like that. But I so wanted to know what the modern arguments against these ideas were! I knew probably more than average as a genetics researcher, but I did wonder if the average layperson would be able to pinpoint what the fallacies were.

This is immediately going with my other books on eugenics and genetics history. I hope that others read it and that I can get some of my lab mates interested in it!