Tracing the shifting sands of 'medical genetics': what's in a name?
This paper focuses on the structural development of institution-based interest in genetics in Anglo-North American medicine after 1930 concomitantly with an analysis of the changes through which ideas about heredity and the hereditary transmission of diseases in families have passed. It maintains that the unfolding relationship between medicine and genetics can best be understood against the background of the shift in emphasis in conceptualisations of recurring patterns of disease in families from 'biological relatedness' to 'related to chromosomes and genes'. The paper begins with brief considerations of the historical confluences of, first, heredity and medicine and, second, genetics and medicine which, in a third section, leads to a discussion about a uniquely 'genetics-based approach' to medicine in the second half of the twentieth century.
Leeming
William
W
Faculty of Liberal Studies, Ontario College of Art and Design, Toronto, ON M5T 1W1, Canada. bleeming@faculty.ocad.ca
D002875:Chromosomes; D005190:Family; D005796:Genes; D020022:Genetic Predisposition to Disease / Q000266:history*; D005826:Genetics, Medical / Q000266:history*; D040941:Heredity; D049673:History, 20th Century; D006801:Humans; D009656:North America