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From Eugenics to Medical Genetics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 October 2011

Diane Paul
Diane Paul
Affiliation:
University of Massachusetts at Boston
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Extract

Sheldon Reed coined the expression “genetic counseling” in 1947, the same year he succeeded Clarence P. Oliver as Director of the University of Minnesota's Dight Institute for Human Genetics. In reflections written more than a quarter-century later, Reed noted that the term had occurred to him “as a kind of genetic social work without eugenic connotations.” Sharply distinguishing the aims of eugenics and counseling, he explained that whereas the former promotes the interests of the larger society, the latter serves the interests of individual families—as families perceive them. Reed never denied that he or other postwar medical geneticists were concerned with population improvement. But he maintained that counseling served a different purpose. Commenting on the history of the Dight Institute, Reed asserted: “There were certainly no attempts to benefit society as a whole in dealing with these families. This was not thought of as a program of eugenics.”

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Policy History , Volume 9 , Special Issue 1: Health Care Policy in Contemporary America , January 1997 , pp. 96 - 116
Copyright
Copyright © The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA. 1997

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References

Notes

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2. “Proposal,” Rockefeller Archive Center, North Tarrytown, N.Y.; Record Group 1.1, Series 200, Box 154, Folder 1393. 1 am grateful for the Division of Research Programs of the National Endowment for the Humanities for its research support. Special thanks are due Sheldon Reed for allowing me access to his papers and to Peter Coventry, Sharon Durfy, and Robert Resta for insightful comments on earlier drafts of this essay.

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76. U.S. Congress, Cystic Fibrosis and DNA Tests, 18.

77. Ibid., 151–52. There are currently only about one thousand Master's-level counselors in the United States.

78. See Press, Nancy A. and Browner, Carol H., “Collective Silences, Collective Fictions: How Prenatal Testing Became Part of Routine Prenatal Care,” in Rothenberg, K. H. and Thomson, E. J., Women and Prenatal Testing: Facing the Challenge of Genetic Technology (Columbus, Ohio, 1994), 201–18.Google Scholar

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