The importance of being marginal: Norma Ford Walker and a Canadian school of medical genetics

Toward a comparative history of medical genetics as a medical specialty in North America

Much of what has been written about the history of medical genetics in North America has focused on physician involvement in eugenics and the transition from heredity counseling to genetic counseling in the United States. What are typically missing in these accounts are details concerning the formation of a new medical specialty, i.e., medical genetics, and Canada's involvement in specialty formation. Accordingly, this paper begins to fill in gaps by investigating, on the one hand, the history of American and Canadian geneticists working together to support the creation of examining and teaching positions in human genetics in North American medical schools and, on the other, working independently of one another to monitor the rate and direction of workloads and patient access to local genetic counseling and laboratory services and, subsequently, achieve recognition for medical genetics as a medical specialty at the national level.

Dermatoglyphics and the persistence of 'Mongolism'

In 1961, a prestigious group of medical researchers called on their colleagues to stop using the language of 'Mongolism' to describe people with what we now call 'Down's syndrome' (or Trisomy 21). This call responded to new knowledge about the biological basis of Down's syndrome: rather than the product of racial degeneration, as had been hypothesized in the 19th century, the condition was the result of an extra chromosome, dubbed '21'. Yet, despite this plea, the terms 'Mongol' and 'Mongolism' continued in scientific use through the 1960s. Drawing on published and archival materials, I argue that the new knowledge about chromosomes did not rupture older patterns of scientific practice or interpretation, and with them, older terminological habits. The persistence of the language of Mongolism reflects the continuity of a network of older approaches to interpreting the condition within the community of human and medical geneticists, including an enduring diagnostic and interpretive technology, dermatoglyphics. Old networks were not supplanted; they were re-aligned.