“Studies in Mendelism and Its Multiple Contexts” would be a more plain-speaking subtitle for this outstanding volume. Its sixteen chapters touch on everything from asylums, bachelors, and cousin marriage to Wilhelm Weinberg (of “Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium” fame), X-ray mutagenesis, and Zionist medicine. But the rise of Mendelism or, to use the later and better-known name, “genetics,” is a recurring motif, and toward the end of the volume, it becomes an explicit focus. As the editors explain in their introduction, the overall aim is to enlarge and complicate historical understanding of the diverse, heredity-related ideas, ideologies, practices, and institutions with which Mendelism meshed—or failed to mesh—as its partisans took ownership of the twentieth-century science of heredity.
No brief review can do justice to so rich a collection of scholarship. One chapter that is in every sense exemplary is Theodore M. Porter’s about asylums. By the end of the nineteenth century, Porter shows,...