From Galtonian Eugenics to Biosocial Science: The Intellectual Origins and Policy Implications of Quantifying Heredity in Interwar and Post-War Britain

In the UK, the period after the Second World War is generally associated with the reformist ideas which influenced the emergence of the welfare state, the NHS, and a political economy of national planning. Few, however, would connect the transition from the interwar to the post-war period in the UK with the continuing influence of eugenic ideas which had a lasting impact on British research on health and welfare policies following the end of 1945. This thesis aims to demonstrate that from the interwar through to the post-war decades, British social scientists, economists, demographers, doctors, and geneticists actively supported and advocated health and welfare policies which were fundamentally related to eugenic concerns about potential qualitative and quantitative changes within a population. It will show that eugenic ideas and methodologies which emerged during the interwar period's 'poverty debate' remained important to researchers in population genetics, social medicine, genetic counselling, and 'biosocial science' across the post-war period.This thesis represents the first detailed historical analysis of the influence of eugenics within post-war health and welfare policies and research in the UK following the end of the Second World War. It adopts a view which challenges the clean historical demarcation between interwar eugenics and post-war genetics, both in social research into the causes of poverty and medical research into the existence of innately pathological characters among certain population groups. In doing so, two broad new contributions to the history of eugenics in the UK are presented: firstly, this thesis demonstrates that developments across the twentieth century in applied quantitative analysis, particularly the statistical demarcation of varying groups within a population based upon categories of fitness, class, and health, were inspired by and influenced eugenic research in the social and biological sciences from the interwar period through to the late 1960s. Secondly, this thesis charts from the interwar period through to the post-war decades the intellectual shift among eugenicists towards a growing acceptance of a complex interaction between both environmental and genetic factors as the cause of 'social problems', such as poverty and unemployment, and changes in population health which complicates a clean nature/nurture distinction to define eugenics in relation to post-war research in human genetics. It concludes that these two broad findings together highlight the continuing influence of eugenics in the UK from the interwar period through to the post-war period, which is likely to have significant implications for our understanding of the history of established academic disciplines, such as population genetics, medical genetics, and bioethics.