William Benjamin Carpenter and the Emerging Science of Heredity

Abstract

In the nineteenth century, farmers, doctors, and the wider public shared a family of questions and anxieties concerning heredity. Questions over whether injuries, mutilations, and bad habits could be transmitted to offspring had existed for centuries, but found renewed urgency in the popular and practical scientific press from the 1820s onwards. Sometimes referred to as "Lamarckism" or "the inheritance of acquired characteristics," the potential for transmitting both desirable and disastrous traits to offspring was one of the most pressing scientific questions of the nineteenth century. As I argue in this paper, Carpenter's religious commitments to abolition and the temperance movement shaped his understanding of heredity. But this also committed him to a body of evidence for the inheritance of acquired characteristics that was coming under criticism for being untrustworthy. Carpenter used his popular treatises on physiology to promote these older, familiar ideas about heredity because they provided vital means of arguing for the unity of mankind and the hereditary dangers of intemperance. While early nineteenth century physiology has been seen by some historians as a challenge to religious authority, given its potentially materialist accounts of the body and the actions of the soul, this paper demonstrates how the missionary and institutional activities of the Unitarian church were ideologically supported by Carpenter's publications.

Women Philosophers in Nineteenth-Century Britain

“…Sometimes this produces sensations-mental phenomena of which we are conscious. Sometimes, however, ¹⁴ On Carpenter's huge influence on nineteenth-century British medicine, see Lidwell-Durnin (2020).…”

Mimush Sheep and the Spectre of Inbreeding: Historical Background for Festetics’s Organic and Genetic Laws Four Decades Before Mendel’s Experiments in Peas

“…Contrary to what is generally assumed of the origin of the laws of heredity—often coupled with the experiments of Gregor Johann Mendel (1822–1884)—interest in studying the transmission of traits and their theoretical conceptualization began to emerge in the eighteenth century. There is a growing consensus that the concepts of biological heredity were gradually constructed from the knowledge scattered in different domains, such as philosophy, jurisprudence, medicine, horticulture, and animal breeding (López-Beltrán 2006 ; Lidwell-Durnin 2020 ; McLaughlin 2007 , p. 281; Poczai and Santiago-Blay 2022 ). Thus, the formation of the epistemic space of heredity as a scientific discipline required assimilating ideas from several other disciplines.…”

Principles and biological concepts of heredity before Mendel

“…There is a growing scientific consensus that the concepts of biological heredity were gradually constructed from the knowledge scattered in different scientific domains such as embryology, philosophy, jurisprudence, medicine, horticulture, and animal breeding [ 2 – 12 ]. Thus, the formation of the epistemic space of heredity as a scientific discipline required cross-cutting through several marginalized disciplines.…”