![](https://commonreader.wustl.edu/app/uploads/2020/07/GeneticsInTheMadhouse-150x150.jpg)
Mental Illness and the Question of Genetics
Theodore Porter’s contribution to this discussion, Genetics in the Madhouse: The Unknown History of Human Heredity, takes a much broader perspective on the eugenics-genetics divide. Instead of seeing eugenics as either a founding contaminant in genetics, or as a temporary aberration in psychiatric science, Porter looks at the much longer history of data collection within the primary sites for psychiatry over several centuries: asylums or mental hospitals.