ABSTRACT
In south Wales, when talking about inheritance, a number of respondents described having 'bad blood' within the family or discussed the purity of their blood. The so-called 'lay beliefs are dialectically produced as a consequence of a sustained engagement with the clinical domain where biomedical ideas of relatedness and inheritance penetrate other models of relatedness. A trait or disease was often described as coming into the family from a certain source or via an incident that was believed to have caused changes in the blood. If within the domain of English kinship substance is often metaphorized as blood, the connections created by the transmission of substance are equally metaphorized as flow. Conditions were often described as being passed 'down the line' through the generations of a family and sources and routes of transmission were traced. The discussions of inheritance often incorporate a belief in gendered modes of transmission.
