ABSTRACT
Early US eugenic attempts at institutionalizing human heredity resulted in the formation of the Eugenic Record Office (ERO) in 1910. This chapter discusses two approaches towards establishing medical institutions specialized in the study of human heredity: the plans promoted by the prominent eugenicist Harry H. Laughlin in the 1930s, and the genetics clinic realized by the medical geneticist Victor A. McKusick in the 1950s. The Medical Genetics Clinic at the Johns Hopkins Hospital grew out of a longstanding clinic for treating syphilis, a disease that both sufferers and healers had long suspected was transmitted, at least in part, due to hereditary factors. Hugh Young, while directing the venereal disease prevention programme for the American Expeditionary Forces during World War I, had recruited Joseph Earl Moore to work in and to supervise Hopkins's Syphilis Clinic. World War II's intercession postponed the fulfilment of many pre-war medical science plans, including the creation of a Laughlin-model Clinic in Human Heredity.
