ABSTRACT
The history of genetics in British medicine goes back several centuries, with a long series of articles on familial disorders, as well as of studies into the nature of heredity. The nineteenth century especially saw many detailed reports in the medical literature on hereditary conditions, but no underlying basis for their occurrence could be found until the recognition of Gregor Mendel's work in 1900. After this many of the previously observed families could be interpreted along mendelian lines, in studies by William Bateson and others, so that by 1914 the specific patterns of single gene inheritance were well established, with evidence from genetic disorders playing a major role in genetics overall. The quantitative aspects of normal human variation, originally studied by Francis Galton, likewise became well established and gave a basis for the inheritance of common non-mendelian diseases.
In the twentieth century, despite the initial lack of laboratory approaches, the period between the wars produced a series of highly original studies on human genetics by workers such as JBS Haldane, RA Fisher and others, so that the foundations for future medical genetics were largely in place by the outbreak of World War II.
