World Journal of
Pharmaceutical and Life Sciences

CHARLES DAVENPORT AND EPILEPSY AS A SINGLE GENE DISORDER

Dr. Mark Lubinsky*

ABSTRACT

Charles Davenport’s genetic studies had eugenic biases. His work on epilepsy seems particularly questionable, with one gene underlying all cases, even with trauma, and also causing social pathologies. However, he was replacing a medical model with Mendelism, with findings well within the mainstream when he wrote, and for decades after. Physicians had seen heredity as a transmitted factor that stabilized and controlled anatomy and physiology. Diatheses, tendencies towards diseases, were part of heredity, and interacted with other influences, giving transmitted changes. Epilepsy was one of many possibilities reflecting a nervous system diathesis- neuropathic heredity, a weakness, or taint. Multiple problems reflected polymorphism, “a unitary something in the neuropathic or psychopathic inheritance that makes itself manifest under many forms” (Myerson 1925: 271). Once heredity weakened, it was subject to further defects via degenerate heredity. Medical views of diseases with multiple contributing causes complimented and supported this. Here, neuropathic heredity predisposed to epilepsy and other findings, none inevitable, accounting for all cases, even with trauma, well past mid-century! Ultimately, this was standard medicine where Davenport essentially used a single gene- in a sense, a progressive attempt to provide genetic justifications for medical findings. It has been suggested that facts are constructed by professional communities, rather than discovered, which we see here. For genetics to be used effectively, new facts had to be constructed and older facts that reflected experience based medical beliefs eliminated. This took decades to accomplish, and much was never disproved, but became irrelevant and forgotten.

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