67 3. A totalizing vision of degeneration that was seen to account for many physical and psychiatric medical conditions, as well as moral problems affecting society at large. As such, it aspired to assume a social control formerly exercised by the Church. There was associated emphasis on hereditary determinism and the transmission of ill-effects suffered by parents, as a result of noxious physical and moral influences,119 to future generations. 4. The promise that many of the manifestations of degeneration could be minimized, or even reversed, by improved mental and physical hygiene under the supervision of a new generation of medical professionals, the hygienists (public health physicians).
This paradigmatic shift, which fused degenerationist ideas with those of the new sanitary movement in France, resulted in a conceptual framework that could be applied to the whole of society. So powerful, so attractive and so polyvalent was its explanatory power that it appeared in the writings of leading philosophers, sociologists, biologists and physicians for the rest of the nineteenth century.120, 121 A
physical and moral influences : The concept of hereditary transmission of acquired characteristics is usually associated with the writings of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829) though, in fact, the notion preceded him. Phillip Wilson quotes an observation about Erasmus Darwin‘s Zoonomia of 1794 that it, ―biologised the concept of progress‖ (McNeil 112), and therefore postulates hereditary transmission of acquired features. Wilson concludes, ―It might be said, contrary to the usual phrasing, that Lamarck was actually [Erasmus] Darwinian in his thinking‖ (Wilson 119). Ernst Kraus, in his 1879 biography of Erasmus Darwin, made the same point (Kraus 133), as did Drachman (88). All degeneration theory was inherently ―Lamarckian.‖ 120 writings of leading philosophers [...] physicians: a list might include Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Spencer, Darwin, Hardy, Taine, Ribot, Engels, Marx, Lankester, Galton, Haeckel, Charcot, Maudsley and Freud in addition to the French aliénistes and authors mentioned in this text. 121 writings of leading [...] biologists: A particularly striking illustration of degenerationist thinking is expressed by Darwin, ―there is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. 119