They are also a part of a growing movement called Eugenics. Adherents believe that biology is destiny, and that selective breeding can improve the human animal just as it does livestock. The movement attracts a curious range of supporters in the US, from Calvin Coolidge to Helen Keller, from Ivy Leaguers to the Ku Klux Klan. Unfortunately, Eugenics is based on the misuse of the emerging science of genetics, a misuse that has sinister consequences an ocean away in Nazi Germany.
Doctors turn to the conventional wisdom, searching for a biological cause.
When they come up empty-handed, reluctantly they turn to psychological explanations popularized by Viennese psychiatrist Sigmund Freud. What was then a radical new perspective is still controversial today in the debate about the causes of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Its discovery comes at a time when fully half of America's hospital beds are taken by patients suffering from schizophrenia. But most psychotic patients in the '50s can't afford the luxury of psychotherapy and spend their days in state mental institutions, where their options range from lobotomy to electric shock to other biological treatments. Still, whether in private or state care all these therapies have only limited, occasional success.