page_title: History of Tay–Sachs disease
section_title: Eugenics era
hierarchical_section_title: History of Tay–Sachs disease / Eugenics era
context_page_description: The history of Tay–Sachs disease started with the development and acceptance of the evolution theory of disease in the 1860s and 1870s, the possibility that science could explain and even prevent or cure illness prompted medical doctors to undertake more precise description and diagnosis of disease. Waren Tay and Bernard Sachs, two physicians of the late 19th century described the progression of the disease precisely and provided differential diagnostic criteria to distinguish it from other neurological disorders with similar symptoms.
  Both Tay and Sachs reported their first cases among Jewish families. Tay reported his observations in 1881 in the first volume of the proceedings of the British Ophthalmological Society, of which he was a founding member. By 1884, he had seen three cases in a single family. Years later, Bernard Sachs, an American neurologist, reported similar findings when he reported a case of "arrested cerebral development" to members of the New York Neurological Society.
  Sachs, who recognized that the disease had a familial basis, proposed that the disease should be called amaurotic familial idiocy. However, its genetic basis was still poorly understood.
context_section_description: Three international eugenics conferences, gatherings that attracted scientists and medical practitioners, were held between 1912 and 1932. These conferences are often regarded as the high water mark of the Eugenics movement, which claimed a scientific basis for racial theories.
  According to sociologist Shelley Reuter, early medical writing about Tay–Sachs disease often treated Tay–Sachs disease as an exclusively Jewish disease and in the process contributed to a characterization of Jews as a racial group. This treatment mirrored the view of genetic disease in society as a whole, in a time when the Eugenics movement was ascendant. When the disease was reported in non-Jewish patients, physicians were skeptical. Often, they questioned the diagnosis, or they speculated that the patient must have "Jewish blood." Sachs, who was Jewish, at first questioned how the disease could be confined to Jews. But by 1903 he was convinced: "Why children of one race should be affected so much more often than those of others, when the allied conditions show no such preference, remains as great a puzzle as ever."
  Among physicians, the characterization of humanity according to race was taken for granted. The question of whether Jews constitute a "pure race" or a "mixed race" was under debate, and Tay–Sachs disease was seen as evidence of a Jewish racial type, which was believed to have a predilection for neurological disorders. Even the Jewish Encyclopedia reflected such a characterization of Tay–Sachs disease:
  In the present state of knowledge of the etiology of idiocy and imbecility in general the only cause of their frequency among Jews that may be considered is the neurotic taint of the race. Children descending from a neurotic ancestry have nervous systems which are very unstable, and they are often incapable of tiding safely over the crises attending growth and development. They are often idiots or imbeciles.
  In the United States, the World War I era was a period of rising nativism, of hostility to immigrants. Jewish immigration to the United States peaked in the period 1880–1924, with most of the immigrants arriving from Russia and countries in Eastern Europe. Opponents of immigration often questioned whether immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, such as Italians and Jews, could be assimilated into American society. Reports of Tay–Sachs disease contributed to a perception among nativists that Jews were an inferior race. Reuter writes, "The fact that Jewish immigrants continued to display their nervous tendencies in America where they were free from persecution was seen as proof of their biological inferiority and raised concerns about the degree to which they were being permitted free entry into the US."
caption: Logo from the Second International Eugenics Conference held in 1921
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