This file contains the unstructured notes made during archival research on my MSc-thesis project ‘Individualised Public Health: a conceptual history of heredity during the interwar years’. Below my provisional abstract (June 2020):

This thesis investigates how public health was conceptualised in the Dutch interwar period by looking at how the contested concept of heredity was used to articulate and legitimise the response to degeneration, alcoholism, and tuberculosis by three groups of health reformers: eugenicists, anti-alcohol reformers, and sanitary reformers. I will show how these groups employed the conceptualisation of heredity and the social diseases they targeted in different ways. Dutch eugenicists employed heredity with reference to population health and degeneration, while criticising the top-down sterilisation policies abroad and, paradoxically, propagated environmental reform. Anti-alcohol reformers remained faithful to a Lamarckian conceptualisation of heredity to argue that any form of alcohol use could damage the hereditary mass of the population. Individuals should take their social responsibility in refraining from alcohol, they argued, and protect the health of the collective. Dutch sanitary reformers employed heredity by downplaying its significance to articulate optimism for environmental reform. In the aftermath of the nineteenth-century debate on whether tuberculosis was a hereditary or contagious disease, the Dutch sanitary reformers chose to emphasise the disease’s ‘contagious cause’—even when experts began to admit that heredity played at least a minor role as a causal factor.