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IJE Advance Access published online on October 5, 2009
International Journal of Epidemiology, doi:10.1093/ije/dyp310
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Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Epidemiological Association © The Author 2009; all rights reserved.

Commentary: A Darwin family concern

Adam Kuper*

Department of Anthropology, Yale University, New Haven, CT, 16 Muswell Road, London N10 2BG, UK. E-mail: adam.kuper@googlemail.com

Accepted 30 March 2009

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

‘I’m not quite sure that it's a good thing for cousins to marry’, remarks Dr Crofts in Trollope's The Small House of Allington, published in 1863. ‘They do, you know, very often’, he is reminded, ‘and it suits some family arrangements’.1 To be sure, the doctor had a personal interest in the matter. A young woman he hoped to marry had just become engaged to her cousin. However, Dr Crofts was talking as a responsible medical man. The British medical press was raising questions about the risks to offspring of cousin marriages,2,3 and a bright young doctor would have been familiar with the professional debates. (And in the end he gets his girl.)

Charles Darwin had picked up on these concerns very early. He was worried about heredity and also about the consequences of cousin marriage. Shortly before his own marriage to his first cousin, Emma Wedgwood, he had . . . [Full Text of this Article]


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