Interrogating Bodies: Medico-Racial Knowledge, Politics, and the Study of a Disease

Abstract

Many of the blood dyscrasias show more or less distinct inheritability and the familial character offers no new problem. But the racial specificity [of sickle cell anemia] is unique. If found to hold true, this would indicate that the primary basis for the disease must be laid in conditions far removed from any possible accident of the environment…. [W]e must assume that "the disease depends primarily on some fundamental racial peculiarity of the blood forming tissues.—G. S. Graham (1924)