In America the movement got an early start but developed slowly. The
first definite step was the formation of an Institute of Heredity in
Boston, shortly after 1880, by Loring Moody, who was assisted by the
poet Longfellow, Samuel E. Sewall, Mrs. Horace Mann, and other
well-known people. He proposed to work very much along the lines that
the Eugenics Record Office later adopted, but he was ahead of his time,
and his attempt seems to have come to nothing.
In 1883 Alexander Graham Bell, who may be considered the first
scientific worker in eugenics in the United States, published a paper on
the danger of the formation of a deaf variety of the human race in this
country, in which he gave the result of researches he had made at
Martha's Vineyard and other localities during preceding years, on the
pedigrees of congenitally deaf persons--deaf mutes, as they were then
called. He showed clearly that congenital deafness is largely due to
heredity, that it is much increased by consanguineous marriages, and
that it is of great importance to prevent the marriage of persons, in
both of whose families congenital deafness is present. About five years
later he founded the Volta Bureau in Washington, D. C., for the study of
deafness, and this has fostered a great deal of research work on this
particular phase of heredity.
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