# ‘A sad inheritance of misery’: the cultural life of hereditary scrofula in eighteenth-century England

## TL;DR

This paper explores how scrofula was rebranded as hereditary in 18th-century England, linking it to moral and financial decline.

## Contribution

The paper reveals how cultural and political shifts influenced the perception of scrofula as a hereditary disease.

## Key findings

- Scrofula was rebranded as hereditary alongside other diseases like gout and rickets.
- The disease became a symbol of moral and financial degeneration in popular and medical discourse.
- Scrofula was often portrayed as passing from father to son, reflecting financial inheritance models.

## Abstract

This essay argues that scrofula was one of several disorders, including gout, rickets, and venereal disease, that were ‘rebranded’ as hereditary in response to broader cultural changes that took place during the Restoration and eighteenth century in England. While the purposes of scrofula’s recategorisation were more political than medical, they resulted in this heretofore relatively obscure childhood ailment assuming a new prominence within both medical and popular discourses of the period. Scrofula became both emblem and proof of the links between sexual promiscuity, financial profligacy, and physiological degeneration, its symbolic status reinforced by the legal and moral language used to model processes of hereditary transmission. By likening the inheritance of scrofula to the inheritance of original sin—or, more commonly, to the inheritance of a ‘docked entail’ or damaged estate—eighteenth-century writers and artists not only made this non-inherited ailment into a sign of catastrophic hereditary decline; they also paved the way for scrofula to be identified as a disease of aristocratic vice, even though its association with crowded, unsanitary living conditions likely made it more common among the poor. By the same token, financial models of disease inheritance facilitated a bias toward paternal transmission, with scrofula often portrayed as passing, like a title or an estate, from father to son rather than from mother to daughter.