Abstract:
The concept of generation has had a dynamic career in science and medicine. Initially used to describe procreation, by the late 18th century, it was replaced by reproduction. But although generation now primarily came to signify a collective of organisms born around the same time, its older meaning, linking procreation, genealogy and the environment of early development, remained. In this chapter I study its career between 1945 and the early 21st century, across medicine as well as social work, public health, psychiatry and molecular biology, to describe the reoccurrence of diseases, behaviours and social conditions within a family and a social or ethnic group. From the term problem family in the 1940s to the later rise of intergenerational cycle, and inter- and transgenerational inheritance or transmission, the need for a concept to capture the reoccurrence of the poorly delineated set of recurring phenomena of non-genetic origin remained. The most famous instance of the intergenerational transmission of trauma, the offspring of Holocaust survivors, provided a blueprint for other groups – especially Indigenous peoples in former European colonies – to explain, from the 1990s onwards, the ongoing consequences of the trauma of colonization.