Hereditary Factors Underlying the “Destructive Trinity of Diseases”: Syphilis, Leprosy, and Tuberculosis

confrontations by outsiders regarding the hereditary succession of its rulers. It was also during this period that new claims were tested in Hawai‘i as to the speculated inheritance of particular diseases. Three diseases common among Hawaiians and Euro-Americans during this period are reviewed: syphilis, leprosy, and tuberculosis. Particular attention is devoted to the timing and the extent to which hereditary conceptualizations of these diseases were challenged by the Germ Theory, an explanation of disease that gained considerable support in at least some parts of Europe and the United States during the second half of the nineteenth century. Source material for disease in the Hawaiian Islands is drawn from published medical and public health reports, patient narratives, ethnographical accounts, scientific expedition reports, travelogue memoirs, and historical writings on tropical medicine, population, race, and culture. This paper provides us with further interpretations of ways in which ‘inheritance ’ and ‘heredity ’ were applied to states of disease within different cultural perspectives across the globe during this critical time of change regarding concepts of heredity. 1 An earlier version of this essay was presented at an invited Cultural History of Heredity Confe