Degeneration under the microscope at the fin de siècle

Theories of familial, racial, and national degeneration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have been explored by historians in the context of social and moral pathology. At the same time nerve degeneration was studied in the post mortem room and in the laboratory but links to the broader ideology of degeneration have not been investigated by scholars. This paper joins these domains by examining the concept of Wallerian degeneration. It argues that various discourses--including those of the laboratory scientist, the clinician, and the social theorist--employed the term degeneration, and these discourses frequently overlapped demonstrating that degeneration was a ubiquitous fact of Victorian and Edwardian nature.