John Randolph had Klinefelter’s syndrome?
Just a weird historical-genetic note, the radical decentralist Republican John Randolph likely suffered from Klinefelter’s syndrome (XXY as opposed to XY). In What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 the author claims that Randolph’s rumored anatomical peculiarities were confirmed postmortem. I only make note of this because it seems strange to me (I don’t know why) that the paleoconservative John Randolph Club would be named after a childless eccentric who was likely genetically abnormal. Then again, it also struck me as peculiar that a conservative Christian college based out of Manhattan would name some of its fraternities and sororities after avowed freethinkers.
“based out of”: does that mean something subtle?
John Randolph had some kind of hypogonadism, but it probably wasn’t Kleinfelter’s. He was slender, had a high-pitched voice and a poorly developed beard. One account says he never shaved. Kleinfelter’s patients are said to have defects of language, “executive function” and affect. But Randolph came up with witticisms that have been reprinted for 200 years, was known as an excellent rider and had strong emotional relations with his family and friends.
The risk factor was that he was a product of one of the many Randolph cousin marriages, a one-and-a-halfth cousin marriage. (Surely there’s a genealogical term for this.) His father, John Randolph, was a grandson of the Immigrant, William. His mother, Frances Bland, was a great-grand-daughter. The only definite genetic disease I’ve noticed in the family was a son of John’s brother, Richard. Richard married his cousin, Judith Randolph of Tuckahoe, who was herself the product of a Randolph marriage between second cousins. One of their two children had congenital deaf-mutism. But Richard and Judith were also cousins as Bolling descendants, and there were two cases of deaf-mutism from a cousin marriage in the Bolling family. So the gene for that condition probably came from the Bolling lineage, not the Randolphs. (I have pedigree diagrams for all of this if anyone is interested.)
The Randolphs has a large number of cousin marriages in the third, fourth and fifth generations, perhaps a dozen in all. John Randolph appears to be the only one with a possible genetic condition. Perhaps the reason was that they were gentry in England — second or third-string gentry, but in a restricted breeding pool that racked up a large amount of consanguinity over the centuries. By the hard logic of population genetics, this is the way to get rid of unfavorable recessives.
There are descriptions of John Randolph in a couple of books about a scandal involving his brother Richard and cousin Anne Carey (Nancy) Randolph.
It’s picky, but how does one study physiology postmortem?
well, i meant that they inferred from anatomy to physiology…since it seems that there was an assumption that his processes weren’t all normal. but i changed it to ‘anatomical’ for the sake of greater accuracy.
The Portland, Oregon, First Unitarian Universalist Church once had a singles group — probably meant to be intellectual — which hit the Age of Aquarius and flowered into a bit of a meat market for sexual cruisers. The name of the group was “Michael Servetus,” an historical unitarian (or maybe anti-trinitarian) who was a cranky bachelor and finally burned at the stake for his strong independent moral stance.
These things happen. (Both witch hunts and meat markets.)
Prairie Mary