Cancer is according to many a most promising test case of the new 'genetic medicine' of the 21st century. However new in terms of the genetic technology used it is important to realize that taking into account genetic or hereditary factors in cancer medicine is nothing new in itself. Since at least the eighteenth century medical doctors and patients have tried to establish links between heredity and cancer. 1n 1913 the Michigan University pathologist Aldred Scott Warthin published his first study on a family with a so-called ‘inherited susceptibility’ to cancer. The susceptibility in this family ‘G’ was associated with the risk of creating an “inferior stock”. Given the boost of studies on heredity and disease, and the vogue for eugenics at the beginning of the twentieth century one would expect strong support for Warthin’s study. If not for purely scientific reasons Family G might have been picked up as part of the gospel of eugenics; an exemplary case of a degenerative stock to be used at an exhibit of eugenics. After all, Warthin was a rising star within the American medical establishment and had become part of John Kellog’s eugenic priesthood in Michigan. However, none of these likely scenarios did materialize. I will show in this paper how the cancer idiom of heredity that was associated with shame, fatalism and stigmatization became regarded by the powerful American Society for the Control of Cancer as counterproductive in the fight against cancer and was blotted out.