Eliot's close attention to MacBride's “Study of Heredity” and his survey of issues in eugenics in general through his reading of the 1916–17 issues of The Eugenics Review and Shield coincided with events in his personal life that made him extremely conscious of his eugenic responsibilities and reinforced his sense of what Foucault identifies as late nineteenth-century bourgeois obligations to safeguard family blood:

Perhaps Eliot's poetic scrutiny of Aunt Helen, Cousin Harriet, and Cousin Nancy ironically acknowledges the menaces of heredity. Certainly his own marriage forced him to acknowledge this menace. On the one hand, his marriage to Vivien Haigh-Wood forced him to confront the possibility that her various health problems were heritable. On the other hand, his medical classification as “unfit” when applying to join the US navy forced him to contemplate defects in his own physical constitution at a time when the valiant soldier was being celebrated as eugenically ideal stock.