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PubMed1989

Eugenic sterilization: a preliminary comparison of the Scandinavian experience to that of Germany.

The paper argues that historical analysis and explanation of eugenics in Germany can benefit much from systematic comparison to Scandinavia. Common cultural background and quite similar development up to 1933 provides a background for isolating salient causes in Nazi population policies. This comparison will also help a more precise understanding of the mutual dependence between science and politics in the case of eugenics. The author holds that many of the geneticists who participated in the eugenics debates of the 1930's and 1940's had a clearer grasp of the distinction between science and politics than most present day historiographers of eugenics.

Eugenics↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Progressing from eugenics to human genetics. celebrating the 70th birthday of professor Newton E. Morton.

Eugenics, unlike science, involves decision making on various issues, and decision making involves the risk of making errors. This communication first clarifies the nature and seriousness of making errors known as type II in the statistical literature, i.e. the error of punishing a person when he is not guilty of the crime attributed to him. Eugenic laws in China and the eugenic movements in England and the United States are briefly reviewed. The explosive advances made in medical and population genetics in the last 40 years are replacing the conventional eugenics programs by new approaches. Modern genetic counseling has been introduced as the intermediate agent between the scientist and the family that needs advice. It is stressed that individual rights must be respected under all circumstances.

China↗
PubMed2006

[Negative and positive eugenics: meanings and contradictions].

Eugenics constitutes an important subject of debate, associated with current biogenetics improvements. Considering that the central point in eugenics has always been the preoccupation with future generations' health and constitution, and that the use of scientific means and knowledge for the birth of a physically and mentally healthy child can be considered a eugenic action, this paper tries to analyze the meanings and contradictions of negative and positive eugenics actions, constructed concomitantly with 20th-century technical-scientific improvements. The meanings range, respectively, between limiting or stimulating human reproduction, at the beginning of this century, and preventing diseases or improving physical and mental characteristics, nowadays. In the implantation of actions, contradictions were produced, such as the discrimination and elimination of many people in view of one ideal man, the biologization of eminently social factors, the defense of a supposed scientific neutrality and the indiscriminate use of the reproductive choice right.

Eugenics↗
PubMed1986

Eugenics and prenatal testing.

Prejudices against people with disabilities, poor people, and immigrants during the nineteenth century generated a science of "race improvement" called eugenics. In the United States, a number of eugenic measures were enacted early in this century, but it was in Nazi Germany that eugenics flourished under the name of racial hygiene (Rassenhygiene). In the guise of furthering the health of the German people, German scientists and physicians initially designed programs of sterilization. Next came euthanasia and finally mass extermination of "lives not worth living." Remembering this history, many German women oppose the new technical developments in prenatal diagnosis because they see them as yet another way to specify what kinds of people are and are not fit to inhabit the world. This paper tries to place the new technologies in the context of eugenics and to point out some of the ways in which the new, supposedly liberating, choices in fact limit women's control over our lives.

Abortion, Induced↗
PubMed2000

["Not unaffected by northern winds"? Swiss psychiatry and eugenics in the period between world warms].

On the basis of the publications and meeting reports of the Swiss Society of Psychiatry this essay examines the relationship of Swiss psychiatry and eugenics during the time between the wars. In a democratic country Swiss psychiatry, on the one hand held a leading position in the justification of eugenic measures, on the other hand a majority of Swiss psychiatrists refused coercive measures, and in World War II disassociated from the racialist eugenics and healthpolicy that were established in NS-Germany. Thus, in difference to NS-Germany the practice of eugenic sterilizations in Switzerland wasn't regulated by any specific national law.

Eugenics↗
PubMed1998

[On the history of French eugenics].

The French Eugenical Society was founded in 1913, but eugenics had been actively discussed already much earlier, although under varing names. The main protagonists of early French eugenics were Georges Vacher de Lapouge, who was inspired by Galton and socialism, Adolphe Pinard, who propagated the "puericulture", and Paul Robin, who represented neo-malthusianism in his country. Alexis Carrel's ideas on improving the human race became widespread especially through his book "Man, the Unknown", published simultaneously in French and English in 1935. In general, the French eugenicists were more in favour of positive eugenics than negative selection, including sterilization, but their general influence was weaker than in several other countries.

Eugenics↗
PubMed1996

"Democracy was never intended for degenerates": Alberta's flirtation with eugenics comes back to haunt it.

An Alberta woman recently won a lawsuit against the government of Alberta for wrongful sterilization that took place when she was a 14-year-old ward at the Provincial Training School for Mental Defectives. It was the first time the province has been held accountable for actions taken under the Sexual Sterilization Act, a 1927 law that promoted the theory of eugenics and led to the sterilization of more than 2800 people. It has since been repealed. A physician who served on the province's Eugenics Board said the decisions were based on the best scientific advice and medical techniques available at the time. Today, she added, eugenics is being practised in a different way through prenatal diagnosis and therapeutic abortion.

Alberta↗
PubMed1976

Galton and the birth of differential psychology and eugenics: social, political, and economic forces.

The social, political, and economic forces operative in nineteenth-century Britain are briefly described. This permits tracing the birth of both the scientific study of individual differences and the field of eugenics to the infrastructure of society at that time. The distinction is made between the normative doctrine of individualism and the factual study of individual differences. It is argued that democratic--liberal--capitalistic--individualism, in part, conditioned the beginning of differential psychology and eugenics. In this process, Galton's liberal views concerning individual freedom and opportunity for full development became transformed into their dialectic--totalitarian--collectivism--a vision of an ideal state which did not come into being. It is paradoxically concluded that those same social forces which helped bring about the birth of differential psychology and the entailing eugenics ideology prevented the latter from being accepted and implemented.

Economics↗
PubMed2002

[The standard textbook on racial hygiene by Erwin Baur, Eugen Fischer, and Fritz Lenz as viewed by the psychiatric and neurological communities from 1921 to 1940].

The textbook "Human heredity and Racial Hygiene" by Erwin Baur, Eugen Fischer, and Fritz Lenz went through five editions between 1921 and 1940. In contemporary journals, it received almost only positive review articles and was considered to be the standard textbook on racial hygiene in the Weimar Republic. After Hitler's takeover in 1933, it became the "scientific" basis for eugenic sterilization programs. In that year, the Nazis enacted a law allowing the involuntary sterilization of persons with diseases thought to be hereditary, mostly neurological and psychiatric disorders. Using review articles on the book, the position of neurologists and psychiatrists towards racial hygiene is analyzed. We describe how they prepared and maintained the acceptance of eugenic politics in the medical profession by praising the standard work on racial hygiene.

Eugenics↗
PubMed2002

[Mentalities and sterilization laws in Europe during the 1930s. Eugenics, genetics, and politics in a historic context].

The laws and related practice of sterilisation in Germany during the Nazi period (1933-1945) were not isolated phenomena. Rather, they have to be understood in the broader context of the eugenic and racial hygiene movement developing internationally during the first decades of the twentieth century. Central conditions allowing its emergence were scientific, sociopolitical, and cultural factors. Fears of biological degeneration, economic considerations, and trust in the future potential of biology and in particular genetics played a crucial role in many western societies. Eugenics and the practice of sterilisation are constitutively linked to scientific justifications, just as - complementarily - the development of genetics, in particular psychiatric genetics, is inextricably associated with eugenics and its funding by philanthropic or state institutions. Parallels and a multiplicity of mutual relations existed on various levels, in particular between Germany, the US, and Scandinavian countries.

Eugenics↗
PubMed1995

Eugenics--medical or social science?

Eugenics is the paradigmatic case of the conflict between biology and medicine over social influence. Commenting on an essay by Debora Kamrat-Lang (1995), the paper reconstructs the historical roots of eugenics as a form of preventive medicine. A comparison between the development of some crucial aspects of eugenics between Germany and the United States reveals that the prevalence of the value placed on the individual over hereditary health of a population ultimately determined the outcome of the conflict but collective concepts may be revived by a new biological knowledge.

Eugenics↗
PubMed2004

[Scandinavian eugenics: Nordic historians provide new approaches].

Late disclosure of the large scale of sterilization practices in the Nordic countries created an outburst of scandal: did these policies rely on coercion? To what extent? Who in the end was responsible? Sterilization practices targeted underpriviledged people first. The mentally retarded and women were their first victims. Operations were very frequently determined by other people's manipulative or coercive influences. Should the blame be put on the Social-Democrats in power throughout the period (except in Finland and Estonia)? Apart from Denmark, perhaps, local physicians and local services, more than governments, seemed to have strongly supported sterilization practices. Teetotalers and feminists shared responsibilities. How can one explain that eugenics finally declined? Based on a sound application of the Hardy-Weinberg law, the science of the eugenicists was correct. Was it politics? But uncovering of the Nazi crimes had only a very small impact on eugenics. Some authors underline the fact that the Nordic scientific institutions were particularly suited to liberal values. Others point to the devastating effect on eugenics once hereditarist psychiatry fell from favour in the middle of the sixties.

Eugenics↗
PubMed1995

Women and eugenics in Britain: the case of Mary Scharlieb, Elizabeth Sloan Chesser, and Stella Browne.

Existing literature on eugenics only touches briefly upon the role played by women. This article sets out to examine the reason for the high participation of women in the British eugenics movement by focusing on the role of three individuals in the early part of the twentieth century. It concludes that an important objective of women in eugenics was the 'feminization' of its social agenda.

Eugenics↗
PubMed2004

Racial science in social context: John R. Baker on eugenics, race, and the public role of the scientist.

In 1974 a British biologist, John Randal Baker (1900-1984), published a large and controversial book simply entitled Race that reiterated persistent eugenicist themes concerning the relation between race, intelligence, and progress. The history of Baker's book is a case study in the politics of scientific publishing, and his ideas influenced scholars associated with later works such as The Bell Curve. Baker, a student of Julian Huxley, was a longtime participant in the British eugenics movement and opponent of what he took to be a facile belief in human equality. In 1942, together with Michael Polanyi, he founded the Society for Freedom in Science to oppose those who advocated the central planning of scientific research. Baker's eugenics, political activities, and views on race express an elitist individualism, associated with the conservative wing of the eugenics movement, that this paper explores in the context of his career as a whole.

Behavioral Sciences↗
PubMed2006

Eugenics, medical education, and the Public Health Service: Another perspective on the Tuskegee syphilis experiment.

The Public Health Service (PHS) Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Male Negro (1932-72) is the most infamous American example of medical research abuse. Commentary on the study has often focused on the reasons for its initiation and for its long duration. Racism, bureaucratic inertia, and the personal motivations of study personnel have been suggested as possible explanations. We develop another explanation by examining the educational and professional linkages shared by three key physicians who launched and directed the study. PHS surgeon general Hugh Cumming initiated Tuskegee, and assistant surgeons general Taliaferro Clark and Raymond A. Vonderlehr presided over the study during its first decade. All three had graduated from the medical school at the University of Virginia, a center of eugenics teaching, where students were trained to think about race as a key factor in both the etiology and the natural history of syphilis. Along with other senior officers in the PHS, they were publicly aligned with the eugenics movement. Tuskegee provided a vehicle for testing a eugenic hypothesis: that racial groups were differentially susceptible to infectious diseases.

Eugenics↗
PubMed2001

Donor insemination: eugenic and feminist implications.

One concern regarding developments in genetics is that, when techniques such as genetic engineering become safe and affordable, people will use them for positive eugenics: to "improve" their offspring by enpowering them with exceptional qualities. Another is whether new reproductive technologies are being used to improve the condition of women or as the tools of a patriarchal system that appropriates female functions to itself and exploits women to further its own ends. Donor insemination is relevant to both of these issues. The degree to which people have used donor insemination in the past for positive eugenic purposes may give some insight into the likelihood of developing technologies being so used in the future. Donor insemination provides women with the opportunity to reproduce with only the most remote involvement of a man. To what degree do women take advantage of this to liberate themselves from male dominance? Through questionnaires and interviews, women who have used donor insemination disclosed their criteria for selecting sperm donors. The results are analyzed for the prevalence of positive eugenic criteria in the selection process and women's attitudes toward minimizing the male role in reproduction.

Attitude to Health↗
PubMedDate not supplied

[Eugenics and marriage].

This analysis of some eugenic strategies for "improving the race" through the control of marriages explores Victorian England's concern with matrimony as expressed in the works of Thomas Malthus, who was interested in population growth, and of Francis Galton, who proposed that eugenics be used as a science to "improve" the innate qualities of the race. The article also discusses how this matrimonial means of control was expressed within the Brazilian eugenics movement and how it influenced the drafting of the Brazilian Civil Code.

Brazil↗
PubMed1998

Eugenics, McGill, and the Catholic Church in Montreal and Quebec: 1890-1942.

Tracing the origins of eugenics in Canada and seeking to apply a national model, the article explores the juxtaposition between the movement's origin in Britain and its popularity in the Canadian academic milieu, and its condemnation in Quebecois intellectual circles. The first aspect of the movement is explored through the work of two McGill professors, Carrie Derrick and J.G. Adami. In contrast, there is both apathy and resistance from the Quebecois polity--and the influence of Catholicism in forming a resistant position to the eugenics movement--to consider. The impact of works by Blais, Forest, and others are examined in this respect. The conclusion argues for a bifurcated response to eugenic ideas in Quebec, divided along linguistic-cultural lines.

Canada↗