Racism and Eugenics in International ContextThe Wellborn Science: Eugenics in Germany, France, Brazil, and Russia. Based on a Conference Held at the University of Pennsylvania, 16-19 May 1983.Mark B. AdamsHealth, Race and German Politics Between National Unification and Nazism, 1870-1945.Paul Weindling

Abstract

pAST EFFORTS to portray the history of eugenics and racism have for the most part been limited to a single country, period, or person. It is consequently of signal importance to note the broader scope of the first of these two volumes. It is a collection of studies that grew out of a three-day conference. To its organizer, Mark B. Adams, fell the task of soliciting and editing the six contributions the book contains: Eugenics in the history of science, by Adams; The race hygiene movement in Germany, 1904-1945, by Sheila F. Weiss; The eugenics movement in France, 18901940, by William H. Schneider; Eugenics in Brazil, 1917-1940, by Nancy Leys Stepan; Eugenics in Russia, 1900-1940, by Adams; and a final summation and perspective, Towards a comparative history of eugenics, also by Adams. Very different in character is the ponderous, scholarly, and well-documented volume by Weindling, a study of race hygiene (the term preferred by the Germans for eugenics) in Germany during the three-quarters of a century before the culmination of Nazism and the outbreak of World War II. Much of what Paul Weindling has to add to existing studies of eugenics in Germany has been anticipated by solid studies in the past, although most of them were far more restricted in purview or detail. One may mention in this comparison, as among the more recent critiques, Weiss's own excellent study of the part Schallmeyer played in the rise of German race hygiene and the vivid relation by Robert Proctor of race hygiene in German medicine (see Q Rev. Biol., 64:175-180, 1989). Weiss's contribution to the volume edited by Mark Adams covers the history of race hygiene in Germany between 1904 and 1945, elaborating on the Schallmeyer volume and providing a good overview of the influence of Alfred Ploetz, Fritz Lenz, and others in the period of Imperial Germany, during the Weimar Republic, and under the swastika. The brevity of this account, in comparison with the vast compilation by Weindling, offers a considerable merit, especially since the conclusions reached by Weiss and by Weindling are quite similar.