The rise and fall of the Eugenics empire: recent perspectives on the impact of biomedical thought in modern society

Abstract

In the last decade or so scholars have begun to develop a series of new strategies for understanding and explaining the creation and popularity of biomedical modes of thinking in modern European societies. In a certain sense these strategies are designed to supplement, if not replace, an older form of intellectual history that was content to trace the spread of racist ideas and theories of biological determinism from the founding fathers (Count Arthur de Gobineau, H. S. Chamberlain, and Paul de Lagarde among many others) to the anti-semitic or racist movements they inspired, culminating in the holocaust and the genocide of the I930S and I940s.1 There was a kind of cosmopolitan quality to this history of ideas approach that treated racial ideas as so many interchangeable parts and racists as fanatical but politically effective propagandists. Because their focus was fixed on the pseudoscientific and ideological aspects of their subject, few of these older histories tried to assess mainstream science and medicine for evidence of collusion or resistance to racist ideas; if they did discuss the science of their day it was to document support for aryanism or anti-Semitism in one or another of their nationalist manifestations in pre-war and wartime Europe. Though echoes of the murderous racism of the World War II era are not absent from the work under review, genocide no longer dominates the research agenda of the history of biomedical thought. Historians are now more willing to explore aspects of biological and racial thought that did not end in holocaust, to follow the variations biomedical concepts have taken in different national settings, and to consider the relationship of mainstream science and scientists with pseudoscience and with the zealots who have until recently received the lion's share of attention. As some of these authors wish to demonstrate, a passionate concern with race hygiene and the identification of dangerous human pathologies did not, accordingly, end in I945, but has been subsumed into the logic and practices of the modern welfare state, though in forms more compatible with contemporary sensibility on these matters. Despite the fact that these books are mostly concerned with Great Britain and France in the period I880-I945, there is enough discussion of the United States and Italy to illustrate fully the point that biomedical thinking about the human population and its pathologies flowed in channels dictated by the situation of particular nationstates. There was wide medical and scientific agreement, for instance, about the threat of an inheritable and worsening biological degeneration, but this notion was interpreted uniquely in each national setting, so that, depending on local conditions, experts