History Of Eugenics Research Articles

Traces of Eugenic Thought in the Work of Egas Moniz

This article explores the resonances of eugenics within the thought of the Nobel Prize winner Egas Moniz with a particular focus on his often republished volume A Vida Sexual. By providing an account that is both sensitive to national realities and international scientific influences, this paper argues that, while eugenics was not a major interest for Egas, the language of eugenics was present in his work and allowed for connections between the sexual sciences, neo-Malthusianism and medical hygiene. Although the analysis of one individual is no substitute for an extensive history of eugenics in any one country, the reception of eugenics in key figures of Portuguese science and medicine provides a useful barometer by which to judge the dissemination of eugenics in this national space.

Alison Bashford and Phillipa Levine (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. xx + 586, hardback, £85.00/$150.00, ISBN: 978-0-19-537314-1.

Alison Bashford and Phillipa Levine (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. xx + 586, hardback, £85.00/$150.00, ISBN: 978-0-19-537314-1. - Volume 56 Issue 1

Eugenics in Portugal, 1900–1950: Setting a Research Agenda

AbstractThis article sets out a research agenda for the study of eugenics in Portugal between 1900 and 1950. In the first part, it frames the debate by reference to four broad themes in the articulation of eugenic knowledge: the international historiographical framework; the role of the state in the construction of eugenics; the question of race in respect of the Portuguese colonies, the metropole and Portugaĺs peripheral geographical position in Europe; the structure of the Portuguese scientific community. In the second part of the article, a broad overview of the history of eugenics in Portugal is provided together with the suggestion of strategies for further research.

Notes on Contributors

Notes on Contributors

Arquivo de Antropologia Física do Museu Nacional: fontes para a história da eugenia no Brasil

Apresenta um conjunto de fontes documentais que integram o Arquivo de Antropologia Física, de responsabilidade do Setor de Antropologia Biológica do Museu Nacional/UFRJ. O arquivo contém importante documentação sobre o Primeiro Congresso Brasileiro de Eugenia, realizado em 1929, no Rio de Janeiro, em comemoração ao centenário da Academia Nacional de Medicina. Além de originais dos trabalhos apresentados no evento - alguns inéditos -, constam também nesse arquivo documentos reunidos pela secretaria do Congresso, como convocações para a sua realização, ficha dos inscritos, correspondências, recortes de jornais e revistas com artigos sobre eugenia, bem como moções, relatórios e atas finais, constituindo acervo fundamental para a compreensão da história da eugenia no Brasil.

“To End the Degeneration of a Nation”: Debates on Eugenic Sterilization in Inter-war Romania

Among various programmes of biological engineering developed in the twentieth century eugenic sterilization is one of the most notorious. The reasons are numerous, ranging from its application under the Nazi regime to its post-1945 application in the Scandinavian countries, the recent sterilization of the Roma in the Czech Republic, and China's birth planning policies.1 Yet it is only in the past two decades that our knowledge about sterilization policies and practices has improved—both in their historical context, and with respect to their practical implementation.2 After the First World War, the prospect of introducing coercive eugenic measures gained acceptance, especially in Northern and Western Europe. Within the economic crises and political instability that characterized the late 1920s, eugenic sterilization attracted considerable attention from both the medical profession and social reformers interested in protecting the nation from alleged biological degeneration and social decline.3 Many of their justifications were then taken over by intellectuals and government officials, and used in support of the biopolitical projects of the 1940s. Supporters of eugenic sterilization maintained that they were rendering the utmost service to society: defending future generations from social and biological degeneration. Whether such authors thought in terms of purifying the nation of “defective genes”, or protecting it from mixing with “racially inferior” elements, there was widespread agreement that sterilization practices were necessary. The extensive acceptance of eugenic sterilization is also reflected in its geographical diffusion: it was as passionately debated in Britain, the United States and Germany as in Brazil, Poland and Romania. Yet, while the Western European, North American and Latin American cases are well researched, little is known about debates in Eastern European countries.4 As Maria Bucur, Kamila Uzarczyk and Magdalena Gawin suggest, the history of eugenics in Eastern Europe has not only been unfairly neglected but has much to offer in terms of understanding the connection between science, political ideals and national contexts.5 This article hopes to enrich this emerging scholarship by concentrating on a hitherto neglected topic: eugenic sterilization in inter-war Romania. The Romanian case meaningfully demonstrates the increasingly intertwined relationship between eugenic sterilization as medical praxis and eugenic sterilization as political discourse geared towards the political engineering of a biologically defined community. This relationship came about as a result of both international and domestic circumstances, including the wide diffusion of eugenic ideas throughout most European countries and the US following the First World War. The practices of sterilization in these countries indicate an overwhelming preoccupation with women's reproductive rights, combined with concerns about social categories such as criminals and/or medical categories such as the mentally ill. In inter-war Romania, on the other hand, debates on eugenic sterilization were predominantly stimulated by a particular fear of the degeneracy of the Romanian nation. For many supporters of sterilization, the concept of the nation served as a unifying principle linking their preoccupation with hygiene to concepts of eugenics, social progress and economic sustainability. Not to inquire into the debate on sterilization would not only render the history of Romanian eugenics during the inter-war period incomplete but would also leave the relationship between concepts of national health and totalitarian biopolitics unexplored.

Blood and Homeland: Eugenics and Racial Nationalism in Central and Southeast Europe, 1900-1940

The history of eugenics and racial nationalism in Central and Southeast Europe is a neglected topic of analysis in contemporary scholarship. The 20 essays in this volume, written by distinguished scholars of eugenics and fascism alongside a new generation of scholars, excavate the hitherto unknown eugenics movements in Central and Southeast Europe, including Austria and Germany. Eugenics and racial nationalism are topics that have constantly been marginalized and rated as incompatible with local national traditions in Central and Southeast Europe. These topics receive a new treatment here. On the one hand, the historiographic perspective connects developments in the history of anthropology and eugenics with political ideologies such as racial nationalism and anti-semitism; on the other hand, it contests the 'Sonderweg' approach adopted by scholars dealing with these issues.

Beyond eugenics: the forgotten scandal of hybridizing humans and apes

This paper examines the available evidence on one of the most radical ideas in the history of eugenics and utopianism. In the mid-1920s, the zoology professor Ilia Ivanov submitted to the Soviet government a project for hybridizing humans and apes by means of artificial insemination. He received substantial financing and organized expeditions to Africa to catch apes for his experiments. His project caused an international sensation. The American Association for the Advancement of Atheism announced its fund-raising campaign to support Ivanov’s project but gave it a scandalously racist interpretation. Ivanov’s own motivation remained unclear, as did the motivation of those in the Bolshevik government who supported Ivanov until his arrest in 1930. This paper discusses three hypothetical reasons for Ivanov’s adventure: first, hybridization between humans and apes, should it be successful, would support the atheist propaganda of the Bolsheviks; second, regardless of the success of hybridization, Ivanov would catch and bring to Russia apes, which were necessary for the rejuvenation programs that were fashionable among the Bolshevik elite; and third, hybridization, should it be successful, would pave the way to the New Socialist Man whose ‘construction by scientific means’ was the official purpose of the Bolsheviks. Ivanov’s ideas were arguably important for the American proponent of reform eugenics, Herman Muller, and for the Soviet anthropologist Boris Porshnev.

Imagining human enhancement: whose future, which rationality?

This article critically evaluates bettering human life. Because this involves lives that do not exist yet, the article investigates human eugenics and enhancement through the social prism of 'the imaginary' (defined 'as a set of assumptions and concepts for thinking and speaking about human enhancement and its future direction') [1]. "Exploring basic assumptions underlying the idea of human enhancement" investigates underlying assumptions and claims for human enhancement. Firstly, human eugenics and enhancement entangles a factual as well as a normative claim about what improvement/betterment maybe constitutive of. Secondly, claims about what a better life is, is often a future orientated claim about whether certain kinds of life that do not exist yet should ever exist. Moral images of thought are introduced and how they work to make normative judgments about lives that do not exist. This implicates the moral problem of difference, where an image of a 'better' life-classically expressed in eugenics as a 'superior' and/or 'normal' life-necessarily entails inferiority and/or deviance from a norm. "Moral imagination in contemporary fiction and the history of old eugenics", introduces moral images in history of eugenics and demonstrates how examples fall foul of the problem. "The new (liberal) eugenics and the moral image of therapy" examines progress in contemporary debates, the move from authoritarian to non-authoritarian eugenics (human enhancement), and how, to some extent, this has solved the problem of difference, through liberal defence of personal choice. "The heart of the eugenic issue" suggests that personal choice in liberal non-authoritarian eugenics is not immune to basic drive behind all eugenic arguments; desire as lack which is expressed as the continual dissatisfaction of not having our future expectations met.

Silence between patients and doctors: the issue of self-determination and amniocentesis in Japan

Japan is among the few countries that have passed laws concerning eugenics. Consequently, the practice of selective abortion (abortion of an abnormal foetus) has been publicly debated for the past 35 years. Nevertheless, data show that knowledge in Japan about prenatal diagnosis is anything but common. In my fieldwork (April- June 2006) only 38% of interviewees (13/34) knew or had heard of 'amniocentesis' and 6% knew nothing about it at all. There are many explanations for why people are unaware of prenatal diagnosis. The most crucial factor is that medical doctors do not talk to their patients about it. My interviews with 11 medical doctors revealed that they do not talk about it because they want to respect the principle of patient selfdetermination. In this paper I aim first to introduce and analyse, in the context of Japanese eugenic history and the contemporary notion of the patient-doctor relationship, medical doctors' explanations for not talking to their patients about amniocentesis. Second, I address whether the principle of 'non-intervention' equates to 'self-determination'. Lastly, I suggest possible improvements to the practice of 'self-determination' in Japan.

`On the Question of Degeneration' by Emil Kraepelin (1908)1

The introduction to this Classic Text draws on a new consensus among researchers in the history of eugenics to assess how Kraepelin articulated his eugenic ideas and put them into practice. It analyses his article `On the Question of Degeneration' and finds him not just giving voice to his deep concern for the German Volk , but also espousing neo-Lamarckian views and building a large-scale, clinically oriented, epidemiological research programme. The introduction situates this research programme in the context of Kraepelin's work in Munich before World War I.

Marginalising ‘eugenic anxiety’ through a rhetoric of ‘liberal choice’: a critique of the House of Commons Select Committee Report on reproductive technologies

In light of a recent House of Commons Select Committee investigation into the regulation of human reproductive technologies, this article critically evaluates the Committee's case for a devolved, libertarian-inspired framework for the regulation of reproductive technologies. In assessing the appropriate balance between legislation, regulation and reproductive freedom, the Committee rightly challenged those who exhibit a myopic history of eugenics to justify restricting reproductive choice. However, by uncritically embracing the tropes of procreative liberty and genetic progress, and defining eugenics in terms of intention rather than consequence, the Committee appeared to ignore or marginalise a number of sociological challenges to the presumptions couched within the doctrine of ‘liberal choice’. This article suggests that failure to consider the cultural and political context within which new technologies are shaped and social needs constructed might undermine any ostensible virtues of a devolved system of governance for reproductive medicine.

To ‘Better the Breed of Men’: women and eugenics in New Zealand, 1900–1935

Over the past decade the relationship between feminism and eugenics has become an increasingly important site of research. This relationship, however, remains to be examined in New Zealand. This article interrogates the ways in which female reformers, colonial feminists and female health and welfare workers engaged in eugenic debates in New Zealand during the first three decades of the twentieth century. It situates the 1924 Inquiry into Mental Defectives and Sexual Offenders in New Zealand and the sterilization debate of the 1930s as representative of women’s role as both the agents and subjects of eugenics in this period. Eugenics offered women a discourse of moral and social reform that fitted neatly with the ideals of colonial feminism and, by extension, enabled them to participate in national debates about racial health. However, in their testimony before the 1924 Inquiry and in the subsequent debates surrounding sterilization, women articulated and prescribed eugenic solutions for ‘deviant women’ and cast themselves as the ‘mothers of the race’. As authors of eugenics for other women, white middle‐class female reformers, health professionals and colonial feminists complicate the history of eugenics in New Zealand.

The Devil in Our DNA: A Brief History of Eugenics in Science Fiction Films

The persistence of eugenic themes in cinema over the last 100 years reflects fundamental societal beliefs about heredity's role as the source of social problems. From its earliest days science fiction cinema's critiques of eugenics were not aimed at the movement's underlying assumptions that humanity's fundamental nature lies within its genome and its relationship to social problems. Most science fiction films either implicitly accept these assumptions or incorporate them into their narratives and visuals. At the same time, however, these films criticize anyone who would change human heredity. By accepting the proposition that the essence of humanity, both the good and the bad, is deeply rooted within our genome, science fiction films take a conservative stance by critiquing any attempts to change the elements that make us "human."

"Wir beherrschen den pflanzlichen Organismus besser. . . ": Wissenschaftliche Pflanzenzüchtung in Deutschland 1889-1945 (review)

Reviewed by: “Wir beherrschen den pflanzlichen Organismus besser, . . .”: Wissenschaftliche Pflanzenzüchtung in Deutschland, 1889–1945 Staffan Müller-Wille (bio) “Wir beherrschen den pflanzlichen Organismus besser,...”: Wissenschaftliche Pflanzenzüchtung in Deutschland, 1889–1945. By Thomas Wieland . Munich: Deutsches Museum, 2004. Pp. 271. €29.80. Innovations in agricultural technology have had the most immediate consequences for modern societies. And yet the history of the agricultural sciences, if compared with the history of eugenics and medical genetics, is under-researched. The only exception is a small number of studies on the close relationship between the rise of Mendelism and its application in agricultural plant breeding in the United States and the United Kingdom. Thomas Wieland's book comprehensively covers the changing relationship among plant breeding, agricultural science, and genetics in Germany from the late nineteenth century to the end of the Third Reich. It draws on an impressive amount of rare published and archival sources. Following German academic customs, the book is a slightly edited version of Wieland's doctoral dissertation, approved in 2000 by the Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich. It thus misses some more recent German publications on the agricultural sciences during the Nazi period, notably the collective volume Autarkie und Ostexpansion (2002) edited by Susanne Heim. Wieland worked in parallel with Jonathan Harwood, whose Technology's Dilemma: Agricultural Colleges between Science and Practice in Germany, 1860–1934 (2005) explores the social history of German agricultural education. Both books complement each other, and in the case of Wieland's it is its epistemological focus—admirably substantiated by a [End Page 188] detailed reconstruction of the institutional, social, and political-economical history of German agricultural science—that makes it an indispensable contribution to the field. The author's central thesis is that plant breeding was characterized by two interrelated trends: an increasing scientification, and an increasing politicization. Scientification began in private-sector plant breeding. Members of a new class of "agrarian entrepreneurs" in Prussia, possessing large estates and some academic training, began to experiment with new methods, like pedigree selection, and successfully marketed new strains of cereals. Although some of them published extensively during the 1880s and 1890s, their concerns remained practical and their methods empirical. As an academic specialty, plant breeding was instituted by agricultural scientists, who succeeded in securing support from agricultural associations and state administrations, the latter especially in Württemberg and Bavaria where the dominance of small-scale farming precluded private initiatives. Establishing plant breeding as an object of scientific expertise had several consequences, which inadvertently prepared it for the reception of Mendelism. Plant breeding came to be seen as independent of plant cultivation, breeding methods as well as their products were subjected to centralized control and testing, and the plant organism was broken down into quantifiable traits. Wieland's fourth chapter explores how these developments fed into the reception of Mendelian theory. It provides fascinating reading, especially because Wieland resists the temptation either to conflate or to oppose science and technology. He emphasizes instead that the agricultural plant, turned into an object of scientific inquiry, functioned as a "boundary object" by separating academic from commercial plant breeding on the one hand, but establishing a connection between these two spheres as well (p. 136). It is within this tension that Wieland then explores the politicization of plant breeding. Academic plant breeders had always argued for the national rather than local importance of their subject. The short-lived epoch of German colonialism before World War I, the striving for national autarchy after the war, and the National Socialist policies of "Erzeugungsschlacht" and "Lebensraum" provided political agendas that were readily taken up by academic plant breeders to promote their science. In a detailed comparison of Theodor Roemer, professor for agricultural sciences in Halle, and Erwin Baur, the first director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Breeding Research, Wieland shows that it was not a closeness to practical concerns, exemplified by Roemer, that resulted in the politicization of the subject. Quite the contrary, it was Baur and his school—which tried to emulate the successes of Thomas H. Morgan's Drosophila genetics by turning the snapdragon (Antirrhinum) into a model organism and experimenting with mutagens—that was most successful in...

The Public and Private History of Eugenics: An Introduction

Inspired by our experience addressing the legacy of eugenics at California State University, Sacramento, this special issue presents an array of articles representative of diverse approaches to the historical investigation of eugenics. This article provides an introduction to the history of eugenics and explores the ways in which public history is particularly well suited to shape the historical memory of eugenics and encourage dialogue about contemporary biotechnologies.

Filming Eugenics: Teaching the History of Eugenics Through Film

In teaching eugenics to undergraduate students and general public audiences, film should he considered as a provocative and fruitful medium that can generate important discussions about the intersections among eugenics, gender, class, race, and sexuality. This paper considers the use of two films, A Bill of Divorcement and The Lynchburg Story, as pedagogical tools for the history of eugenics. The authors provide background information on the films and suggestions for using the films to foster an active engagement with the historical eugenics movement.

Exhibiting Eugenics: Response and Resistance to a Hidden History

Human Plants, Human Harvest: The Hidden History of California Eugenics is the first-ever exhibition on the history of eugenics in California. The disappearance of this history for half a century, and the consequent absence of a "collective menory", were the primary factors determining the exhibit's sttrcture and content. Responses to the exhibit confirmed that most visitors "never knew" about this history. The exhibit is described in some detail, with selected imagery from the exhibit reproduced. After the initial exhibition, responses of other museums and foundation officials revealed a continuing resistance to this history being publicly displayed, though the sources of resistance varied.

Past Futures: On the Conceptual History of Eugenics—a Social Technology of the Past

Based on an introduction to the conceptual history of Reinhart Koselleck, this paper traces the historical development of ‘eugenics’ as a concept. This concept has been immensely influential in shaping the debate on the regulation of human genetic and reproductive technologies. At the beginning of the 20th century eugenics was cast as a social technology associated with strong, almost utopian technological expectations for the future. By the end of the century it was by contrast seen as a dangerous threat, a potential repetition of the past strongly connected to notions of compulsion, ethnic cleansing and crime. In between these two points lies a historical development, traced here through the development of the concept of eugenics as rendered in Scandinavian encyclopaedias throughout the 20th century. In this process a larger and more complex semantic framework emerges illustrating the shifting relationship between experience and expectations.

943: History of Eugenics and Lessons for Andrologsts of Today

943: History of Eugenics and Lessons for Andrologsts of Today