History of Eugenics

What impact does a falling birth rate have on the strength and vitality of a nation? Are citizens duty-bound to think about this question when they make reproductive and sexual choices? Few countries have grappled with these questions as intensely and with such dramatic consequences as Germany. The Politics of Fertility in TwentiethCentury Berlin tracks how fears of a declining population influenced reproductive and sexual health policy in four German regimes, from the end of World War I through the period of German division in the Cold War. A case study set in Berlin, the book examines local measures to control fertility-threatening venereal diseases and influence reproductive choices in marriage counseling clinics. It investigates how policies meant to encourage higher birth rates created feelings of belonging even as they infringed on personal autonomy. The idea that sexual duty should be central to conceptions of citizenship only died with the changing technological and politica...

All the external links were active on the 22/12/2014 unless otherwise stated. Digital material and resources associated with this volume are available at http:// www.openbookpublishers.com/isbn/9781909254541#resources ISBN Paperback: 978-1-909254-54-1 ISBN Hardback: 978-1-909254-55-8 ISBN Digital (PDF): 978-1-909254-56-5 ISBN Digital ebook (epub): 978-1-909254-57-2 ISBN Digital ebook (mobi): 978-1-909254-58-9

A look at how America has been conditioned through cognitive dissonance and predictive programming to subconsciously accept the extreme sex and violence attributed to Satanism and to slowly reintegrate the practice of Eugenics with abortion.

Este texto aborda, desde una historia situada, aspectos centrales de la biopolítica eugénica desde la perspectiva de su funcionalidad para la construcción de la identidad nacional. En efecto, si bien podría afirmarse que toda eugenesia detenta en su telos la mejora de la raza, concebida ésta como un pretenso bien general, futuro e incierto, integrando de este modo un colectivo abarcativo, de manera indistinta, de los conceptos de nación o patria, existe, empero, un aspecto que impone detenernos en él. Nos referimos a que, presuponiendo toda eugenesia la faz reproductiva, desde los diversos diseños biopolíticos ideados en la Argentina durante el siglo XX subyacía, claramente, una consigna heterosexual. En ese sentido, el presente libro avanza en torno a la reconstrucción genealógica de una heteronormatividad reductible a la pareja varón-mujer, la que fue asociada, sin más, a la necesidad de control exhaustivo de la madre o futura madre. En efecto, las preocupaciones biomédicas, jurídicas y religiosas avaladas desde la eugenesia se concentraron, primero en seleccionar, y desde ahí, en formar una buena madre; alejando, al menos de la reproducción legítima, a la mala madre, en cuanto supuesta deformadora del acervo hereditario de la patria.

Les damnes de la democratie puritaine: sterilisations en Scandinavie, 1929-1977 par Patrick ZYLBERMAN* L e 14 juillet 1933, Hitler interdit les partis politiques. Ce meme jour est promulguee la loi sur la , prevention de la reproduction des malades hereditaires ,? (Gesetz zur ...

This article surveys the history of eugenics in Europe, noting its origins in the growing comprehension of the power of science to understand the human body and in the increasing ambitions of the state and the social and scientific elites to exert control over the social body. The article then surveys major events and personalities of the eugenics movement in various European countries over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, placing the movement firmly in its political, social, and cultural contexts.

This article aims to give insight into the 1920s’ scientific racist discourse in Hungary with a special emphasis on sexuality and reproduction. Post-First World War Hungary saw new developments in nationalist discourse, notably a new language of race and nation. In this context of nationalism, a new wave of racial scientism appeared that was based on concepts of racial purity and biological reproduction. Reviewing the publications of a group of academic and medical professionals who dominated the scientistic racist discourse, this article analyses how sexuality was represented in their framework as a crucial aspect of the reproduction of the ‘Magyar race’. It argues that such ideas on the one hand, were influenced by contemporary racist theories from Western Europe and North America, but on the other hand, the argumentation of Hungarian contemporary right-wing political rhetoric is also detectable in this discourse. The article also explores the intersection of racial anti-Semitism ...

Under the bathroom light in the middle of the night, she saw the male fetus in the toilet bowl. In her frightened eyes it was a full ten inches long, suspended between the white porcelain wall and water. Its flesh was smeared with a faint layer of blood, becoming the light orange color of recently planed wood. The blood that congealed in its recesses clearly outlined the fetus' contours. A pair of disproportionately large round eyes, two protruding eyes. [...] She thought it would not flush away, but it eventually disappeared amidst the surging water.- Eileen Chang, Little Reunion.2(ProQuest: ... denotes non-USASCII text omitted.)The above passage from Eileen Chang's Little Reunion { 7 @3 ® » (2009) vividly describes the novel's protagonist, Jiuli Sheng (Julie Sheng), as she lays eyes on her own aborted fetus. She is horrified by the unborn child's bloody flesh and "disproportionately large" dead eyes, and the sight concurrently arouses intense feelings of ...

With the proclamation that "Three generations of imbeciles are enough" Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes concluded his Supreme Court opinion in the 1927 case of Buck v. Bell, which upheld the constitutionality of a Virginia law permitting eugenical sterilization of the mentally ill Most commentators have explained Holmes's harsh opinion as a reflection of the popularity of the eugenics movement. In an original interpretation of the Buck case, Dr. Lombardo demonstrates that the lawsuit was a carefully designed test of the Virginia law, brought by the statute's proponents as the final step to ensure the success of a eugenical sterilization program. Charting the genesis of the law, Lombardo reveals that it originated as a means of vindicating the moralism and private prejudices of three professional and political colleagues One was the state legislator who drafted the statute and eventually defended it in court. Another was the doctor whose fervent belief that sterilization could rid society of undesriables spurred the law's enactment The third was the attorney who represented Carrie Buck That attorney, Dr. Lombardo contends, colluded with his purported adversaries in the Buck lawsuit by deliberately neglecting to develop the factual record in the case, and consequently failing to mount a proper challenge to the statute. Dr. Lombardo concludes that Carrie, her mother and her daughter were not imbeciles, but rather, the unfortunate victims of an elaborate legislative and judicial campaign that resulted in the legally sanctioned sterilization of Carrie and thousands of other American.

After a reference to the debate concerning the concept of Romanticism (Lovejoy vs Wellek), the article briefly evokes certain key stances of English and French literary Romanticism. It then points to the distinguishing features of German Romanticism, namely the enlargement of the doctrine into an integral metaphysics with the concept of the "organic state" at its core (A. Müller). The critique of political Romanticism by two revolutionary democrats (H. Heine and A. Ruge) is then presented. The article closes with a critique of C. Schmitt's interpretation of political Romanticism. I. Romanticisms Romanticism was a cultural movement which put European civilization on new tracks. It is, however, notoriously difficult to define-so ramified are its particular forms and branches. The term "Romantic" as a marker of a new age of "progressive universal poetry" superseding the anti-poetic Classicism of the Enlightenment was invented by Friedrich Schlegel 1 and elaborated further by his brother, August Wilhelm. In France it emerged after the Bourbon restoration and established itself towards the end of the 1820s and especially in the wake of the notorious "Hernani battle" of 1830. 2 Capitalizing on this continuing difficulty a whole century and more after Romanticism's first stirrings, Arthur O. Lovejoy argued, in a landmark article published in 1924, that we must give up striving for a general definition. In his view, there is no one internally cohering Romanticism. The concept must not be "hypostatized" as if it referred to a single real entity "existing in nature". 3 What we have instead is a variety of local and specific cultural and literary phenomena to which, for the purposes of brevity and broad-stroke classification, a common name is appended. Lovejoy's "Romanticisms" (in the

This paper is mainly focused on "racial hygiene" and eugenic questions in the context of the ideology of the interwar Yugoslav extreme right and during occupation of Serbia in the World War II. The main historical sources used in this research were racial narratives and journal articles from 1920s and 1930s, together with unpublished archival records originating from the period of occupation. Analysis of sources and literature have shown that racial and eugenic themes were present in Serbian and Yugoslav political thought from the very first days of the new South Slavs state. The term "race" had several different meanings in this country, particularly regarding the "Yugoslav race", that referred both to the cultural individuality of so-called "Yugoslav civilization", and to the biological attributes of the Dinaric race. The ideology of (integral) Yugoslav nationalism, strongly promoted during the dictatorship of King Alexander I, encouraged racial and eugenic stances. Affirmative writings on the qualities of Dinaric race from the worldwide famous eugenic authors like Houston Stewart Chamberlain also spurred interests in racial and eugenic discussions in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Since the mid-1930s a number of Serbian eugenicists became close to the extreme political right, placing themselves in the first rows of ongoing ideological struggle between fascism, communism and liberal democracy. Many of them, like Dr. Svetislav Stefanović, Branimir Maleš, Dr. Stevan Z. Ivanić and others, were * This article has been written within the framework of the scholarly project Serbs and Serbia in the Yugoslav and International Context: Internal Development and Position within European/ World Community (No. 47027), financed by the Ministry of Education, Science and Technological Development of Republic of Serbia. Author would like to credit Mr. Zoran Janjetović, Ph. D., for assistance in translation and proofreading of the article. Stojanović, A., Eugenics and Racial Hygiene in Th eory and Political Th ought fascinated with the rise of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, and were later on involved in the collaboration with the Germans during the occupation of Serbia 1941-1944.

Analiso conexões e diálogos internacionais que envolveram a eugenia brasileira nas primeiras décadas do século XX. Partindo dos projetos eugênicos e das controvérsias entre Renato Kehl e Edgard Roquette-Pinto, duas lideranças do movimento eugênico brasileiro, investigo o contato deles com os movimentos eugênicos de países como EUA, Alemanha, Inglaterra, Suécia e Noruega. Meu interesse é demonstrar que as conexões desses pesquisadores com a chamada “linha dominante” do pensamento eugênico foram mais amplas e difusas do que o imaginado inicialmente. O resultado foi a conformação da eugenia brasileira em diferentes sentidos, o que ampliou a circulação internacional de ideias e extrapolou as fronteiras da “eugenia latina”.

Affirmer que la sexualité est une question politique semble, au premier abord, relever de l'évidence : non seulement il existe des politiques publiques dont le principal objet est la sexualité (contraception, prostitution, prévention des maladies sexuellement transmissibles, éducation sexuelle, etc.), mais de nombreux mouvements sociaux se sont également constitués autour de ces enjeux (prévention du harcèlement et des violences domestiques, luttes pour la liberté sexuelle et contre les discriminations liées à l'orientation sexuelle, mobilisations pour le droit à l'avortement, etc.). Ces thèmes ont pourtant été assez peu analysés par la science politique, en particulier dans l'espace francophone. Cet évitement doit être pensé dans le contexte de l'institutionnalisation de la science politique : discipline encore jeune, la science politique a dû consolider sa légitimité face à d'autres disciplines plus anciennes . Se constituer autour de thèmes stigmatisés socialement, tel celui de la sexualité, risquait donc, par homologie, de la disqualifier et, partant, pouvait menacer son propre développement. Ce phénomène est particulièrement marqué en France où la science politique a d'abord analysé le pouvoir d'État avant d'étendre progressivement son périmètre. Par ailleurs, interroger la dimension politique de la sexualité, c'était s'exposer au déplacement des frontières public/privé, autour desquelles la . Voir, sur le cas français, Favre,  ; et, sur le cas belge, Perrin et Jacquemain, .

This article analyzes the debate on neo-Malthusianism and eugenics in Spanish anarchist publications in the first third of the last century. Using theoretical frameworks that have been under-utilized thus far, it provides new interpretations of what the term "eugenics" meant in pro-anarchist neo-Malthusian journals. Framed within a "struggle over meaning," Spanish neo-Malthusianism re-signified eugenic ideas in an attempt to recover political ground that had been lost in the drive to promote individual control of human sexuality. This study also analyzes the role of the anarcho-syndicalist movement's "direct action" strategy, in which actions undertaken by individualist anarchists were seen as a complement to revolutionary action.

A revisionist examination of the "new eugenics," which had been described by historians as more scientific and liberal. This paper examines the efforts of Pioneer Fund scholars to re-assert the claim that there are racial differences in intelligence and that there was a dysgenic trend which needed to countered with social policies that included sterilization of the unfit.

Through a case study of the emergence of rights-infringing “illiberal” policies and practices in the field of Danish alcohol treatment from 1900 to 1943, this article shows how new scientific ideas on “degeneration” as the cause of alcoholism and the use of force in treatment were adapted and promoted by Protestant revivalist groups and Social Democrats alike. The article analyzes how new scientific ideas resonated with the cultural ideals of Danish Social Democracy and the evangelical temperance organization the Blue Cross. The article challenges the established view in the literature that eugenic and similar illiberal practices were the result of a “high modernist” state ethos and “communitarian-organic” thinking on the left. Building on secondary literature and archival sources, it is shown that illiberal policies and practices as well as theories of heredity in the case of Danish alcohol treatment were adopted as the result of common liberal-conservative ideals regarding the val...

Este trabalho objetiva apresentar uma teoria substantiva sobre a relacao entre educacao, religiao e saude na Constituinte de 1934, visando contribuir com outras iniciativas na busca por caminhos que auxiliem a efetiva concretizacao das politicas publicas da promocao da saude nas escolas brasileiras. Para tal, adota o metodo qualitativo de pesquisa denominado Grounded Theory, que utiliza um conjunto de procedimentos para desenvolver indutivamente uma teoria enraizada em dados sistematicamente coletados e analisados. O metodo orientou a coleta de dados a partir dos anais da referida Constituinte, assim como o processo de codificacao e analise. O software ATLAS.ti® foi utilizado como ferramenta facilitadora do processo de codificacao, escrita de memorandos e esquematizacao de diagramas. Tres macrocategorias emergiram ao longo do processo de analise dos dados: Aperfeicoamento Racial, Higienizacao da Nacao e Defesa do Ensino Religioso. Em um nivel abstrato superior, como categoria centra...

The discourse of popular science in The Dial—one of the most important ‘little’ magazines of North American twentieth-century literature—reveals a surprising fact. Over 170 titles relating to evolution, eugenics, natural history, and other socio-biological subjects are marketed, reviewed, and discussed across its pages. The Dial thus offers clues to a communal intellectual history of modernist culture’s brushes with ‘bad’ science, especially in the US, that reached its apex in the 1920s. This article posits a model to unpack the material: a series of types of evaluation that enable an account of the complex range of mediating judgements overlapping with the business of a literary review. Taking in extensive previously uncharted primary historical materials, and moving through editorial tone, readership construction, critical intervention, and creative responses, I argue for a family of encounters with life and social science that reveals a magazine as faultily performative and self-serving as it was incisively modern.

This paper asks questions about the resilience of radical gynaecological surgeries, such as hysterectomy and ovariectomy, from the moment of their widespread use in Western European and American practices of the late nineteenth century, to their renewed increase in the Indian subcontinent and Africa into our own time.

Of all the actions of the Irish Censorship of Publications Board, one of the most often cited, but least critically examined, is the suppression of Samuel Beckett's More Pricks Than Kicks (1934). This article aims to recover a fuller picture of how censorship of More Pricks affected Beckett, particularly in his attitudes to the biopolitical policing of ethnonational identity. To do so, it examines Beckett's involvement in Harry Sinclair's 1937 libel action against Oliver St John Gogarty, and the crucial role that the suppression of More Pricks played in discrediting Beckett as a witness. In contrast to previous, "personal" readings of the trial, it explores how the libellous passages of Gogarty's As I Was Going Down Sackville Street (1937) offered an anti-Semitic portrait of Sinclair and his family in which ethnic alterity and sexual deviance are presented as synonymous, and how Gogarty's barrister appropriated this rhetorical strategy to target Beckett. In the process, it offers a deep contextualisation of Beckett's anti-natalism, anti-nationalism, and longstanding aversion to censorship, by emphasising their relationship to his experiences of the operation of biopolitics in the emergent Free State and a wider European context during the trial and its aftermath.

The aim of this article is to introduce details about the forced sterilizations performed under Japan's Eugenic Protection Law (1948-96) and provide answers to questions about why such a piece of legislation could exist in postwar democratic Japan, how its constitutionality was discussed at the time, and how involuntary sterilizations were performed, perceived, and rationalized. It suggests that the law was conceived amid complex discussions on overpopulation and the quality of the 'nation' and that even though its constitutionality was put under question, these doubts were overlooked in favor of 'public welfare'. This article also suggests that forced sterilizations were not only an attempt to improve the genetic stock of the Japanese nation but were a complicated mixture of the state's willingness to promote sterilizations, care institutions' and families' inability or unwillingness to cope with the hygienic needs or sexuality of certain disabled people, and misguided concerns for the happiness or parenting abilities of these people.

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 Qu6btkois intellectual circles. The first aspect of the movement is explored through the work of two McGiU professors, Carrie Derrick and J. G. Adarni. In contrast, there is both apathy and resistance from the QukMcois 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 mpect. The conclusion argues for a b i b cated response to eugenic ideas in Qtiebec, divided along linguistic4tural lines. R6sud. Ayant pour but de tracer les origines de l'eu&nism au Canada, ainsi que d'essayer d'appliquer un modde ii I'6chelle nationale, cet article confronte les origines du mouvement eug6nique en Grande-Bretagne et sa popu-larit6 dam les milieux universitaires canadiens-anglais, ii sa condamnation par les milieux intellectuels qu6b6cois. Le premier asp& du mouvement est explod 3 travers l'oeuvre de deux professeurs de l'universit6 McGill, Carrie Derrick et J. G. Adami. Le deuxiiime est rnis en 6vidence par l'indiff6rence et la dsistance de la soci6t6 qutSb&oise, ainsi-que par l'influence du catholicism dans le rejet du mouvement euenique. A cet bgard, l'impact des oeuvres de Blais, de Forest et d'autres est examid. La conclusion soumet l'argument d'une I dponse bifurquk au Qu6bec aux id& eughiques, selon des l i p s linguistiques et culturelles. In 1936, And& Laquerri&re, a doctor at the University of Montreal, wrote a revealing article in the Quebec scientific journal Revue trimstrielle. Entitled "Les origines de la race et de la mentalit6 frqaise.. Depuis la pr6histoire jusqu'h I'4tablissement du Christianisme," the ar

This research will focus on the postwar period in relation to lives not worth living. This chapter is divided into five sections. The first section is a short introduction to the overall topic. The second part discusses the legal and philosophical language, post-Second World War, in relation to the psychically and mentally ill. This raises the question of whether or not philosophy can be made after 1945 without looking at Auschwitz. Adorno's categorical imperative: Auschwitz can never ever be repeated, gains prominence in the way of making and proceeding in philosophy and in law this does not include just the Holocaust but also one of the most forgotten groups: the severely mentally and/or physically disabled. The policy of oblivion was practised much quicker than with other human categories. The paradigm of human rights changes substantially immediately after the Second World War The establishment of individual responsibilities for the committed atrocities will be carried out by means of the Nuremberg's Trials. The third section focuses on the Nuremberg War Crimes Trial, USA vs. Karl Brandt et al. The fourth section analyzes the concepts of post-Auschwitz memory and memory of oblivion. Recovering post-Auschwitz memory implies recreating to the thought process after 1945. Finally, the fifth section draws some conclusions and indicates some further areas for research.

This article analyzes the debate on neo-Malthusianism and eugenics in Spanish anarchist publications in the first third of the last century. Using theoretical frameworks that have been under-utilized thus far, it provides new interpretations of what the term "eugenics" meant in pro-anarchist neo-Malthusian journals. Framed within a "struggle over meaning," Spanish neo-Malthusianism re-signified eugenic ideas in an attempt to recover political ground that had been lost in the drive to promote individual control of human sexuality. This study also analyzes the role of the anarcho-syndicalist movement's "direct action" strategy, in which actions undertaken by individualist anarchists were seen as a complement to revolutionary action.

[Book reviews in cultural press]
Susan Sontag, „Despre fotografie”, Traducere din limba engleză de Delia Zahareanu, Cu un eseu de Erwin Kessler, Editura Vellant, București, 2018, 232 p.
Marius Turda, Știință și etnicitate. Cercetarea antropologică în România anilor ’30, Editura Muzeului Municipiului București, București, 2018, 160 p.

This chapter briefly reviews the role of race (as a concept) in the history of theorizing the posthuman, engages with existing discussions of race as technology, and explores the significance of understanding race as technology for the field of posthumanism. Our aim is to engage existing literature that posits racialized individuals as posthumans and to consider how studying race might inform theories of the posthuman.

This study explores the emergence and development of physical anthropology in the modern Greek state from the viewpoint of the proclaimed intention of its representatives to influence societal developments. This study is the first to subject racial and eugenic discourses in Greece to research.

This study focuses on the contribution of Emmanuel Lambadarios to special education in Greece in the early twentieth century. It examines Lambadarios’s involvement in special education, culminating in the establishment of the ‘Model Special School of Athens’ (PESA), the first public special education school for children with intellectual disabilities. It specifically explores Lambadarios’s key perceptions of the education of children with disabilities influenced by his medical-centred school hygiene and paedological views, studied within the broader international context of the first four decades of the twentieth century. This is an attempt to shed light on an unknown aspect of the early history of special education in Greece, which appears to be influenced by medicine. Moreover, the latent rivalry between the physician Emmanuel Lambadarios and the educator/head teacher of the PESA, Rosa Imvrioti, indicates an educational resistance to the attempted medicalisation of the early development of special education.

The scholarly study of eugenics legislation in Alberta has been seriously limited as research has focused on the province’s original Sterilization Act, passed in March 1928, and on the political, social, and economic conditions of the 1920s. Although the 1928 Act was of great significance, being the first sterilization law passed in Canada, it was its 1937 amendment and the permitting of involuntary sterilizations that made the Alberta eugenics movement truly distinct. During the late 1930s, a time when the great majority of regional governments were either decommissioning or disregarding their sterilization laws due to a lack of funding, the discrediting of scientific racism and an increase in public protest, Alberta expanded its own legislation. Although similar laws were met with fierce opposition in other provinces and in the United States, this new amendment of 1937 remained largely unopposed in Alberta. As a result of such narrowly focused research, the explanations for why th...

Although research on the history of the eugenics movement in the United States is legion, its impact on state policies that identified and defined American Indians has yet to be fully addressed. The exhibit, Our Lives: Contemporary Life and Identities (ongoing until September 21, 2014) at the National Museum of the American Indian provides a provocative vehicle for examining how eugenics-informed public policy during the first quarter of the twentieth century served to “remove” from official records Native peoples throughout the Southeast. One century after Indian Removal of the antebellum era, Native peoples in the American Southeast provide an important but often overlooked example of how racial policies, this time rooted in eugenics, effected a documentary erasure of Native peoples and communities.

At first glance, John L. Lovell’s Harvard class portraits appear to represent one man and one woman. But instead, these composite photographs personify the “average” appearance of the entire classes of 1887 at Harvard University and the “Annex,” or Boston’s Protestant Brahmin elite. Composite photographs such as these, which held scientific gravity as part of the Harvard-entrenched Positive Eugenics movement, were composed of an incomplete data set. Thus, they offer a revised view of Allan Sekula’s ideas about composite photography’s requisite statistical potency. In addition, the Harvard composites call for a more nuanced articulation of their indexical functions, within the context of late nineteenth-century trends in the production of visual statistics and knowledge.

The article presents a set of documental sources that are part of the physical anthropology archive administered by the National Museum’s biological anthropology sector (UFRJ). The archive holds important documentation on the First Brazilian Congress of Eugenics, held in Rio de Janeiro in 1929, in celebration of the National Academy of Medicine centennial. In addition to the originals of papers presented at the event (some unpublished), the archive also contains a series of documents compiled by the congress organizers, including announcements of the event, attendee registrations, correspondence, newspaper and magazine clippings of articles on eugenics, as well as motions, reports, and final minutes, all of which makes this collection invaluable in understanding the history of eugenics in Brazil.