Eugenics

Eugenics, a term coined in 1883 by British statistician Francis Galton from the Greek for well-born, is an applied science of human heredity that aims to achieve “better” breeding and improve the human race. Although eugenics is often portrayed as a pseudoscience linked to extreme and racist policies such as forced sterilization and Nazi genocide, a rich historical literature portrays it as a science and social program with broad appeal and variable meanings. Eugenics was an expression of modernity, a biologizing vision for human improvement that was embraced by various political ideologies, from fascism to communism, liberalism to anarchism, and antifeminism to feminism, and arose alongside the nation-state. “Positive eugenics” encouraged the “better” part of the population to reproduce through measures like child health clinics and marriage counselling. “Negative eugenics” discouraged the reproduction of those considered inferior through institutional segregation, sterilization, and, at the most extreme, euthanasia. Medical professionals played a leading role in shaping and implementing both types of eugenics policies. Eugenic ideas about improving human heredity arose at roughly the same time in many parts of the world. Eugenicists exchanged ideas in scientific and medical journals and participated in international eugenics congresses held in London in 1912 and in New York City in 1921 and 1932. Yet eugenicists’ policy agendas and theoretical orientations differed, depending on local cultures and concerns. In the United States and Germany, most eugenicists embraced Mendel’s laws of genetic inheritance, minimized the role of the environment, and supported negative eugenic policies like sterilization. In contrast, “Latin” eugenicists tended to be neo-Lamarckian, emphasized the interaction of heredity and environment, and focused on population-level health and hygiene measures. They were less likely to embrace sterilization. Yet as the following works show, the exceptions were many. Recent research has extended the scope and periodization of the eugenics movement. Early histories supposed that the “old” eugenics declined in the 1930s and 1940s, with advances in genetic science and knowledge of Nazi atrocities, but that new reproductive technologies and genomic medicine created a “new” eugenics that is consumerist and voluntary rather than statist and coerced (although the line between voluntary and coerced is blurred). Others emphasize continuity, especially in the areas of medical genetics and population control. There is general agreement that the legacy of eugenics continues today. Scholars of gender, sexuality, disability, and colonialism have enriched older interpretations of eugenics that focused solely on race, ethnicity, and class. This bibliography contains a fraction of the international English-language scholarship on eugenics, with an emphasis on histories of health and medicine.