Eugenic Anxieties

Randall Hansen; Desmond King

doi:10.1017/CBO9781139507554.004

3 - Eugenic Anxieties

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2014

Randall Hansen and

Desmond King

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Randall Hansen: Affiliation:
University of Toronto
Desmond King: Affiliation:
Nuffield College, Oxford

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Summary

The word “eugenics” derives from the Greek and denotes “good in birth” or “noble in heredity.” Francis Galton understood by it the science of improving the human gene pool by granting “the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable.” His American counterpart, Charles Davenport, put it slightly differently: “Eugenics may be defined as the science and art of social advancement by better breeding, or of improving the population by increasing the number of those with valuable racial (heredity) traits.” What distinguished eugenics from many existing academic branches of science was that it was a program with a set of prescriptions for law- makers – it was science with an agenda. Eugenicists in fact liked to compare this policy implication to the application of a newly discovered vaccination. But, in contrast to a medically prescribed preventive vaccination, eugenics demanded political action.

Heredity and Mental Illness:

Eugenics depended on two principles: heredity and differential fertility. Absent these two precepts, a eugenic program would be pointless. From the eugenicists’ point of view, eugenics was not only policy-relevant but was urgently so. This resulted from the assumption that the majority of mental illnesses were hereditary, increasingly pervasive, and degenerative of a society’s overall human stock.

Type: Chapter
Information: Sterilized by the State
Eugenics, Race, and the Population Scare in Twentieth-Century North America
, pp. 49 - 62

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139507554.004 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2013

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