Journal articles on the topic 'Eugenics'
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1
Stucchi-Portocarrero, Santiago. "Eugenics, medicine and psychiatry in Peru." History of Psychiatry 29, no. 1 (November 29, 2017): 96–109. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0957154x17741232.
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Eugenics was defined by Galton as ‘the science which deals with all influences that improve the inborn qualities of a race’. In Peru, eugenics was related to social medicine and mental hygiene, in accordance with the neo-Lamarckian orientation, that predominated in Latin America. Peruvian eugenists assumed the mission of fighting hereditary and infectious diseases, malnutrition, alcoholism, drug addiction, prostitution, criminality and everything that threatened the future of the ‘Peruvian race’. There were some enthusiastic advocates of ‘hard’ eugenic measures, such as forced sterilization and eugenic abortion, but these were never officially implemented in Peru (except for the compulsory sterilization campaign during the 1995–2000 period). Eugenics dominated scientific discourse during the first half of the twentieth century, but eugenic discourse did not disappear completely until the 1970s.
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Kamrat-Lang, Debora. "Healing Society: Medical Language in American Eugenics." Science in Context 8, no. 1 (1995): 175–96. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0269889700001940.
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The ArgumentAmerican eugenics developed out of a cultural tradition independent of medicine. However, the eugenicist Harry Hamilton Laughlin and some legal experts involved in eugenic practice in the United States used medical language in discussing and evaluating enforced eugenic sterilizations. They built on medicine as a model for healing, while at the same time playing down medicine's concern with its traditional client: the individual patient. Laughlin's attitude toward medicine was ambivalent because he wanted expert eugenicists, rather than medical experts, to control eugenic practice. In contrast, legal experts saw eugenics as an integral part of medicine, though one expert challenged basing the judicial system on eugenically minded medicine. All in all, the medicalization of American eugenics involved expanding the scope of medicine to include the mutilation of individuals for the benefit of society. The judicial system was medicalized in that an expanded medicine became the basis of legislation in the thirty states that permitted eugenic sterilizations
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Binnebesel, Józef, Ditta Baczała, and Piotr Błajet. "Eugenika – aspekty historyczne, biologiczne i edukacyjne." Studia Edukacyjne, no. 52 (March 15, 2019): 139–58. http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/se.2019.52.10.
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Eugenics is the selection of desired heritable characteristics in order to improve future generations, typically in reference to humans. The article is about eugenics in historical, biological and educational aspects. The historical aspect is elaborated on and includes early eugenics, eugenics organizations, popular support for eugenics, and anti-eugenics sentiments. Despite the dropping of the term eugenics, eugenic ideas remained prevalent in many issues concerning human reproduction and genetic intervention. “New Eugenics” is a fact. “New Eugenics” includes education. Does it really?
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Aylward, Alex. "R.A. Fisher, eugenics, and the campaign for family allowances in interwar Britain." British Journal for the History of Science 54, no. 4 (October 11, 2021): 485–505. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0007087421000674.
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AbstractRonald Aylmer Fisher (1890–1962) is today remembered as a giant of twentieth-century statistics, genetics and evolutionary theory. Alongside his influential scientific contributions, he was also, throughout the interwar years, a prominent figure within Britain's eugenics movement. This essay provides a close examination of his eugenical ideas and activities, focusing particularly upon his energetic advocacy of family allowances, which he hoped would boost eugenic births within the more ‘desirable’ middle and upper classes. Fisher's proposals, which were grounded in his distinctive explanation for the decay of civilizations throughout human history, enjoyed support from some influential figures in Britain's Eugenics Society and beyond. The ultimate failure of his campaign, though, highlights tensions both between the eugenics and family allowances movements, and within the eugenics movement itself. I show how these social and political movements represented a crucial but heretofore overlooked context for the reception of Fisher's evolutionary masterwork of 1930, The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection, with its notorious closing chapters on the causes and cures of national and racial decline.
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Linett, Maren. "Mind the Gap." Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies 17, no. 4 (November 2023): 435–51. http://dx.doi.org/10.3828/jlcds.2023.33.
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The article argues that eugenics was motivated, in part, by human exceptionalism. It first explores the ways in which eugenics understood nonwhite race, disability, and animality as forces capable of exerting a drag on the forward thrust of eugenic progress. Next, it traces the incoherent discourse about animality within eugenics, demonstrating that while eugenic breeding—eugenic methods—relied on human animality, the fundamental goal of eugenics was to improve human beings by distancing us from that animality. The final part of the article explores the imbrication of animality, race, and disability in Aldous Huxley’s 1948 novel Ape and Essence , arguing that the novel is a dysgenic vision that substantiates the eugenic call to increase the evolutionary distance between human beings and other animals, to cement human domination—conceived of as white human domination—of the planet.
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Sher, S. A., T. V. Yakovleva, and V. Yu Al’bitskiy. "About history and significance of the eugenic ideas." Kazan medical journal 99, no. 5 (December 15, 2018): 855–59. http://dx.doi.org/10.17816/kmj2018-855.
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Aim. To show the short history of the origin and development of the eugenic ideas at the beginning of the 20th century.
Methods. Historical-genetic and historical-comparative methods were used.
Results. The article presents the results of historical and medical research that demonstrated that close by the tasks to medicine eugenics studied inherited properties, their social manifestations and historical changes. Science eugenics gained wide circulation and recognition in 1920s in USSR. The ideas became popular that achievements of the Soviet health care, its preventive direction lead to creation of higher sanitary culture and realization of eugenic tasks for creation of the harmonious Soviet identity. Since the early 1930s in the Soviet Union the eugenics underwent severe criticism. The eugenic ideas were completely discredited by Nazi programs of fascist Germany in 1933-1945 when millions of people were exterminated. In the end of the 20th century interest in eugenics has renewed because of development of genetics.
Conclusion. Despite the ambiguous past, the eugenics had played a certain positive role as it allowed understanding genetic and anthropological human features, and served as an incentive for development of medical genetics and study of genetic diseases.
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Woods, Peter J. "Aesthetics in the Eugenics Movement: A Critical Examination." Journal of Aesthetic Education 56, no. 2 (July 1, 2022): 56–77. http://dx.doi.org/10.5406/15437809.56.2.04.
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Abstract Although multiple scholars have pushed music education to embrace the aesthetic as a curricular and pedagogical touchstone, research surrounding this aesthetic turn has largely framed aesthetics as a sensory experience rather than a social technology (one that can both liberate and oppress). In response, I address the following question: how do uncritical aesthetic philosophies and the experiences they engender act as a means of oppression within music education? By way of example, I approach this question through a text analysis of writings on aesthetics from The Eugenics Review, a long-running publication that disseminated eugenics news and research. In doing so, I construct a eugenical theory of aesthetics that illuminates how eugenicists used aesthetics to enact what Foucault defines as pastoral power and assert control of bodies and populations through education. I then frame the writings of Carl Seashore (a pioneering music education researcher and avowed eugenicist) within this eugenical theory of aesthetics, revealing the ways that Seashore used aesthetic theory to forward eugenical arguments. I conclude with implications for contemporary educators and researchers, sounding a call for a deep and critical examination of all aesthetic formations within music education.
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Iredale, Rachel. "Eugenics and its Relevance to Contemporary Health Care." Nursing Ethics 7, no. 3 (May 2000): 205–14. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/096973300000700303.
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Recently there has been a revival of interest in the theory and practice of eugenics by both academics and lay people. The ongoing revolution in biology and the increasing ability to acquire genetic information has led to concerns about genetics being used again for sinister eugenic ends. Although the goals behind traditional eugenics - the minimization of disease and the improvement of human health - remain unchanged, the means by which these goals should be achieved have altered significantly. However, in debates about the impact of human genetic research, eugenics is sometimes viewed as a purely historical phenomenon and its relevance to the current situation is minimized. This article outlines the history of the eugenics movement, describes some eugenic practices, and explores why an appreciation of these historical debates is important for nurses.
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Resta, Robert G. "Eugenic Considerations in the Theory and Practice of Genetic Counseling." Science in Context 11, no. 3-4 (1998): 431–38. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0269889700003124.
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The ArgumentIs genetic counseling a form of eugenics? To some extent, the answer depends upon how the terms “eugenics” and “genetic counseling” are defined. This paper reviews the eugenic implications of four models of genetic counseling. The complexities of slapping the eugenic label on genetic counseling are illustrated with three cases drawn from clinical practice. However, even though genetic counseling is not always a eugenic activity, genetic counselors work in a medical/ financial setting that has the net eugenic effect of, and profits from, reducing the number of people with genetic disorders.
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Susanne, C. "Eugenics and eugenism." Global Bioethics 10, no. 1-4 (January 1997): 101–10. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/11287462.1997.10800718.
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Donohue, Christopher R. "“The Bare Replacement”: Geneticists’ and Bioethicists Support of Eugenics, from after the Second World War to the Human Genome Project." Revista Brasileira de História 43, no. 94 (December 2023): 225–52. http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/1806-93472023v43n94-12.
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ABSTRACT Using a combination of archival and secondary sources, this article argues that scientists and bioethicists after the Second World War advocated a wide variety of eugenic practices and strongly supported the development of eugenics, strengthened by advances in medicine, human genetics, and population genetics. I detail extensive research in both the Curt Stern and the American Eugenics Society Papers (American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia), uncovering novel defenses of eugenics and its integration in sciences after the Second World War by key figures such as Curt Stern and Theodosius Dobzhansky. Moreover, I relate to Richard Lewontin’s participation in a Princeton conference sponsored by the American Eugenics Society in 1965. This article is also the first to not only describe geneticists’ defense and development of eugenic ideas but also details bioethicists’ defense of this inhumane and unscientific ideology until the dawn of the Human Genome Project in the late 1980s.
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Fangerau, Heiner M. "Making Eugenics a Public Issue." Science & Technology Studies 18, no. 2 (January 1, 2005): 46–66. http://dx.doi.org/10.23987/sts.55179.
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During the 1920s, the world-wide eugenics movement reached a peak level of popularity. Historians have stressed the key role of the textbook “Human Heredity and Racial Hygiene” in the popularisation of eugenic thinking in Germany. In this textbook the well known scientists Erwin Baur (1875-1933), Eugen Fischer (1874-1967) and Fritz Lenz (1887-1976) tried to combine genetics, anthropology and racial hygiene to form a “Magna Carta” of eugenics. This paper aims at quantitatively reconstructing the book’s development into a standard work. 325 contemporary reviews of the book were analysed. More than 80% of the reviewers evaluated the book positively recommending it to a variety of readers. Most of the reviewers were Medical Doctors concentrating on the eugenic aspects of the book. The reception study makes the reciprocity of eugenics as an accepted science and academics forming it into science prevalent. Explanations for the uniform reaction of the scientific community are discussed. *Key words*: reception study, interwar years, eugenics
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Falk, Pedro Frederico. "Charles Wicksteed Armstrong and positive eugenics." Resgate: Revista Interdisciplinar de Cultura 27, no. 2 (December 19, 2019): 11–28. http://dx.doi.org/10.20396/resgate.v27i2.8656454.
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Charles Wicksteed Armstrong (1871-1963) was a British writer, schoolmaster, and eugenicist who lived most of his life in Brazil during three distinct periods. His experience in Brazil served to gain practical experience and knowledge to propose his positive eugenic measures in England or, especially, with Englishmen. Thus, using a variety of primary sources, with documentary and bibliographical analysis, this article seeks to show how Brazil served as an experimental eugenics’ laboratory for Armstrong. This made Armstrong confident that he possessed the necessary knowledge to fulfill his patriotic duty and to save England from racial suicide. In this context, the physical environment, health situation (mental, physical and intellectual) and heredity of an individual were important factors that could influence the survival of the people.
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Boutlas, George, Dimitra Chousou, Daniela Theodoridou, Anna Batistatou, Christos Yapijakis, and Maria Syrrou. "Eugenics between Darwin’s Εra and the Holocaust." Conatus 4, no. 2 (December 31, 2019): 171. http://dx.doi.org/10.12681/cjp.21061.
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Heredity and reproduction have always been matters of concern. Eugenics is a story that began well before the Holocaust, but the Holocaust completely changed the way eugenics was perceived at that time. What began with Galton (1883) as a scientific movement aimed at the improvement of the human race based on the theories and principles of heredity and statistics became by the beginning of the 20th century an international movement that sought to engineer human supremacy. Eugenic ideas, however, trace back to ancient Greek aristocratic ideas exemplified in Plato’s Republic, which played an important role in shaping modern eugenic social practices and government policies. Both positive (prevention and encouragement of the propagation of the fit, namely without hereditary afflictions, i.e. socially acceptable) and negative (institutionalization, sterilization, euthanasia) eugenics focused on the encouragement of healthy and discouragement of unhealthy reproduction. All these practices were often based on existing prejudices about race and disability. In this article, we will focus on the rise of eugenics, starting with the publication of Origin of Species to the Holocaust. This examination will be multidisciplinary, utilizing genetics, legal history and bioethical aspects. Through this examination, we will discuss how provisional understandings of genetics influenced eugenics-based legislation. We will also discuss the rise of biopolitics, the change of medical ethos and stance towards negative eugenics policies, and the possible power of bioethical principles to prevent such phenomena.
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Testart, Jacques. "The New Eugenics and Medicalized Reproduction." Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 4, no. 3 (1995): 304–12. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0963180100006058.
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We know today that classical eugenics, of an essentially negative nature, was not only an aggressive and brutal practice but, like its positive counterpart, inefficient as well. In fact, numerous biological, sociological, and psychological events beyond our control arise to prevent the realisation of any eugenic plan. Thus, like all human beings, individuals whose procreation is encouraged by positive eugenics suffer unexpected mutations that are transmitted to their offspring by their gametes. Gene distribution among the gametes at meiosis is the result of an uncontrollable, natural lottery. As an effect of this lottery, positive eugenics could allow the birth of defective babies whereas negative eugenics precludes the birth of normal babies.
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Roitberg, Guilherme. "Crisis, end, or eclipse of reason? Max Horkheimer's Critical Theory contributions to an epistemology of eugenics." Cadernos de Filosofia Alemã: Crítica e Modernidade 27, no. 1 (June 29, 2022): 69–85. http://dx.doi.org/10.11606/issn.2318-9800.v27i1p69-85.
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This article investigates the epistemological foundations of Francis Galton's eugenics based on Max Horkheimer's Critical Theory. Grounded on a bibliographical research, we analyze the texts in which the English polymath structured the rationality of his science-religion, contrasting them with the theoretical-critical diagnosis of the crisis of reason. We conclude that Horkheimer’s argument denouncing the enlightened roots of eugenics, despite not having been explored in historiography, remains fundamental to the understanding of the eugenic scientific rationality, which we denominated eugenic reason.
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Dąbrowski, Przemysław. "Oddział wileński Polskiego Towarzystwa Eugenicznego Walki ze Zwyrodnieniem Rasy w dwudziestoleciu międzywojennym — geneza, działalność i struktura prawna." Studia nad Autorytaryzmem i Totalitaryzmem 39, no. 2 (September 8, 2017): 25–35. http://dx.doi.org/10.19195/2300-7249.39.2.2.
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VILNIUS BRANCH OF THE POLISH EUGENICS SOCIETY FIGHTING AGAINST BREEDING DEGENERATION DURING THE INTERWAR PERIOD — GENESIS, ACTIVITY AND LEGAL STRUCTUREVilnius Branch of the Polish Eugenics Society played asignificant role in the development and propagation of eugenic ideas. Statutory goals were realized through the establishment of eugenic and premarital counseling. In addition, alot of attention has been devoted to numerous lectures. The Vilnius society with great approval accepted the establishment of anew institution, and some resistance came from local intelligentsia and doctors.
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Sørensen, Victoria E. Pihl. "“In Women’s Hands”." Kvinder, Køn & Forskning, no. 2 (November 22, 2023): 46–62. http://dx.doi.org/10.7146/kkf.v36i2.132611.
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Eugenics had popular appeal and expressions in early 20th-century Denmark. This article tells two stories of what eugenics looked like ‘in the hands’ of bourgeois Danish women as they promoted ‘racial hygiene’ through cultural production. The first story highlights the eugenic feminism of nationally acclaimed women’s rights advocate Thit Jensen through a reading of her play The Stork (1929). The second tells of the Copenhagen Housewife Association’s engagement with new media technology and race science through their eugenics radio Listener Group (1934). Read through a lens that pays especially close attention to race and class, I argue that this work identifies them as significant proponents of eugenic ideology and as contributors to the targeting of the poor and working class in the name of ‘racial hygiene’ – a decidedly racist project.
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Holtzman, Neil A. "Eugenics and Genetic Testing." Science in Context 11, no. 3-4 (1998): 397–417. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0269889700003100.
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The ArgumentPressures to lower health-care costs remain an important stimulus to eugenic approaches. Prenatal diagnosis followed by abortion of affected fetuses has replaced sterilization as the major eugenic technique. Voluntary acceptance has replaced coercion, but subtle pressures undermine personal autonomy. The failure of the old eugenics to accurately predict who will have affected offspring virtually disappears when prenatal diagnosis is used to predict Mendelian disorders. However, when prenatal diagnosis is used to detect inherited susceptibilities to adult-onset, common, complex disorders, considerable uncertainty is inherent in the prediction. Intolerance and the resurgence of genetic determinism are current pressures for a eugenic approach. The increasing use of carrier screening (to identify those at risk of having affected offspring) and of prenatal diagnosis could itself generate intolerance for those who refuse the procedures. Genetic determinism deflects society from social action that would reduce the burden of disease far more than even the maximum use of eugenics.
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Kyllingstad, Jon Røyne. "The Norwegian Association for Heredity Research and the Organized International Eugenics Movement. Expertise, Authority, Transnational Networks and International Organization in Norwegian Genetics and Eugenics (1919–1934)." Perspectives on Science 30, no. 1 (January 2022): 77–107. http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/posc_a_00403.
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Abstract The Norwegian Association for Heredity Research played a key role in the rise of genetics as a research field in Norway. The immediate background of its establishment in 1919 was the need for an organization that could clarify scientific issues regarding eugenics and coordinate Norwegian representation in the organized international eugenics movement. The Association never assumed this role. Instead, Norway was represented in the international eugenics movement by the so-called Norwegian Consultative Eugenics Commission, whose leader, Jon Alfred Mjøen, was dismissed as a pseudo-scientist by Norwegian geneticists. The paper explores the Association’s role in defining and delimiting scientific expert knowledge in the field of genetics and eugenics in Norway. It demonstrates how struggles about academic authority on the national arena were intertwined with struggles about representation and impact in the international eugenics movement and how transnational scientific networks where mobilized to legitimize and delegitimize notions about Nordic race supremacy, racial mixing and the politics of eugenic sterilizations.
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Krementsov, Nikolai. "The Strength of a Loosely Defined Movement: Eugenics and Medicine in Imperial Russia." Medical History 59, no. 1 (December 11, 2014): 6–31. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/mdh.2014.68.
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AbstractThis essay examines the ‘infiltration’ of eugenics into Russian medical discourse during the formation of the eugenics movement in western Europe and North America in 1900–17. It describes the efforts of two Russian physicians, the bacteriologist and hygienist Nikolai Gamaleia (1859–1949) and the psychiatrist Tikhon Iudin (1879–1949), to introduce eugenics to the Russian medical community, analysing in detail what attracted these representatives of two different medical specialties to eugenic ideas, ideals, and policies advocated by their western colleagues. On the basis of a close examination of the similarities and differences in Gamaleia’s and Iudin’s attitudes to eugenics, the essay argues that lack of cohesiveness gave the early eugenics movement a unique strength. The loose mix of widely varying ideas, ideals, methods, policies, activities and proposals covered by the umbrella of eugenics offered to a variety of educated professionals in Russia and elsewhere the possibility of choosing, adopting and adapting particular elements to their own national, professional, institutional and disciplinary contexts, interests and agendas.
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Wilker, Daniel. "Eugenic Values." Science in Context 11, no. 3-4 (1998): 455–70. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0269889700003148.
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The ArgumentEugenics is generally regarded as evil; but what was its sin? Racism, class bias, and violation of reproductive freedom, which tainted objectionable eugenic interventions, are not part of the core notion of eugenics. A number of candidates have been suggested as the wrong inherent in eugenics, ranging from statism to the impossibility of consensus on the ideal human being. It is most plausible to view eugenics as sharing moral dilemmas with much of public health, and the critical issues as those of distributive justice.
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Mamarasulov, Andrei Ravkhatovich. "Definition of essential attributes of a person through criticism of positive eugenics." Философская мысль, no. 4 (April 2022): 57–70. http://dx.doi.org/10.25136/2409-8728.2022.4.37744.
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The purpose of the work is to identify and comprehend the essential attributes of human existence, which are found to be conceptually opposite in relation to the eugenic doctrine of the foundation. The subject of the study are such attributes of human existence as universality, stability, self-existence, self-identity. The arguments put forward by eugenics as a positivist concept, on the contrary, are based on the idea of human nature as a biologically strictly determined and changeable material for the implementation of artificial transformation. The criticism of this premise undertaken in the work, as well as the criticism of the likely consequences of the use of positive eugenics, reveals the destructiveness of the eugenic doctrine. Applying the method of critical analysis, the author raises the question: "Is positive eugenics possible at all?" - and within the framework of philosophical anthropology answers it. The author comes to the conclusion that the implementation of the doctrine of positive eugenics threatens with distortions incompatible with the existence of man. The main conclusion of the study is: the essential moment of human existence is the fundamental basis that establishes the anthropological prohibition on the implementation of eugenic transformations. As a result, the attributes of a person's essential being - universality, stability, self-existence, self-identity - are revealed as quite effective conditions for human existence, which gives these attributes an additional degree of conceptual significance and cognitively concretizes their being. The results of the study of the causes of the failure of positive eugenics can be applied in the field of anthropology, ethics, bioethics, axiology.
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Cleminson, Richard Mark. "Between Germanic and Latin eugenics: Portugal, 1930-1960." História, Ciências, Saúde-Manguinhos 23, suppl 1 (December 2016): 73–92. http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/s0104-59702016000500005.
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Abstract This article assesses critically the participation of Portuguese eugenicists in “Latin eugenics” and traces the continuities and discontinuities with respect to this model. In particular, it focuses on a number of examples of more “Germanic” eugenics in contrast and in comparison to Latin versions of eugenics. In the former category, Eusébio Tamagnini, José Ayres de Azevedo and Leopoldina Ferreira de Paulo are considered; in the latter category, especially the work of Almerindo Lessa on “racial mixing” is considered. The conclusions suggest that we should seek diversity in both Latin and northern European eugenic models while at the same time placing Portugal within the array of possible versions of eugenics during the first half of the twentieth century.
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Jędrysiak, Marcin. "Wpływ ustawodawstwa III Rzeszy na polskie projekty ustaw eugenicznych (1933–1939)." Miscellanea Historico-Iuridica 20, no. 1 (2021): 53–80. http://dx.doi.org/10.15290/mhi.2021.20.01.03.
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The matter of development of the eugenic movement Has already been described in the Polish science. A lot has been written regarding both the law of the Third Reich, as well as the history of the Polish eugenic movement. However Polish project of eugenic laws have never been thoroughly analyzed from the legal point of view, despite this topic being an object to commentaries in the Interwar period. Up to this point no one attempted to analyze how strongly did the Nazi eugenic concepts influenced the Polish projects of eugenic laws. According to some authors such inspirations are easily noticeable. Thus the thesis that the German law strongly influenced the Polish projects shall be subjected to a critical analysis. The goal of the paper is to compare the German eugenic law with Polish concepts on that matter, especially projects made by Leon Wernic. Due to the use of the comparative legal analysis in the historical perspective, it was possible to indicate the similarities and dissimilarities between the Polish projects and the Nazi laws: Law for the Prevention of Hereditary and diseases of offspring; the Nuremberg Laws; the Law for the Protection of the Health of the German People. The Polish drafts include the Preventive Eugenics Act published in 1934, the drafts of four eugenics laws published in 1935; project of the law: ,,On the inhibition of reproduction of dysgenic individuals” created by Wernic; draft of the law ,,On the inhibition of undesirable reproduction” made by Witold Łuniewski and ,,Eugenics Laws” prepared by Bohdan Ostromęcki. The so-called „Eugenics Act” of 1938 has also been analyzed. The paper indicates that although Wernic explicitly pointed out his inspiration by German and Italian legislation, his concepts as well as concepts of other Polish eugenicists are original. Similarities with German legislation can be seen for example in the procedure of sterilization or a certain concordance of the catalog of diseases which qualified for sterilization. The Polish proposals, however, were not identical with the Nazi proposals. Neither were they racist or anti-Jewish in content. Moreover, the role of so-called positive eugenics was more strongly emphasized in Poland than in Germany.
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AGAR, NICHOLAS. "Why We Should Defend Gene Editing as Eugenics." Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 28, no. 1 (December 20, 2018): 9–19. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0963180118000336.
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Abstract:This paper considers the relevance of the concept of “eugenics,”—a term associated with some of the most egregious crimes of the twentieth century—to the possibility of editing human genomes. The author identifies some uses of gene editing as eugenics but proposes that this identification does not suffice to condemn them. He proposes that we should distinguish between “morally wrong” practices, which should be condemned, and “morally problematic” practices that call for solutions, and he suggests that eugenic uses of gene editing fall into this latter category. Although when we choose the characteristics of future people we are engaging in morally dangerous acts, some interventions in human heredity should nevertheless be acknowledged as morally good. These morally good eugenic interventions include some uses of preimplantation genetic diagnosis. The author argues that we should think about eugenic interventions in the same way that we think about morally problematic interventions in public health. When we recognize some uses of gene editing as eugenics, we make the dangers of selecting or modifying human genetic material explicit.
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Trigos, Mercedes. "An Erotics of Eugenics." Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies 47, no. 1 (2022): 43–71. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/azt.2022.47.1.43.
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This essay analyzes moments of erotic tension in the work of Leonor Villegas de Magnón through eugenic feminist and settler colonialist critiques. Combining close reading and archival research, it conceptualizes her work as a transborder eugenic erotics, arguing that her feminist consciousness develops within translation and with a particular attention to erotics, which in her works is often tied to representations of racial and class difference informed by eugenics. The first section analyzes a short story from her archives, “Lingerie. Lingerie. Lingerie.,” published in the Laredo Morning Record on September 10, 1920. The second section uses the discourses of eugenics and settler colonialism to place this reading in conversation with her better-known autobiographical novel La rebelde and its English self-translation The Rebel, both published posthumously. The comparative analysis elucidates the collapse and overlap of eugenic and settler colonial ideologies atthe turn of the twentieth century, seeking to complement and complicate the version of feminism we see in Villegas de Magnón’s most widely read texts, a feminism that has been largely readin celebratory terms in Chicanx and Latinx studies.
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Stern, Alexandra Minna. "“The Hour of Eugenics” in Veracruz, Mexico: Radical Politics, Public Health, and Latin America’s Only Sterilization Law." Hispanic American Historical Review 91, no. 3 (August 1, 2011): 431–43. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00182168-1300191.
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Abstract In 1932, the Mexican state of Veracruz passed Latin America’s only eugenic sterilization law. Building on the foundational scholarship of Nancy Leys Stepan, this article critically examines Veracruz’s eugenics movement, exploring how it intersected with public health, antivice campaigns, and radical agrarian and labor politics. I pay particular attention to Governor Adalberto Tejeda, who, during his second term in office (1928 – 1932) incorporated a zealous version of Latin eugenics into state laws and policies. This article suggests that Veracruz’s experiment with eugenics, especially the state’s sterilization statute, was intimately connected to concerns about prostitution, sexual health, and working-class vigor. This article highlights an unexplored dimension of society and medicine in Latin America and raises questions about the orientation and limits of preventive eugenics in Mexico, and about the homologies among eugenics movements in the Americas and across the globe in the twentieth century.
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Adams, Mark B. "The politics of human heredity in the USSR, 1920–1940." Genome 31, no. 2 (January 15, 1989): 879–84. http://dx.doi.org/10.1139/g89-155.
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After the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, Iurii Filipchenko (in Petrograd) and Nikolai Koltsov (in Moscow) created centers of genetic research where eugenics prospered as a socially relevant part of the new "experimental" biology. The Russian Eugenics Society, established in 1920, was dominated by research-oriented professionals. However, Bolshevik activists in the movement tried to translate eugenics into social policies (among them, sterilization) and in 1929, Marxist geneticist Alexander Serebrovsky was stimulated by the forthcoming Five-Year Plan to urge a massive eugenic program of human artificial insemination. With the advent of Stalinism, such attempts to "biologize" social phenomena became ideologically untenable and the society was abolished in 1930. Three years later, however, a number of eugenicists reassembled in the world's first institute of medical genetics, created by Bolshevik physician Solomon Levit after his return from a postdoctoral year in Texas with H. J. Muller. Muller himself moved to the Soviet Union in 1933, where he agitated for eugenics and wrote Stalin in 1936 to urge an artificial insemination program. Shortly thereafter, Muller left Russia, several of his colleagues were shot, and the Institute of Medical Genetics was disbanded. During the next three decades, Lysenkoists regularly invoked the Soviet eugenic legacy to claim that genetics itself was fascist.Key words: Russia, eugenics, human genetics, medical genetics, Lysenkoism, history, politics.
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Weindling, Paul. "The ‘Sonderweg’ of German Eugenics: Nationalism and Scientific Internationalism." British Journal for the History of Science 22, no. 3 (September 1989): 321–33. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0007087400026182.
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The history of eugenics has become a classic arena for examining how the interplay of culture, social interests and social structures affects the advancement of science. At the same time eugenics demonstrates how in the first half of the twentieth century, the expectation arose that science could offer the solution of social problems; for biology intruded into many areas of social policy during the 1920s and 30s. Historians of science have been struck by the coincidence between the rise of genetics and eugenics after 1900. Genetics underpinned techniques of family reconstruction, which were deployed for the screening of population groups. Areas of social policy such as the prediction of potential criminals and other types of social deviancy relied on eugenic rationales. This poses intriguing problems concerning the extent to which genetic research was motivated by eugenic ideals, particularly in the field of human genetics. At the same time, it is important to recognize that eugenics was a heterogenous agglomeration of sciences: in addition to genetics, a prominent place was taken by anthropology, clinical medicine, statistics, and psychology. These diverse constituents were welded together by cultural and social movements peculiar to respective national contexts.
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Weingart, Peter. "Politics of heredity — Germany 1900–1940, a brief overview." Genome 31, no. 2 (January 15, 1989): 896–97. http://dx.doi.org/10.1139/g89-158.
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The paper gives a brief overview of the main stages of development of eugenics and race hygiene in Germany between 1900 and 1940. Two main stages can be differentiated: one, the formation of the eugenics movement and its development parallel to quantitative population policy before and after World War I, and the second beginning toward the end of the Weimar Republic (1919–1933) when the financial crisis of the public health system favored eugenic schemes implemented by an authoritarian government, such as the Nazi regime.Key words: eugenics, race hygiene, Germany, quantitative population policy, World War I, Nazi regime.
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Björkman, Maria, and Sven Widmalm. "Selling eugenics: the case of Sweden." Notes and Records of the Royal Society 64, no. 4 (August 18, 2010): 379–400. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2010.0009.
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This paper traces the early (1910s to 1920s) development of Swedish eugenics through a study of the social network that promoted it. The eugenics network consisted mainly of academics from a variety of disciplines, but with medicine and biology dominating; connections with German scientists who would later shape Nazi biopolitics were strong. The paper shows how the network used political lobbying (for example, using contacts with academically accomplished MPs) and various media strategies to gain scientific and political support for their cause, where a major goal was the creation of a eugenics institute (which opened in 1922). It also outlines the eugenic vision of the institute's first director, Herman Lundborg. In effect the network, and in particular Lundborg, promoted the view that politics should be guided by eugenics and by a genetically superior elite. The selling of eugenics in Sweden is an example of the co-production of science and social order.
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Lepicard, Etienne. "Eugenics and Roman Catholicism An Encyclical Letter in Context: Casti connubii, December 31, 1930." Science in Context 11, no. 3-4 (1998): 527–44. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0269889700003197.
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The ArgumentLittle has been written about religion vis à vis eugenics and, even less on Roman Catholicism and eugenics. A 1930 papal encyclical, Casti connubii, is usually held by historians to have been the official condemnatory view of the Catholic Church on eugenics, and the document is further supposed to have induced the only organized opposition to eugenic legislative efforts in several countries (especially France). In fact, the encyclical was not directly about eugenics but a general statement of the Catholic doctrine on marriage.This article attempts to clarify the issue of a Catholic position on eugenics by re-examining the encyclical itself as well as its contemporaneous reception in Germany and France, where there was a strong Catholic presence. Casti connubii introduced a change in the prescribed hierarchy of the aims of marriage when, for the first time, relations between spouses took precedence over procreation. While condemning the means (abortion, sterilization, etc.), the encyclical did not condemn positive eugenics. In the broader context of the history of eugenics, the reception of the encyclical emphasizes the family as the third entity between the individual and society. Eugenics, as a “religious Utopia” of modernity, developed a hegemonic discourse over the family realm. As such it entered into competition with more traditional religious institutions such as the Roman Catholic Church.
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Temoukale, Mabandine Djagri. "Eugenics in Brave New World: A New Historicist Reading." International Journal of English Literature and Social Sciences 7, no. 5 (2022): 228–34. http://dx.doi.org/10.22161/ijels.75.36.
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In Brave New World, eugenics translates into a practice that not only enhances the performance of certain social classes but also encourages sterilization, discrimination, and standardization of citizens on the assumption that anti-social behaviors are genetically inherited. However, a new historicist reading of the novel attempts to show that the eugenic practices of the leaders of the World State are inspired by classical eugenic methods. It argues that the social problems such as delinquency, alcoholism, and poverty that leaders in Brave New World seek to control stem from social injustice. The analysis, therefore, reveals that negative eugenics (eliminating the bad genetic stock responsible for anti-social behaviors) using technoscience cannot be a solution to a problem caused by social injustice. Nevertheless, the paper argues that the survival instinct pushes humans to practice eugenics in order to pass on to their descendants a genetic stock that allows them to adapt and survive in an ever-changing world.
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Cleminson, Richard. "Eugenics in Portugal, 1900–1950: Setting a Research Agenda." East Central Europe 38, no. 1 (2011): 133–54. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/187633011x570756.
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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.
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Fiorito, Luca, and Valentina Erasmo. "Norman Edwin Himes's "Eugenics and Democracy: A Call to Action" (1939). The Eugenic Manifesto of a Devote Carverian." HISTORY OF ECONOMIC THOUGHT AND POLICY, no. 2 (December 2022): 47–76. http://dx.doi.org/10.3280/spe2022-002002.
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This note presents an unpublished 1939 address given by the American sociologist and population specialist Norman Edwin Himes on "Eugenics and Democracy: A Call to Action. Himes's discussion of eugenics and democracy has a two-fold relevance. First, it provides further evidence that among population studies specialists a generalized commitment to eugenics persisted well beyond the era of the so-called Progressive Era and continued throughout the 1930s. Second, Himes's approach reveals an attempt to reformulate a eugenic agenda along "liberal" lines, which was intended to distance him from the coercive and racialist approach of his progressive predecessors. Yet, it will be shown, even though Himes seemed to temper the extremism of the earlier movement with sociological and voluntaristic language, there was little actual change in the ultimate goals of his agenda regardless of the apparent switch to democratic eugenics.
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Ryan, Patrick J. "Eugenic Continuities: Youth, Sex, Disability, and the Rise of Liberal Eugenics in the Late Twentieth Century." Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 17, no. 1 (January 2024): 104–26. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/hcy.2024.a916842.
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Abstract: This article places the landmark 1986 Supreme Court of Canada decision E. (Mrs.) v. Eve within its avowedly anti-eugenic context. Then it compares the trial record and appellate documents of Eve to the notorious 1927 American case Buck v. Bell . It outlines the legal reasoning of the Eve decision, its reception, and the different trajectories of law in the US, the UK, and Australia. These multiple points of historical comparison expose a series of unresolved eugenic continuities in the politics of youth, sex, and disability. The interpretation challenges more conventional definitions, periodization, and understandings of eugenics, drawing attention to the formation of "liberal" eugenics in the late twentieth century.
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Chamarette, R. Michael. "Sir Francis Galton: A Historiographical Reassessment of British Psychology’s Eugenic Past, 1860–1940." History & Philosophy of Psychology 23, no. 1 (2022): 18–32. http://dx.doi.org/10.53841/bpshpp.2022.23.1.18.
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Many people find it difficult to accept British psychology’s eugenic history. Much of the literature is unhelpful in its abstention from comprehensive and lucid accounts of the Galtonian eugenic origins of much published work on individual differences in intelligence and personality deemed as inherited, the multifaceted nature of eugenics itself, or the complexity of this legacy in the early 20th century. Despite some well researched accounts of highly specific aspects of eugenic influence, the wider picture often remains elusive. Yet as the implications of eugenics for studies of race, class, and the histories of institutions and academic disciplines are increasingly interrogated, this is ever more inappropriate. Its eugenic past forms part of the challenging history of British psychology. Though a single paper cannot address these issues in their entirety, this thematic reappraisal of Galton and his legacy in the early 20th century provides a crucial initial step.
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Roll-Hansen, Nils. "Geneticists and the Eugenics Movement in Scandinavia." British Journal for the History of Science 22, no. 3 (September 1989): 335–46. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0007087400026194.
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Two questions will receive special attention in this account, namely the political location of eugenics and the role of genetic science in its development. I will show that moderate eugenic policies had broad political support. For instance, the Scandinavian sterilization laws which were introduced in the 1930s were supported by the Social Democratic Parties, who were partly in position of government. I will argue that the effect of genetic research was to make eugenics more moderate, mainly because the fears and hopes were shown to be exaggerated. Degeneration was much slower than feared at first, if it took place at all, and the expectation of rapid and large effects of eugenic policies on the gene pool likewise proved to be quite unrealistic.
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Giæver, Øyvind. "Marriage and Madness." Science & Technology Studies 16, no. 1 (January 1, 2003): 3–21. http://dx.doi.org/10.23987/sts.55156.
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This essay focuses on marriage regulation as a eugenic tool – a topic that has received little attention in the literature – in 20th century Norway. Although eugenics was very much the focus of expert discussions prior to the first Norwegian marriage act (1918), a marriage bar for the insane that was included in the act was not mainly motivated by eugenic concerns. In fact, an amendment prepared in the late 1950s brought such concerns more to the foreground. In a final round of revisions prepared in the 1970s and 80s, however, both the marriage bar and the eugenic arguments were firmly dismissed. The essay uses these developments to discuss the relative weight to be accorded technical versus political factors in explaining the decline of eugenics – a decline that came rather late as far as the history of Norwegian marriage laws goes.
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Avila, Vrindavani, and Jennifer Elyse James. "Controlling Reproduction and Disrupting Family Formation: California Women’s Prisons and the Violent Legacy of Eugenics." Societies 14, no. 5 (May 19, 2024): 73. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/soc14050073.
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Prisons in the United States serve as a site and embodiment of gendered and racialized state violence. The US incarcerates more people than any other nation in both numbers and per capita rates. Individuals incarcerated in women’s prisons are 10% of the total prison population, yet women’s prisons remain understudied, and the violence that occurs in women’s facilities is rampant, widespread, and operates in particular racialized and gendered ways. This paper centers the forced sterilizations that occurred in California state prisons over the last two decades. We consider how reproduction and the nuclear family have served as a primary site of racial capitalism and eugenic ideology. While eugenic policies were popularized and promoted across the US and globally in the 20th century, the violent ideas underlying eugenic ideology have been a constant presence throughout US history. The height of the eugenics era is marked by the forcible sterilization of institutionalized ‘deviant’ bodies. While discussions of eugenics often center these programs, the reach of eugenic policies extends far beyond surgical interventions. We utilize a reproductive justice lens to argue that the hierarchical, racialized social stratification necessary for the existence of prisons constructs and sustains the ‘deviant’ bodies and families that predicate eugenic logic, policies, and practices. In this conceptual paper, we draw from ongoing research to argue that prisons, as institutions and as a product of racial capitalism, perpetuate the ongoing violent legacy of eugenics and name abolition as a central component of the fight to end reproductive oppression.
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Cleminson, Richard. "Mazdaznan, Eugenics and the Future of the “White Race”." Revista Brasileira de História 43, no. 94 (December 2023): 101–22. http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/1806-93472023v43n94-07.
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ABSTRACT This article examines the reception of eugenic thought among the followers of the Neo-Zoroastrian Mazdaznan movement primarily in North America and Britain, with respect to their ideas on “race”, the role of women in eugenics, and the question of environment versus heredity in eugenic thought. It focuses on the work of Dr. Otoman Zar-Adhust Ha’nish, the movement’s founder, and some of his supporters in the first four decades of the twentieth century. The article argues that Mazdaznan, when explicit about eugenics, held much in common with other “radical” or “life reform” movements of the time. It also examines how Mazdaznan connected with movements that favoured the purification and exaltation of the “white race” as the maximum expression of human and spiritual attainment. Finally, it examines the role of women in the production of this “regenerated” “race” as part of the eugenic project.
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Kohlman, Michael J. "Evangelizing Eugenics: A Brief Historiography of Popular and Formal American Eugenics Education (1908-1948)." Alberta Journal of Educational Research 58, no. 4 (June 14, 2013): 657–90. http://dx.doi.org/10.55016/ojs/ajer.v58i4.55683.
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This article examines the history of the American Eugenics movement’s penetration into the formal and popular educational milieu during the first half of the 20th Century, and includes a review of some recent scholarly research on eugenic themes in education and popular culture. Apologists have dismissed the American Eugenics movement as a shortlived, racist, reactionary, and pseudoscientific aberration that was already dying long before the collapse of the Third Reich. Many official histories of biology and various social science disciplines including education were sanitized to expunge or trivialize the involvement of a host of important prophets, disciples, and evangelists in the eugenics movement. It was also common to divorce the research and statistical methods developed in the service of eugenics from their inspiration and original application to Galton’s secular religion of human betterment. In the last few decades, however, a new generation of scholars began to re-examine and illuminate the breadth and depth of the eugenics movement: its devotees and devotees’ actions and influence on their professions or academic disciplines and on society. These scholars also looked into how eugenics penetrated educational thought, curriculum, courses, and texts; thereby, revealing a panoply of overlapping interests, academic programs, organizations, and influential individuals that fatefully intersected and synergistically recombined into a powerful social movement throughout the first half of the 1900s.
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Björkman, Maria. "The Emergence of Genetic Counseling in Sweden: Examples from Eugenics and Medical Genetics." Science in Context 28, no. 3 (August 10, 2015): 489–513. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0269889715000216.
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ArgumentThis paper examines the intertwined relations between eugenics and medical genetics from a Swedish perspective in the 1940s and 1950s. The Swedish case shows that a rudimentary form of genetic counseling emerged within eugenic practices in the applications of the Swedish Sterilization Act of 1941, here analyzed from the phenomenon of “heredophobia” (ärftlighetsskräck). At the same time genetic counseling also existed outside eugenic practices, within the discipline of medical genetics. The paper argues that a demand for genetic counseling increased in the 1940s and 1950s in response to a sense of reproductive responsibility engendered by earlier eugenic discourse. The paper also questions the claim made by theoreticians of biopolitics that biological citizens have emerged only during the last decades, especially in neoliberal societies. From the Swedish case it is possible to argue that this had already happened earlier in relation to the proliferation of various aspects of eugenics to the public.
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Hubbard, Ruth. "Eugenics and Prenatal Testing." International Journal of Health Services 16, no. 2 (April 1986): 227–42. http://dx.doi.org/10.2190/1yke-php6-h69a-yrkv.
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Prejudices against people with disabilities, pool people, and immigrants during the nineteenth century generated a science of “race improvement” called eugenics. In the United States, a number of eugenic measures were enacted early in this century, but it was in Nazi Germany that eugenics flourished under the name of racial hygiene (Rassenhygiene). In the guise of furthering the health of the German people, German scientists and physicians initially designed programs of sterilization. Next came euthanasia and finally mass extermination of “lives not worth living.” Remembering this history, many German women oppose the new technical developments in prenatal diagnosis because they see them as yet another way to specify what kinds of people are and are not fit to inhabit the world. This paper tries to place the new technologies in the context of eugenics and to point out some of the ways in which the new, supposedly liberating, choices in fact limit women's control over our lives.
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Currell, Sue. "Dirty History and America's White Trash: American Eugenics and the Problem of Purity." Excursions Journal 4, no. 2 (January 24, 2020): 26–36. http://dx.doi.org/10.20919/exs.4.2013.178.
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Sue Currell’s paper discussed the idea of purity on several levels of discourse: firstly, as a historical trope by which both “welfare” and eugenics were promoted as progress, seen in the metaphorical ideas of welfare as “social house cleaning” or the pure and thereby efficient body during the 1930s. Secondly, how “pure” records such as well-intentioned documentary photographs aiming to uplift the rural poor were “infected” with the “fictions” of eugenic discourse around gene impurity. Finally, how researching the history of eugenics raises further trouble by hanging out the “dirty laundry” of the process of history making itself, in raising the problematic of historical knowledge and pure truths/transparent meanings, arguing that the methodological issues raised by researching eugenics highlight mostly an “impure”, tainted, or incomplete historical record that needs acknowledgment.
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Silva, Renata Luchini Paes da, and Joseval Martins Viana. "bioethical aspects of the new eugenics." Saúde Ética & Justiça 24, no. 2 (December 6, 2019): 50–56. http://dx.doi.org/10.11606/issn.2317-2770.v24i2p50-56.
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With the advances in biotechnology and in the Human Genome Mapping Project, the ability to manipulate the DNA and perform gene therapy has increased and raised some concerns. The new eugenic theory is one of them. The concept of eugenics first appeared in the late nineteenth century1, as a theory of the improvement of the human race. It nearly disappeared after World War II2 but is now returning with new theories and ethical debates. The purpose of this study is to present some considerations regarding contemporary and widespread technological advances in assisted reproduction. We bring attention to the relations between assisted reproduction and a possible new eugenic policy, stressing the relevance of the matter and discussing some of the implied ethical issues. We do not intend to conduct a comprehensive study on the subject, but to provide some considerations that may contribute to further debate. A literature review was conducted focused on the ethical, bioethical and legal aspects of eugenics. In addition, some media coverage on the current use of the above-mentioned technologies was also consulted.
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Reggiani, Andrés H. "Depopulation, Fascism, and Eugenics in 1930s Argentina." Hispanic American Historical Review 90, no. 2 (May 1, 2010): 283–318. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00182168-2009-135.
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Abstract The article explores the reception of eugenics in Argentina in the 1930s. It aims, first, to place eugenics as a topic of expert and public concern against the background of the “demographic fears” associated with the decline of the birthrate among the white population and the closing of European immigration that followed the world depression. Second, it underscores the role played by Italian and German cultural and scientific transnational networks in the reception and dissemination of medical ideas of race improvement. Based upon previously overlooked sources of the Prussian state archives, the essay seeks to revise conventional “neo-Lamarckian” explanations about Latin America’s (and Argentina’s) alleged immunity to negative eugenics. By examining the activities of the Asociación de Biotipología, the debates of the Second Pan-American Conference on Eugenics, and the academic exchanges fostered by the Deutsche-Iberoamerikanische Ärzteakademie, the article argues that Argentine medical practitioners were much more receptive to eugenic sterilization than previously claimed. As they made great efforts to separate it from other “unscientific” forms of racism, they lent credibility to practices which, as recent research has shown, many of them had adopted on allegedly therapeutic grounds.
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Currell, Susan. "Breeding Better Babies in the Eugenic Garden City: ‘Municipal Darwinism’ and the (Anti)Cosmopolitan Utopia in the early Twentieth Century." Modernist Cultures 5, no. 2 (October 2010): 267–90. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/mod.2010.0106.
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Showing how ‘modernist cosmopolitanism’ coexisted with an anti-cosmopolitan municipal control this essay looks at the way utopian ideals about breeding better humans entered into new town and city planning in the early twentieth century. An experiment in eugenic garden city planning which took place in Strasbourg, France, in the 1920s provided a model for modern planning that was keenly observed by the international eugenics movement as well as city planners. The comparative approach taken in this essay shows that while core beliefs about degeneration and the importance of eugenics to improve the national ‘body’ were often transnational and cosmopolitan, attempts to implement eugenic beliefs on a practical level were shaped by national and regional circumstances that were on many levels anti-cosmopolitan. As a way of assuaging the tensions between the local and the global, as well as the traditional with the modern, this unique and now forgotten experiment in eugenic city planning aimed to show that both preservation and progress could succeed at the same time.
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Bardziński, Filip. "The Concept of the 'New Soviet Man' As a Eugenic Project: Eugenics in Soviet Russia after World War II." ETHICS IN PROGRESS 4, no. 1 (February 1, 2013): 57–81. http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/eip.2013.1.5.
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This article penetrates the idealistic, Marxist concept of the 'new Soviet man', linking it with the notion of eugenics. Departing from a reconstruction of the history and specificity of the eugenic movement in Russia since the late 19th century until the installation of Joseph Stalin as the only ruler of the Soviet Union, Lysenkoism paradigm of Soviet natural sciences is being evoked as a theoretical frame for Soviet-specific eugenic programme. Through referring to a number of chosen – both theoretical (classic Marxist works) and practical (chosen aspects of Soviet science and internal politics) – issues and cases, the concept of the 'new Soviet man' is being confronted with an original reading of eugenics, understood in neo-Lamarckian terms of direct shaping human beings through environmental conditions (comprehending the GULag system of labour camps, pseudo-medical experiments and other) and intergenerational transfer (through inheritance) of acquired traits.