Eugenics between Darwin’s Εra and the Holocaust
Published:
Dec 31, 2019
Keywords:
Eugenics Darwin’s era Holocaust race heredity Mendel’s laws forced sterilization euthanasia interracial marriage immigration laws biopolitics medical ethics
Abstract
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.
Article Details
- How to Cite
-
Chousou, D., Theodoridou, D., Boutlas, G., Batistatou, A., Yapijakis, C., & Syrrou, M. (2019). Eugenics between Darwin’s Εra and the Holocaust. Conatus - Journal of Philosophy, 4(2), 171–204. https://doi.org/10.12681/cjp.21061
- Section
- Articles
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial International License (CC BY-NC 4.0) that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g. post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (preferably in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work.
Downloads
Download data is not yet available.
References
Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller Roazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998.
Allen, E. Garland, “The Social and Economic Origins of Genetic Determinism: A Case History of the American Eugenics Movement, 1900-1940 and its Lessons for Today.” Genetica 99, nos. 2-3 (1997): 77-88.
Allen, E. Garland. “The Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor, 1910-1940: An Essay in Institutional History.” Osiris 2 (1986): 225-264.
Amundson, Ron. “Disability, Ideology, and Quality of Life: A Bias in Biomedical Ethics.” In Quality of Life and Human Difference Genetic Testing, Health Care, and Disability, edited by David Wasserman, Jerome Bickenbach, and Robert Wachbroit. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Baker, Graham J. “Christianity and Eugenics: The Place of Religion in the British Eugenics Education Society and the American Eugenics Society, c.1907-1940.” Social History of Medicine: Τhe Journal of the Society for the Social History of Medicine 27, no. 2 (2014): 281-302.
Bannes, J. Hitlers Kampf und Platons Staat; Eine Studie über den ideologischen Aufbau der nationalsozialistischen Freiheitsbewegung. Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 1933.
Barnett, Richard. “Keywords in the History of Medicine: Eugenics.” The Lancet 363, no. 9422 (2004): 1742.
Barondess, Jeremiah A. “Care of the Medical Ethos: Reflections on Social Darwinism, Racial Hygiene, and the Holocaust.” Annals of Internal Medicine 129 (1998): 891-898.
Bayor, Ronald H. The Columbia Documentary History of Race and Ethnicity in America. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.
Beauchamp, Tom, and James Childress. Principles of Biomedical Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Beaumont, Caitriona. “Moral Dilemmas and Women’s Rights: The Attitude of the Mothers’ Union and Catholic Women’s League to Divorce, Birth Control and Abortion in England, 1928–1939.” Women's History Review 16, no. 4 (2007): 463-485.
Brendan, Wolfe. “Racial Integrity Laws (1924–1930).” Encyclopedia Virginia. https://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/racial_integrity_laws_of_the_1920s.
Caulfield, Timothy, and Gerald Robertson. “Eugenic Policies in Alberta: From the Systematic to the Systemic?” Alberta Law Review 35, no. 1 (1996):59-79.
Cheah, Pheng, David Fraser, and Judith Grbich. Thinking Through the Body of the Law. New York: New York University Press, 1996.
Chesterton, Keith Gilbert. Eugenics and Other Evils. London, New York, Toronto and Melbourne: Cassell and Company, 1922.
Chung, Y. J. “Better Science and Better Race? Social Darwinism and Chinese Eugenics.” Isis 105, no. 4 (2014): 793-802.
Clément, Dominique. “Human Rights Milestones: Alberta’s Rights Revolution.” in The Search for Equality and Justice: Alberta’s Human Rights Story, edited by Dominique Clément, and Renée Vaugeois, 17-57. Edmonton: John Humphrey Centre for Peace and Human Rights, 2012.
Darwin, Charles. The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. Two volumes. New York: D. Appleton and Co, 1871.
Davenport, B. Charles. “Report of Committee on Eugenics.” Journal of Heredity 1, no. 2 (1910): 126-129.
Davenport, B. Charles. “Research in Eugenics.” Science 54, no. 1400 (1921): 391-397.
Denis, Alexander R., and Ronald L. Numbers. Biology and Ideology from Descartes to Dawkins. Chicago - London: The University of Chicago Press, 2010.
Dike, Samuel M. “State Laws Regulating Marriage of the Unfit.” Journal of the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology 4, no. 3 (2013): 423-425.
Drouard, Alain. “Concerning Eugenics in Scandinavia: An Evaluation of Recent Research and Publications.” Population: An English Selection 11 (1999): 261-270.
“Eugenic Sterilization in Indiana.” Indiana Journal Law 38, no. 2 (1963): 275-189.
Feinberg, Joel. “The Child’s Right to an Open Future.” In Who’s Child? Children’s Rights, Parental Authority and State Power, edited by William Aiken, and Hugh LaFollete, 124-153. Totowa, New Jersey: Littlefield, Adams and Co., 1980.
Fischer, Eugen. Die Rehobother bastards und das bastardierungsproblem beim menschen: Anthropologische und ethnographiesche studien am Rehobother bastardvolk in Deutsch-Südwest-Afrika, ausgeführt mit unterstützung der Kgl. Preuss. Jena: G. Fischer, 1913.
Forti, Simona. “The Biopolitics of Souls: Racism, Nazism, and Plato.” Political Theory 34, no. 1 (2006): 9-32.
Gabler, A. Platon und der Fűhrer. Berlin and Leipzig: W. de Gruyter, 1934.
Galton, Francis. Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into its Laws and Consequences. London: Macmillan and Co., 1869.
Galton, Francis. English Men of Science: Their Nature and Nurture. London: Macmillan and Co, 1874.
Galton, Francis. Natural Inheritance. London: Macmillan, 1889.
Galton, J. David. “Greek Theories on Eugenics.” Journal of Medical Ethics 24, no. 4 (1998): 263-267.
Gerdes, Christer, and Eskil Wadensjö. “Post-enlargement Migration and Adjustment in a Receiving Country: The Case of Sweden.” In Labor Migration, EU Enlargement, and the Great Recession, edited by Martin Kahanec, and Klaus F. Zimmermann, 123-138. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer, 2016.
Gillham, W. Nicholas. “Sir Francis Galton and the Birth of Eugenics.” Annual Review of Genetics 35 (2001): 83-101.
Goddard, H. Henry. The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble-mindedness. New York: Macmillan Co, 1912.
Goodheart, Lawrence B. “Rethinking Mental Retardation: Education and Eugenics in Connecticut, 1818–1917.” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 59, no. 1 (2004): 90-111.
Grue, Lars. “Eugenics and Euthanasia – Then and Now.” Scandinavian Journal of Disability Research 12, no. 1 (2010): 33-45.
Gutierrez, Cathy. “Unnatural Selection: Eugenics and the Spirit World.” Studies in Religion 47, no. 2 (2018): 263-279.
Habermas, Jürgen. The Future of Human Nature. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003.
Haldane, John Burdon Sanderson. The Causes of Evolution. London, New York, Toronto: Longmans, Green and Co., 1932.
Hansen, Randall, and Desmond King. “Eugenic Ideas, Political Interests, and Policy Variance. Immigration and Sterilization Policy in Britain and the U.S.” World Politics 53, no. 2 (2001): 237-263.
Harrington, Anne. Mind Fixers. New York, London: W. W. Norton & Company Independent Publishers, 2019.
Hayes, Patrick J. The Making of Modern Immigration: An Encyclopedia of People and Ideas, Vol. 1. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2012.
Holowchak, Mark A. “Jefferson’s Platonic Republicanism.” Polis 31, no. 2 (2014): 369-386.
Hyatt, Stephanie. “A Shared History of Shame: Sweden’s Four Decade Policy of Forced Sterilization and the Eugenics Movement in the United States.” Indiana International & Comparative Law Review 11, no. 2 (1998): 475-503.
Jackson, John P. Jr., and Nadine M. Weidman. “Race, Racism and Science: Social Impact and Interaction.” History: Reviews of New Books 34, no. 4 (2006): 133.
Johnson, Kevin R. Mixed Race America and the Law: A Reader. New York: New York University Press, 2003.
Jones, Ross L. “Eugenics in Australia: The Secret of Melbourne’s Elite.” The Conversation, 2011. https://theconversation.com/eugenics-in-australia-the-secret-of-melbournes-elite-3350.
Joseph, Jay, and Norbert A. Wetzel. “Ernst Rudin: Hitler’s Racial Hygiene Mastermind.” Journal of the History of Biology 46, no. 1 (2013): 1-30.
Justia US Supreme Court. Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200 (1927). Accessed July 25, 2019. https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/274/200/.
Kevles, J. Daniel. In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.
Kerber, Linda K. “The Meanings of Citizenship.” The Journal of American History 84, no. 3 (1997): 833-854.
Kolman, M. Jacob, and Susan M. Miller. “Six Values Never to Silence: Jewish Perspectives on Nazi Medical Professionalism.” Rambam Maimonides Medical Journal 9, no. 1 (2018): e0007.
Kühl, Stefan. “The Cooperation of German Racial Hygienists and American Eugenicists before and after 1933.” In The Holocaust and History. The Known, the Unknown, the Disputed and the Reexamined, edited by Michael Berenbaum, and Abraham J. Peck, 134-151. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1998.
Landman, Jacob Henry. Human Sterilization: The History of the Sexual Sterilization Movement. New York: Macmillan, 1932.
Landman, Jacob Henry. “The Human Sterilization Movement.” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 24, no. 2, (1933): 400-408.
LeMay, Michael C., and Elliott Robert Barkan. U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Laws and Issues: A Documentary History. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1999.
Lemieux, Nina N. Australian Eugenics from 1900 to 1061. PhD Diss., The University of Texas at Austin, 2017.
Lennerhed, Lena. “Sterilisation on Eugenic Grounds in Europe in the 1930s: News in 1997 but Why?” Reproductive Health Matters 5, no. 10 (1997): 156-161.
Levin, Philippa. Eugenics: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.
Lifton, Robert Jay. The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide. New York: Base Books, 2000.
Trindade, Lima Nisia. “Public Health and Social Ideas in Modern Brazil.” American Journal of Public Health 97, no. 7 (2007): 1168-1177.
Lombardo, P. A. “A Child’s Right to Be Well Born: Venereal Disease and the Eugenic Marriage Laws, 1913-1935.” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 60, no. 2 (2017): 211-232.
Lovett, Laura L. “Mark A. Largent. Breeding Contempt: The History of Coerced Sterilization in the United States. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2008.” The American Historical Review 114, no. 3 (2009): 776-777.
Lubinsky, S. Mark. “Scientific Aspects of Early Eugenics.” Journal of Genetic Counseling 2, no. 2 (1993): 77-92.
Mazumdar, M. H. Pauline. “Reform Eugenics and the Decline of Mendelism.” Trends in Genetics 18, no. 1 (2002): 48-52.
McCoy, R. David. “Jefferson and Madison on Malthus: Population Growth in Jeffersonian Political Economy.” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 88, no. 3 (1980): 259-276.
McDougall, Allan K., Lisa Philips, and Daniel L. Boxberger. Before and After the State: Politics, Poetics, and People(s) in the Pacific Northwest. Vancouver, Toronto: UBC Press, 2018.
Mondt, Laura. “An Act to Prevent Procreation of Confirmed Criminals: The Origins of Sterilization in Indiana.” Historia 20 (2011): 56-70.
Morrison, Wayne. Criminology, Civilisation and the New World Order. London: Routledge, 2006.
Muller-Hill, B. Murderous Science: Elimination by Scientific Selection of Jews, Gypsies, and Others, Germany 1933-1945. Translated by George R. Fraser. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.
Pearson, Karl. The Life, Letters, and Labours of Francis Galton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1930.
Proctor, Robert N. Racial Hygiene: Medicine under the Nazis. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1988.
Protopapadakis, Evangelos D. From Dawn till Dusk: Bioethical Insights into the Beginning and the End of Life. Berlin: Logos Verlag Berlin GmbH, 2019.
Reilly, Philip R. “Eugenics and Involuntary Sterilization: 1907–2015.” The Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics 16 (2015): 351-368.
Reilly, Philip R. “The Surgical Solution: A History of Involuntary Sterilization in the United States.” The American Historical Review 97, no. 3 (1992): 944-945.
Rose, Nikolas. The Psychological Complex. Psychology, Politics and Society in England 1869-1939. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985.
Rudberg, Pontus. The Swedish Jews and the Holocaust. New York: Routledge, 2017.
Sasaki, T. “Plato and Politeia in Twentieth-Century Politics.” Études Platoniciennes 9 (2012): 147-160.
Seidelman, William Ε. “Lessons from Eugenic History.” Nature 337, no. 6205 (1989): 300.
Stern, Alexandra Minna. “Eugenics, Sterilization, and Historical Memory in the United States.” História, Ciências, Saúde-Manguinhos 23, no. 1 (2016): 195-212.
Strous, R. D. “Hitler’s Psychiatrists: Healers and Researchers Turned Executioners and its Relevance Today.” Harvard Review of Psychiatry 14, no. 1 (2006): 30-37.
Tomlins, Christopher. Freedom Bound: Law, Labor, and Civic Identity in Colonizing English America, 1580–1865. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Vecoli, Rudolph J. “The Significance of Immigration in the Formation of an American Identity.” The History Teacher 30, no. 1 (1966): 9-27.
Vizcarrondo, F. E. “Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide: The Physician’s Role.” The Linacre Quarterly 80, no. 2 (2013): 99-102.
Wallace, Victor H. “The Eugenics Society of Victoria (1936-1961).” The Eugenics Review 53, no. 4 (1962): 215-218.
Weindling, Paul. Health, Race and German Politics between National Unification and Nazism, 1870–1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Weller, Carl V. “The Inheritance of Retinoblastoma and Its Relationship to Practical Eugenics.” Cancer Research 1, no. 7 (1941): 517-535.
Wikipedia. “The Serpent’s Egg (film).” Accessed November 5, 2019. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Serpent%27s_Egg_(film)#cite_note-1.
Wilson, Philip K. “Harry Laughlin’s Eugenic Crusade to Control the ‘Socially Inadequate’ in Progressive Era America.” Patterns of Prejudice 36, no. 1 (2002): 49-67.
Yapijakis, Christos. “Ancestral Concepts of Human Genetics and Molecular Medicine in Epicurean Philosophy.” In History of Human Genetics, edited by Heike L. Petermann, Peter S. Harper, and Suzanne Doetz, 41-57. Dordrecht: Springer Publications, 2017.
Yapijakis, Christos. “Genetics and Ancient Greek Philosophers: From Myth to Science.” In Hybrid and Extraordinary Beings. Deviations from ‘Normality’ in Ancient Greek Mythology and Modern Medicine, edited by Panayiotis N. Soukakos, Ariadne Gartziou-Tatti A, and Minas Paschopoulos, 269-280. Athens Greece: Konstantaras Medical Press, 2017.
