Eugenics. Medical search. Frequent questions

Sir Francis Galton, founder of the science of eugenics. (history.com)
The ancient Greek philosopher Plato may have been the first person to promote the idea, although the term "eugenics" didn't come on the scene until British scholar Sir Francis Galton coined it in 1883 in his book, Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development . (history.com)
Recently uncovered documents show that Edwards served on the organization's Council -its leadership body-as a trustee on three separate occasions: from 1968 to 1970, 1971 to 1973 and once again from 1995 to 1997 after the group euphemistically renamed itself ' The Galton Institute ' for the founder of the eugenics movement, Francis Galton . (scientificamerican.com)
In 1883, Sir Francis Galton, a nineteenth-century English social scientist, statistician, and psychologist, coined the term "eugenics" from the Greek word eugenes , meaning well-born. (dp.la)
UCL was an epicenter of the early 20th-century eugenics movement-a precursor to Nazi "racial hygiene" programs-due to its ties to Francis Galton, the father of eugenics, and his intellectual descendants and fellow eugenicists Karl Pearson and Ronald Fisher. (nautil.us)
Karl Pearson (left) referred to eugenics as "the directed and self-conscious evolution of the human race," which he said Francis Galton (right) had understood "with the enthusiasm of a prophet. (nautil.us)
The exact definition of eugenics has been a matter of debate since the term was coined by Francis Galton in 1883. (bushywood.com)
The English scientist Francis Galton had coined the term eugenics , meaning "of good birth," in 1883. (ushmm.org)
While the notion of 'selective breeding' to secure offspring with 'desirable' traits dates at least since the publication of Plato's Republic in about 378 bce and has reappeared periodically since that time in one guise or another, the term 'eugenics' was coined in 1883 by British explorer and natural scientist Francis Galton. (transcend.org)
Indeed, Francis Galton, the founder of the concepts of statistical correlation, also coined the phrase eugenics and advocated for avoiding racial admixture ( Markel 2018 ). (nih.gov)

The title page of John Hendren Bell's The Biological Relationship of Eugenics to the Development of the Human Race (1930), a pamphlet endorsing the forced sterilization of people deemed incompetent, bears the official seal of the Commonwealth of Virginia. (encyclopediavirginia.org)

While eugenic principles have been practiced as early as ancient Greece, the contemporary history of eugenics began in the late 19th century, when a popular eugenics movement emerged in the United Kingdom, and then spread to many countries, including the United States, Canada, Australia, and most European countries. (wikipedia.org)
The eugenics movement became associated with Nazi Germany and the Holocaust when the defense of many of the defendants at the Nuremberg trials of 1945 to 1946 attempted to justify their human-rights abuses by claiming there was little difference between the Nazi eugenics programs and the U.S. eugenics programs. (wikipedia.org)
The eugenics movement attracted social activists such as Moses Harman (1830-1910), who pursued his goal through The Eugenic Magazine . (nih.gov)
The eugenics movement, which had begun in England and was rapidly spreading in the United States, insisted that human progress depended on promoting reproduction by the best people in the best combinations, and preventing the unworthy from having children. (harvardmagazine.com)
He also lent his considerable prestige to the campaign to build a global eugenics movement. (harvardmagazine.com)
Its mission was to collect substantial information on the ancestry of the American population, to produce propaganda that was made to fuel the eugenics movement, and to promote the idea of race-betterment. (wikipedia.org)
The eugenics movement was popular and viewed as progressive in the early-twentieth-century United States. (wikipedia.org)
California was considered an epicenter of the American eugenics movement. (bibliotecapleyades.net)
Much of the spiritual guidance and political agitation for the American eugenics movement came from California's quasi-autonomous eugenic societies, such as Pasadena's Human Betterment Foundation and the California branch of the American Eugenics Society, which coordinated much of their activity with the Eugenics Research Society in Long Island. (bibliotecapleyades.net)
The Bush family, the Harriman family - the Wall Street business partners of Bush in financing Hitler - and the Rockefeller family are the elite of the American eugenics movement. (pakalertpress.com)
The eugenics philosophy not only fed her work within the Planned Parenthood movement but also her lesser known advocacy of euthanasia. (all.org)
She aligned the fight to make birth control more widely available with the eugenics movement , which Planned Parenthood has maintained conveyed her support for the broader " issues of health and fitness " objectives of the movement. (talkingpointsmemo.com)
Margaret Sanger, a strong advocate for women's reproductive rights, was also a supporter of the eugenics movement. (dp.la)
This primary source set explores the eugenics movement to help readers analyze how racism, sexism, classism, and ableism (discrimination against people with disabilities) influenced eugenics laws and programs in the United States. (dp.la)
https://production.dp.la/primary-source-sets/eugenics-movement-in-the-united-states. (dp.la)
But there was also a dark side to the eugenics movement that encouraged the state to pass laws to stop 'unfit' people from procreating. (ranker.com)
Eugenics was a scientific movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. (ushmm.org)
He drew a line between the eugenics movement of the early 20th century - which embraced the idea that black people, other minorities, and individuals with disabilities were inferior and that steps should be taken to reduce their populations - and the fight to increase women's access to birth control and abortion. (buzzfeednews.com)
Enshrining a constitutional right to an abortion based solely on the race, sex, or disability of an unborn child, as Planned Parenthood advocates, would constitutionalize the views of the 20th-century eugenics movement," Thomas wrote. (buzzfeednews.com)
He quoted Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, who wrote in the early 20th century about how the eugenics movement could embrace birth control to serve its purposes and shape the population. (buzzfeednews.com)
It was, therefore, disturbing to learn that Palin had been vetted by a secretive group with connections to the eugenics movement. (ipbhost.com)
For many people on the left, it is hard to swallow the idea that the CNP has ties to the eugenics movement. (ipbhost.com)
The CNP connects to the eugenics movement through deceased Senator Jesse Helms. (ipbhost.com)
High schoolers examine the Eugenics movement in America. (lessonplanet.com)
In its twentieth century forms, the eugenics movement comprised many diverse and often contrary directions, from racially motivated state oppression to efforts to empower families. (medscape.com)
Nevertheless, two features of the eugenics movement that made it so destructive were ill-founded (often crackpot) genetic science and state control and coercion of individual reproductive choice. (medscape.com)
Some who have studied the movement ask whether it is not this coercive dimension, rather than a concern with genetic improvement, that was the core problem with eugenics. (medscape.com)
An interview with Rana A. Hogarth, PhD on her NLM History Talk and her research on legacies of slavery in the early eugenics movement. (nih.gov)
This paper proposes an examination of the origins and postulates of Eugenics, which is conceived as a social, political and scientific movement that intended to improve the biological heritage in order to solve mankind's mental degeneration and decay. (bvsalud.org)
The environmental health sciences (EHS) community has joined this movement by pledging to enhance diversity within its ranks ( McCarthy 2020 ), launching new initiatives on environmental health equity, and atoning for its own racist history and past relationship with the eugenics movement ( Brune 2020 ). (nih.gov)

They took two approaches: positive and negative eugenics. (dp.la)
Galton theorized two ways that eugenics could help society, which he called positive and negative eugenics. (ranker.com)

These organizations - which functioned as part of a closely-knit network - published racist eugenic newsletters and pseudoscientific journals, such as Eugenical News and Eugenics, and propagandized for the Nazis. (bibliotecapleyades.net)
The Nazis invoked eugenics to justify the extermination of people with disabilities, Jews, and other marginalized populations. (scientificamerican.com)
Depopulation, also known as eugenics, is quite another thing and was proposed under the Nazis during World War II. (pakalertpress.com)
Eugenics was popular in the United States long before Nazis like Dr. Josef Mengele used it to promote racial purity. (ranker.com)

He was a vice president of the First International Eugenics Congress, which met in London in 1912 to hear papers on "racial suicide" among Northern Europeans and similar topics. (harvardmagazine.com)
He notes that the attendees of the First International Eugenics Congress in London in 1912 included Alexander Graham Bell and Winston Churchill. (jstor.org)

The Eugenics Record Office ( ERO ), located in Cold Spring Harbor, New York , United States , was a research institute that gathered biological and social information about the American population, serving as a center for eugenics and human heredity research from 1910 to 1939. (wikipedia.org)

Finally, some fear that any stress on improving human health or abilities will foster intolerance toward the 'less-than-perfect' and lead to a new outbreak of the kind of eugenics thinking that so blighted the reputation of genetics in the first half of the twentieth century. (medscape.com)

The practice, also known as eugenics, originated early in the twentieth century. (jrank.org)

Eugenics in America took a dark turn in the early 20th century, led by California . (history.com)
Coined by Galton in the late 1800s to mean 'well-born,' eugenics became a dominant aspect of Western intellectual life and social policy during the first half of the 20th century. (scientificamerican.com)
At the beginning of the 20th century, eugenics was seen as cutting-edge science that could improve society. (ranker.com)

Harvard administrators, faculty members, and alumni were at the forefront of American eugenics-founding eugenics organizations, writing academic and popular eugenics articles, and lobbying government to enact eugenics laws. (harvardmagazine.com)

People who want to stop the breeding of those whom they regard as the physically and intellectually unfit have been uncomfortable with the term "eugenics," because of its history elsewhere in this century. (tampabay.com)
Eugenics was the racist pseudoscience determined to wipe away all human beings deemed "unfit," preserving only those who conformed to a Nordic stereotype. (hnn.us)
Negative eugenics sought to actively discourage "unfit" people from procreating. (ranker.com)
Proponents of eugenics argued that by keeping the "unfit" alive to reproduce and multiply, modern medicine and costly welfare programs interfered with natural selection. (ushmm.org)

In 1938, just a few years prior to Sanger's American Birth Control League (ABCL) changing its name to Planned Parenthood, a group of American Eugenics Society Members and members of Margaret Sanger's American Birth Control League (ABCL) formed the National Society for the Legalization of Euthanasia. (all.org)
Henry P. Fairchild, who was a past president of the American Eugenics Society and a vice-president of Planned Parenthood. (all.org)
You know, I know who [Planned Parenthood founder] Margaret Sanger is, and I know that she believes in eugenics, and that she was not particularly enamored with black people," Carson said. (talkingpointsmemo.com)

The leading student and promoter of eugenics in the United States for over a quarter century was Charles Davenport (1866-1944), director of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory's Eugenics Record Office from 1910 to 1940, part of the Station for Experimental Evolution. (nih.gov)
From Cold Spring Harbor, eugenics advocates agitated in the legislatures of America, as well as the nation's social service agencies and associations. (bibliotecapleyades.net)
An early advocate of eugenics, Harry H. Laughlin, Director of the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor, New York, supported compulsory state sterilization laws and significantly shaped negative eugenics legislative policy in the United States. (dp.la)

Charles Davenport, A.B. 1889, Ph.D. '92, a classmate of Prescott Hall, founded the Eugenics Record Office in 1910, and promoted ideas that led to the sterilization of Carrie Buck (next image). (harvardmagazine.com)
Eugenics and modern biology: critiques of eugenics, 1910-1945. (nih.gov)

While Plato's ideas may be considered a form of ancient eugenics, he received little credit from Galton. (history.com)
Eugenics, from the Greek for "well born," was the brainchild of Galton, a well-born Victorian gentleman scientist from a prominent English family. (nautil.us)

Eugenics, Race, and Margaret Sanger Revisited: Reproductive Freedom for All? (jstor.org)

Thomas bounced back and forth between discussing birth control and abortion in the context of eugenics, while acknowledging that they raise different issues. (buzzfeednews.com)
To support the position that eugenics supporters embraced abortion, Thomas largely cited writings from the 1930s and 1960s. (buzzfeednews.com)

Eugenics was popular in America during much of the first half of the twentieth century, yet it earned its negative association mainly from Adolf Hitler and his obsessive attempts to create an advanced Aryan race. (history.com)
The hour of eugenics : race, gender and nation in Latin America / Nancy Leys Stepan. (who.int)

American eugenics advocates believed with religious fervor that the same Mendelian concepts determining the color and size of peas, corn and cattle also governed the social and intellectual character of man. (bibliotecapleyades.net)
The result, eugenics advocates believed, was an overall biological "degeneration" of the population. (ushmm.org)

Though now associated with the abhorrent and discredited policies of the Nazi state, before World War II eugenics had a wide following among scientists, politicians, and writers around the world. (nih.gov)
Eugenics programs in states like California and North Carolina sterilized thousands of people and provided models for Nazi Germany's eugenics work. (dp.la)
It s comforting now to think of eugenics as an evil that sprang from the blackness of Nazi hearts. (bushywood.com)
Eugenics ideas were absorbed into the ideology and platform of the developing Nazi Party during the 1920s. (ushmm.org)

The foundation hosted national conferences on eugenics in 1914, 1915 and 1928. (history.com)
In 1914, a Model Eugenical Sterilization Law was published by Harry Laughlin at the Eugenics Records Office. (jrank.org)
In 1914, eugenicist Harry Laughlin, who was head of the Eugenics Record Office proposed a " eugenical sterilization law " that would stop the feebleminded from reproducing. (ranker.com)

Following Germany's defeat in World War I and during the political and economic crises of the Weimar Republic , ideas known as racial hygiene or eugenics began to inform population policy, public health education, and government-funded research. (ushmm.org)

Eugenicists like Harry Laughlin promoted new laws based on eugenics like Virginia's Racial Integrity Act of 1924 . (ranker.com)

Other sections touch on the "subjugation of race and class throughout time," the genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia, "the survival of the fittest," the "Aryan Elite," and "the Commercial Eugenics Civilization," which discusses "the perfectibility of life through a human-controlled elite race that will bring about a better world. (theweek.com)

Eugenics was the pseudoscience aimed at 'improving' the human race. (bibliotecapleyades.net)

As the concept of eugenics took hold, prominent citizens, scientists and socialists championed the cause and established the Eugenics Record Office. (history.com)
The Eugenics Record Office also maintained there was clear evidence that supposed negative family traits were caused by bad genes, not racism, economics or the social views of the time. (history.com)
The endeavors of the Eugenics Record Office were facilitated by the work of various committees. (wikipedia.org)

California eugenicists played an important, although little-known, role in the American eugenics movement's campaign for ethnic cleansing. (bibliotecapleyades.net)

HISTORY OF EUGENICS - In 1907, the eugenics Education Society was founded in Britain to campaign for sterilisation and marriage restrictions for the weak to prevent the degeneration of Britain's population. (bushywood.com)
A growing faction, linking eugenics to race, championed the long-skulled, fair "Nordics" as "eugenically advantageous" and discussed "race mixing" as a source of biological degeneration. (ushmm.org)

In recent years, the term has seen a revival in bioethical discussions on the usage of new technologies such as CRISPR and genetic screening, with heated debate around whether these technologies should be considered eugenics or not. (wikipedia.org)
Since the 1980s and 1990s, with new assisted reproductive technology procedures available, such as gestational surrogacy (available since 1985), preimplantation genetic diagnosis (available since 1989), and cytoplasmic transfer (first performed in 1996), concern has grown about the possible revival of a more potent form of eugenics after decades of promoting human rights. (wikipedia.org)
A criticism of eugenics policies is that, regardless of whether negative or positive policies are used, they are susceptible to abuse because the genetic selection criteria are determined by whichever group has political power at the time. (wikipedia.org)
Another criticism is that eugenics policies eventually lead to a loss of genetic diversity, thereby resulting in inbreeding depression due to a loss of genetic variation. (wikipedia.org)
Yet another criticism of contemporary eugenics policies is that they propose to permanently and artificially disrupt millions of years of human evolution, and that attempting to create genetic lines "clean" of "disorders" can have far-reaching ancillary downstream effects in the genetic ecology, including negative effects on immunity and on species resilience. (wikipedia.org)
Modern eugenics, more often called human genetic engineering, has come a long way-scientifically and ethically-and offers hope for treating many devastating genetic illnesses. (history.com)
The practice of eugenics aims to improve the genetic quality of a human population through selective breeding-encouraging reproduction for the "strongest" humans while discouraging reproduction for the "weakest" humans. (dp.la)
Eugenics is a set of beliefs and practices that aims at improving the genetic quality of a human population. (bushywood.com)

Furthermore, many criticize negative eugenics in particular as a violation of basic human rights, seen since 1968's Proclamation of Tehran, as including the right to reproduce. (wikipedia.org)
Historically, eugenics encouraged people of so-called healthy, "superior" stock to reproduce and discouraged reproduction of the physically or mentally challenged-or anyone who fell outside the social norm. (history.com)
Positive eugenics encouraged healthy people perceived to have above-average intelligence to reproduce. (dp.la)
Negative eugenics promised a solution to these social problems by ensuring that the feebleminded could not reproduce. (ranker.com)

In 1907, Governor J. Frank Hanly approved first state eugenics law making sterilization mandatory for certain individuals in state custody. (in.gov)

Edwin Black is the author of " IBM and the Holocaust " and " War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race ," from which the following article is drawn. (hnn.us)
No one on America's political stage today has more motivation to oppose eugenics than Sarah Palin. (ipbhost.com)

Supported by the argument that the eugenics office would collect information for human genetics research, Davenport convinced the Carnegie Institute to establish the ERO. (wikipedia.org)
Typescript of the UCL Lunch Hour Lecture "From Eugenics to Human Genetics", on 4 March 1954. (wellcomecollection.org)

The alliance of eugenics and progressive politics was evident, in the need to exert rational control in pursuit of the common good. (nih.gov)
During the early 20thcentury, eugenics was given the appearance of being serious scientific study because of its pursuit by both biologists and social scientists. (transcend.org)

Early supporters of eugenics believed people inherited mental illness, criminal tendencies and even poverty, and that these conditions could be bred out of the gene pool. (history.com)
Supporters of eugenics claimed that it offered biological solutions to social problems. (ushmm.org)

Eugenics made its first official appearance in American history through marriage laws. (history.com)
But the history of eugenics in Virginia led to a pair of terrible laws that allowed the state to sterilize people against their will and ban whites from marrying non-whites. (ranker.com)
In this interactive session, IU professor Richard Gunderman takes us on a journey through the history of eugenics in Indiana and society's misguided efforts to change human nature through science. (spiritandplace.org)
So long as humans suppose that human biology equals human destiny, the specter of eugenics will continue to lurk in the shadows of human history. (spiritandplace.org)
Located at the intersection of medicine, history, bioethics, and science, this event invites guests to learn more about the history of eugenics and then engage in small group conversations about the ethics of eugenics. (spiritandplace.org)
Elements of a counter-exhibition: Excavating and countering a Canadian history and legacy of eugenics. (nih.gov)

Negative eugenics, the predominant form in the US, discouraged reproduction and advocated sterilization for those perceived to have undesirable traits. (dp.la)
In negative eugenics programs, sterilization was often performed involuntarily on patients, sometimes without the patient's knowledge of the consequences. (dp.la)

These academicians espoused race theory and race science, and then faked and twisted data to serve eugenics' racist aims. (bibliotecapleyades.net)

Frank H. Hankins, who was a managing editor of Margaret Sanger's Birth Control Review as well as an American Eugenics Society member. (all.org)
The Chinese government's latest five-year plan proposal contains a birth policy with an emphasis on eugenics, a China scholar said this week. (catholicnewsagency.com)
Margaret Sanger's belief in eugenics stemmed from her interest in individual choice-an idea that brought birth control into the mainstream of American life. (jstor.org)

Both its founder, Charles Benedict Davenport , and its director, Harry H. Laughlin , were major contributors to the field of eugenics in the United States . (wikipedia.org)

In contemporary usage, the term eugenics is closely associated with scientific racism. (wikipedia.org)
They even use a term … which is effectively emphasizing the role of eugenics in population planning in China," she said. (catholicnewsagency.com)
The term "eugenics" was coined in 1883. (ushmm.org)

This interpretation will link contemporary pronatalist efforts labelled "hipster eugenics" with earlier efforts to champion a four-child family norm. (gulbenkian.pt)
From preventive eugenics to slippery eugenics: Population control and contemporary sterilisations targeted to indigenous peoples in Mexico. (nih.gov)

The American Eugenics Society, for instance, changed its name years ago to the Society for the Study of Social Biology. (tampabay.com)
Sanger was an enthusiastic proponent of eugenics and a member of the American Eugenics Society. (all.org)
Frank L. Babbott (Vice President of the Euthanasia Society), who was a founding member of the American Eugenics Society. (all.org)
1969-72) of the American Eugenics Society. (ipbhost.com)

Framed in this manner, eugenics has held an appeal to dictatorial and authoritarian regimes seeking to eradicate or discourage the growth of disfavored groups. (scientificamerican.com)

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century United States, eugenics programs received widespread public support. (dp.la)

Eugenics attracted considerable support from progressives, reformers, and educated elites as a way of using science to make a better world. (harvardmagazine.com)

One detail omitted from the obituaries published around the world was that Edwards was a member in good standing of the Eugenics Society in Britain for much of his career. (scientificamerican.com)

Reporters who cover the man who nominated Dr. Elders might ask him whether he believes eugenics is the way to go. (tampabay.com)

Early advocates of eugenics in the 19th century regarded it as a way of improving groups of people. (wikipedia.org)

Eugenics was born as a scientific curiosity in the Victorian age. (bibliotecapleyades.net)
But eugenics provided a "scientific" argument to ban interracial marriage. (ranker.com)
Linking voluntary parenthood with eugenics-a "scientific," respectable notion-was a way to bring it into the mainstream. (jstor.org)

German biologist August Weissmann's theory of "immutable germ plasm," published in 1892, fostered growing international support for eugenics, as did the rediscovery in 1900 of Austrian botanist Gregor Mendel's theory that the biological makeup of organisms was determined by certain "factors" that were later identified with genes. (ushmm.org)
Reform-minded proponents of eugenics worldwide offered biological solutions to social problems common to societies experiencing urbanization and industrialization. (ushmm.org)
The Biological Relationship of Eugenics to the Development of the Human Race , F 221 v.284, Special Collections, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Va. (encyclopediavirginia.org)

And as a social philosophy eugenics also received approbation and financial support from the wealthy and other elites-particularly in the U.S. It was followed by the likes of philanthropists John D. Rockefeller and Nobel Prize-winning scientists such as William Shockley and Alexis Carrel . (scientificamerican.com)
Statistical thinking and eugenicist thinking are, in fact, deeply intertwined, and many of the theoretical problems with methods like significance testing-first developed to identify racial differences-are remnants of their original purpose, to support eugenics. (nautil.us)

After similar outcries about eugenics, the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies renamed its annual Fisher Lecture, and the Society for the Study of Evolution did the same for its Fisher Prize. (nautil.us)

Eugenics is the practice or advocacy of improving the human species by selectively mating people with specific desirable hereditary traits. (history.com)

Diseases1

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Humanities5

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Francis Galton10

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Movement30

Positive and negative eugenics2

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International Eugenics Congress2

Heredity1

Kind of Eugenics1

Known as eugenics1

20th3

Popular eugenics1

Unfit4

Planned Parenthood3

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19102

Galton2

Margaret Sanger1

Abortion2

America2

Advocates believed2

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19143

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Harry Laughlin1

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19071

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Human genetics2

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Negative2

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American Eugenic4

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