Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: eugenics

  • Promoting early 20th century American eugenics under the guise of science

    Joseph LockhartSaty Satya-MurtiCalifornia, United States Few adherents of pseudoscientific beliefs have wreaked as much societal and human damage as did the eugenicists during the first half of the 20th century. In America, these beliefs led to large-scale sterilization, immigration controls with flimsy rationales,1 and support of racist education and funding.2 Worldwide, they set the stage…

  • Eugenics in Chicago, 1915: Harry Haiselden, M.D., and The Black Stork

    Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden In the first decades of the twentieth century, the idea of eugenics took root in Northern Europe, Scandinavia, Great Britain, and the US. Anthropologists, geneticists, physicians, and politicians informed the public about eugenics and influenced policy and law. Eugenics, from the Greek eu-, good, and genos, birth, is an attempt to “improve”…

  • Howard A. Knox and intelligence testing on Ellis Island

    Carine TabakKansas City, Kansas, United States Between 1892 to 1924, twelve million men, women, and children entered the United States through the Ellis Island Immigration Center, making it the largest health screening facility in the US at the time.1,2 At first, immigrants were inspected to identify medical conditions, but changing economic and political forces shifted…

  • Winnie Ille Pu and Dr. Alexander Lenard

    Avi OhryTel Aviv, Israel Sandor (Alexander) Lenard1 was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1910 and died in Dona Irma, Santa Catarina, Brazil in 1972. He was a Jewish poet, author, physician, painter, musician, translator, language teacher, philosopher, and polyglot. A short outline of Lenard’s life events could be summarized as follows: Hungary, medical studies in…

  • Alexis Carrel: The sunshine and the shadow

    Philip R. LiebsonChicago, Illinois, United States Dr. Alexis Carrel (1873-1944) was as complex as his glass perfusion pump apparatus. A brilliant research surgeon, he won the Nobel Prize in Medicine before his fortieth birthday for his work on vascular suture and the transplantation of blood vessels and organs, and later developed techniques that were predecessors…

  • Eugenics: Historic and contemporary

    JMS PearceHull, England, United Kingdom Moral judgments, changing ethical criteria, and the broader concepts of good and evil are always controversial, and often dangerous. Prominent amongst such judgments are those relating to population control and the wider, ill-defined field of eugenics. Hidden, and often ignored or denied in these conversations, is the underlying conflict between…

  • Henrik Ibsen’s diagnosis of the conscience

    Sally MetzlerChicago, Illinois, United States Dr. Thomas Stockmann, the protagonist in Henrik Ibsen’s 1879 play, An Enemy of the People, thought he had finally landed the ideal position as physician for an idyllic Norwegian resort town. He was well-paid and well-connected; his brother was even the mayor. Life and livelihood centered on the public baths…

  • Diagnosing defectives: Disability, gender and eugenics in the United States, 1910–1924

    Sara VogtChicago, Illinois, United States Introduction The science of eugenics developed in countries around the world such as Great Britain, the United States, and Germany during the second half of the nineteenth century as a means of fighting emergent public health and social problems like tuberculosis, prostitution, and the so-called degeneration of the race. The…

  • Patients and society: The big divide

    J.M.S. PearceUnited Kingdom But society has now fairly got the better of individuality; and the danger which threatens human nature, is not the excess, but the deficiency, of personal impulses and preferences.John Stuart Mill (1806–1873), On Liberty, chapter 3, 1859 John Snow’s classical publication, On the Mode of Communication of Cholera, 1849, exemplified the undoubted benefits…