EUGENICS.

Eugenics refers to the study and cultivation of conditions that may improve the physical and moral qualities of future generations. Derived from the Greek word eugenes, meaning "good in stock" or "hereditarily endowed with noble qualities," eugenics is understood historically to be a reaction to perceptions of industrial society being in states of decline and decay.

ORIGINS

Sir Francis Galton, cousin of the British naturalist Charles Darwin, coined the term eugenics in 1883 after reflecting upon Darwin's seminal work On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (1859). Here, Darwin advanced his theory of evolution by describing natural selection, the process in nature by which only the organisms best adapted to their environment tend to survive and transmit their genetic characteristics in increasing numbers to succeeding generations, while those less adapted tend to be eliminated. On the Origin of Species prompted Galton to consider the idea of human civilization potentially thwarting, instead of being changed by, mechanisms of natural selection. In his book Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development (1883), Galton reasoned that because many societies sought to protect the underprivileged and weak through charitable and other social interventions, those societies stood at odds with the natural selection responsible for eliminating individuals deemed to be "less fit." As a natural application of knowledge about breeding to the human life, Galton concluded, the science of eugenics was a means to changing these social policies and preventing what Galton described as "reversion towards mediocrity." Galton highlighted dysgenic tendencies in British society (behavior that caused degeneration instead of improvement in offspring produced), such as the late marriages of eminent people and the paucity of their children, and advocated the encouragement of eugenic marriages by supplying incentives for the "most fit" to have children.

Eugenics differed from social Darwinism in that while both concepts claimed that intelligence was hereditary, eugenics actively promoted policies to move the status quo toward a more "eugenic" state. Social Darwinists argued that nature would naturally "check" the problem of the status quo if no welfare policies were enacted. Poor and unhealthy individuals, they reasoned, might reproduce more to yield a potentially greater population of poor and unhealthy individuals, but nature would intervene to "select" this group to encounter higher mortality rates.

Contributing to Galton's influence on European eugenics movements after the turn of the century—and no less to the work of others who were seeking a solid theory of inheritance to apply to eugenics—was the rediscovery in 1900 of Gregor Mendel's midcentury research on the mechanisms of heredity. Mendel's laws demonstrated that specific inherited characteristics are determined not by the environment but rather by the combination of a pair of hereditary units, what are now understood to be genes, from each of the parental reproductive cells, or gametes.

EUGENICS POLICIES, INITIATIVES,
AND OUTCOMES

Eugenic policies have historically been divided into two categories, positive and negative. Examples of "positive eugenics" policies are those advocated by Galton and others who sought to increase reproduction of individuals seen to have advantageous hereditary traits. "Negative eugenics" refers to the discouragement of reproduction by those with hereditary traits that are perceived as poor. During the course of the twentieth century, European eugenics movements advocated a variety of positive and negative eugenics policies that found their way into national life with varying degrees of success.

Formed in the United Kingdom in 1907, the Eugenics Education Society, later the British Eugenics Society, promoted policies to improve levels of industrial and personal efficiency among members of the working class. Legislative efforts of the society fell short, but its promotion of sterilization for mental defectives and individuals with physical disabilities became part of a larger dialogue among British social Darwinist organizations about national "social hygiene." These organizations included the National Council for Mental Hygiene, the Central Association for Mental Welfare, the People's League of Health, and the National Institute for Industrial Psychology.

Established in 1912, the French Eugenics Society was a response to the perception that French society was in a state of decline, due in part to fears of a shrinking population. To varying degrees, scientists and policy makers affiliated with the society adopted policies of birth control, premarital examinations, sterilization, and immigration control as ways to affect not only the quality of the population but also its quantity.

Following its establishment in 1922, Sweden's National Institute for Race Biology sponsored research in social engineering that ultimately led to the forced sterilization of an estimated sixty thousand "unfit" men and women between 1936 and 1976. The governments of Norway, Finland, Denmark, Estonia, Switzerland, and Iceland instituted comparable programs as part of large-scale social welfare efforts. In each of these countries, policy leaders held that economic prosperity and social progress depended in part upon preventing the reproduction of individuals who were poor, uneducated, or deemed to be mentally or physically weak or disabled. Although each these programs reached far fewer individuals than did the Swedish case, many remained in effect toward the third quarter of the twentieth century. The Swiss programs to control the country's Gypsy population ended in 1972. Finland outlawed forced sterilization two years earlier; its own program of sterilization reached nearly fifteen hundred individuals between 1930 and 1955.

THE CASE OF NAZI GERMANY

The most infamous case of eugenics in twentieth-century Europe was Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler. Radicalizing what had been a relatively moderate national eugenics movement, Hitler's Third Reich transformed eugenics into a pseudoscientific means to achieve a "pure" German race. "Racial hygiene" programs included awards to "Aryan" women who had large numbers of children and impregnation of "racially pure" single women by members of the Schutzstaffel Protection Squad (SS), which formed the basis of the Nazi police state and was the major instrument of racial terror in the concentration camps and occupied Europe. Nazi eugenics programs also involved forced sterilization of hundreds of thousands of people who were viewed as mentally and physically "unfit," compulsory "euthanasia" programs that killed tens of thousands of institutionalized individuals with disabilities, and the systematic killing during the Holocaust of millions of "undesirable" Europeans, including Jews, Gypsies, and homosexuals. Such programs existed alongside extensive experimentation on live human beings to test Nazi genetic theories, ranging from simple measurement of physical characteristics to horrific experiments carried out in concentration camps.

DISCREDITING AND RECONFIGURATION AFTER 1945

Following the Holocaust and the Nuremberg Trials against former Nazi leaders, which helped to reveal fully the genocidal policies of the Nazi regime, politicians and members of the scientific community almost universally rejected eugenics programs. The cases of Sweden and others, including the forced sterilization of Romani women in Slovakia during the final years of the twentieth century, may be considered exceptions to this view. However, they should not overshadow the broader postwar reaction to the abuses of the Nazi regime, which involved the development of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations in 1948, the subsequent statements on race and racial prejudice by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and medical ethics policies that promoted the involvement of informed and concerned medical and scientific professionals in their respective disciplines.

SCHOLARLY INTERPRETATIONS
AND DEBATES

Since the late twentieth century, interpretations of eugenics have revealed several new ideas and debates. While historians continue to credit Galton for coining the term eugenics and for helping to spread its influence across Europe, they have paid increasing attention to the fact that eugenics ideas and movements outside Britain, particularly in France, developed through their own indigenous circumstances and leadership, both simultaneously with and independently from Galton's ideas and the British eugenics movement. However, such nationally focused studies of eugenics history have not slowed efforts to reveal the interplay of eugenics ideas and programs across borders, particularly between the United States, which had its own robust eugenics movement, and Germany. Scholars have shown that when Nazi administrators appeared at Nuremberg, they justified the mass sterilizations by citing the United States as their inspiration. Historical interpretations have also revealed the significant degrees to which medical professionals in Germany and elsewhere not only promoted and facilitated negative eugenics programs but also profited professionally and financially from them.

Advances in science have also helped to shape new debates related to eugenics. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, eugenics was widely accepted in European scientific circles as a logical way to improve the physical and moral qualities of future generations. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, and in the wake of the abuses of the past, European governments, including the European Commission, and members of the European scientific community, including the European Society of Human Genetics and the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology, approached discussions of new genetic technologies with reference to the past, the acknowledgement of ethical issues such as patient confidentiality and reproductive autonomy versus professional duty, and the recognition of the economic impact of new technologies, such as the commercialization and profitability of gene therapy, genetic testing and screening, and genetic counseling.

See alsoNazism; Public Health; Racism; Science.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

Darwin, Charles. On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. London, 1859.

Galton, Francis. Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development. London, 1883.

Mendel, Gregor. Experiments in Plant Hybridisation. Translated by the Royal Horticultural Society of London. Cambridge, Mass., 1965.

Secondary Sources

Broberg, Gunnar, and Nils Roll-Hansen, eds. Eugenics and the Welfare State: Sterilization Policy in Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Finland. East Lansing, Mich., 1996.

Jones, Greta. Social Hygiene in Twentieth-Century Britain. London, 1986.

Kühl, Stefan. The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism. New York, 1994.

Proctor, Robert. Racial Hygiene: Medicine under the Nazis. Cambridge, Mass., 1988.

Schneider, William H. Quality and Quantity: The Quest for Biological Regeneration in Twentieth-Century France. Cambridge, U.K., 2002.

Weindling, Paul. Health, Race, and German Politics between National Unification and Nazism, 1870–1945. Cambridge, U.K., 1989.

Jeffrey S. Reznick