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The rhetoric of Eugenics: expert authority and the Mental Deficiency Bill

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2009

Edward J. Larson
Edward J. Larson
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of Georgia, Le Conte Hall, Athens, Georgia30602.
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Extract

‘We greatly want a brief word to express the science of improving stock … especially in the case of man’, the influential English scientist Francis Galton wrote in 1883. ‘The word eugenics sufficiently expresses the idea.’ During the ensuing half century, Gallon's new word and the underlying theories that he had already begun developing from the evolutionary concepts advanced by his cousin, Charles Darwin, spread throughout the Western world. With Galton's blessing these theories spawned a political movement advocating the enactment of statutes designed to encourage the propagation of eugenically fit human beings and discourage the propagation of eugenically unfit ones. Yet, while such laws were commonly adopted throughout North America and Northern Europe, the British homeland of Galton and Darwin proved reluctant to act by statutory fiat in the field of eugenics.

Type
Research Article
Information
The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 24 , Issue 1 , March 1991 , pp. 45 - 60
Copyright
Copyright © British Society for the History of Science 1991

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References

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29 38 Parl. Deb., H. C. (5th ser.) 1444–47, (1912).

30 38 Parl. Deb., H. C. (5th ser.) 1454, 1465, and 1504 (1912). Charles Roberts also used the word ‘eugenics’ during parliamentary debate in a guarded statement that did not commit him to support or to oppose final passage of the bill, but he used the term in a disparaging way by saying, ‘I would ask people before they make up their minds on the latest novelty of the eugenics theory to be a little cautious.’ 38 Parl. Deb., H. C. (5th ser.) 1512, (1912).

31 38 Parl. Deb., H. C. (5th ser.) 1470–74 (1912). While Wedgwood's remarks were aimed specifically at eugenic legislation, they reflected wider concerns within the radical wing of Liberalism that, allowing governmental decisions to be made by experts, undermined representative government, popular control and individual liberty. Searle, , op. cit. (4), pp. 101–5.Google Scholar

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35 41 Parl. Deb., H. C. (5th ser.) 740 and 749 (1912). See also ‘The Mental Deficiency Bill’, Times, 20 07 1912, p. 8Google Scholar; and ‘Science and liberty’, Manchester Guardian, 20 06 1912, p. 9.Google Scholar

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49 53 Parl. Deb., H. C. (5th ser.) 228–29 (1913).

50 53 Parl. Deb., H. C. (5th ser.) 226, 244, and 251; and 56 Parl. Deb., H. C. (5th ser.) 91, and 161–62 (1913). The hold that this view of eugenics had on British popular opinion was indicated later in a 1934 private letter from EES General Secretary C. P. Blacker to MP A. W. H. James, in which Blacker warned James, ‘in the public mind, you are identified with this Society, which is still (unjustly) regarded as consisting of cranks who advocate the application of stock breeding methods to the human race’, C. P. B. to James, A. W. H., 24 01 1934Google Scholar, Eugenics Society Records, file C-191, (Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, London) (by courtesy of the Wellcome Trustees).

51 53 Parl. Deb., H. C. (5th ser.) 239 (1913); and 56 Parl. Deb., H. C. (5th ser.) 84 and 134 (1913). Two examples illustrate how government leaders dodged Wedgwood's fervid attempts to link the measure to eugenics. At one point, Wedgwood charged that the last phase in a standard commitment provision, which provided coverage for persons requiring control ‘for their own protection or for the protection of others’, opened the way for eugenic applications. The Home Secretary replied that, in context, this did not confer ‘powers of a Eugenic character’. At another point, Wedgwood objected to reserving four seats on a fifteen-member oversight commission for physicians, saying, ‘Eugenist doctrines are at present confined, more or less, to doctors and bishops, and I certainly do not want to see a close corporation formed in control of all the mentally defective persons of the country in the hand of this Eugenist Society.’ A government spokesman replied, ‘My hon. Friend has rather a prejudice against doctors…. My hon. Friend thinks that these doctors will be Eugenists. There is really no reason why he should come to that conclusion at all.’ 53 Parl. Deb., H. C. (5th set.) 111 and 435–37 (1913).

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