Bulletin of the History of Medicine

The last decade has witnessed a rapidly expanding literature on the history of eugenics observed through its increasing expansion in different latitudes as well as in a reassessment of its legacy in contemporary genetic studies. The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics reflects the extent to which the historiography of eugenics has matured as a subject to merit the editorial attention of Oxford University Press to commission the first edited volume in comparative eugenics as part of its recently launched “history series.” The invitation has been returned in a substantial and thought-provoking work of thirty-one chapters together with an introduction and epilogue, which will be an invaluable resource for not only students and scholars of eugenics but also for those interested in nationalism, science, and population more broadly.

Among the various possible arrangements within which eugenic topics can be grouped, location stands out in this edition, giving the collection a powerful indication that eugenics, however diverse it has been in its developments, has clearly been ubiquitous across the twentieth century. The volume’s simple division into two sections belies the complexity of the themes that some chapters introduce. Part 1, “Transnational Themes in the History of Eugenics,” comprises ten chapters that, despite the use of the term transnational, do not engage with the transfer or transatlantic exchanges of ideas between countries, but with the salient topics that have prominently featured in most eugenic debates and practices. The section opens with Diane B. Paul and James Moore’s contextual relationships (rather than direct links) between Darwinian evolution by natural selection and Galton’s proposal of artificial selection to improve human populations. It is followed by Philippa Levine’s essay on the milieu where eugenic ideas expanded, colonialism and imperialism, together with the nascent science of anthropology and its [End Page 668] scientific support to notions of racism, thus articulating a discourse of biology and culture. However, as Marius Turda reminds us through his hermeneutical revision of race and eugenics, to equate the latter with racism is hardly instructive, and to restrict both concepts to their association with Nazism can dangerously obscure the many nuances and complex interactions of race and eugenics as well as their enduring political, scientific and social implications. In another chapter, the common association of genetics and eugenics about human inheritance and racial superiority appears as nothing but straightforward and reflects the frequent unease of scientists and social scientists when they had to communicate those concepts in landmark declarations like the ones on race by UNESCO (Roll-Hansen). On the other hand, social and political progressive movements like feminism and social democracy in Western societies have also recognized eugenic advocacy in their pursuit of responsible motherhood and women’s rights to family planning (Susanne Klausen and Bashford) and in the implementation of welfare policies in Scandinavian countries (Véronique Mottier). Two further chapters dwell on the most common subjects of eugenics concerns and practice: the feebleminded and the family. The first one (Mathew Thomson) places segregation of the feebleminded in the asylum as a process preceding eugenic movement, but also one that lingered in controversial practices such as the antenatal screening for Down syndrome. The second one (Alexandra Minna Stern) explores how issues of gender and sexuality have strongly and ambiguously featured in eugenics, by pointing to both women’s agency in supporting an agenda of race betterment and male eugenicists and their pursuit of virile enhancement as a reinforcing movement toward the segregation of those mentally or physically unfit. The section also includes discussion on the inextricable links between eugenics and genocide and with internationalism, respectively. Genocidal practices, as A. Dirk Moses and Dan Stone argue, have extended their initial focus on the Holocaust to other equally eliminationist population policies such as assimilation, absorption, and sterilization. Bashford’s focus on internationalism also contributes an insightful perspective on the broad spread of eugenics by drawing attention to the world’s leading international organizations, most notably the United Nations, where eugenically inspired policies have underpinned interventions to control “world overpopulation.”

Part 2, “National/Colonial Formations,” has an impressive coverage and illuminates the history of eugenics in some contexts that have received very little attention to date. There are essays on the Soviet Union, Iran, Japan, colonial Kenya, Israel, China and Hong Kong, and Dutch Indonesia, as well as on countries of main continental areas such as South Africa, Southeast Asia, Europe (Italy, Germany, France, Britain, Eastern Europe, Scandinavian states), America (United States and Canada), Latin America (Mexico, Puerto Rico, Cuba and Brazil), Australia, and New Zealand, which have been studied more extensively. Great coverage, however, does not necessarily imply representativeness in the “state of the art” of the countries selected, nor does it suggest innovative scholarship as in the case of Latin America, where only one essay covers Mexico, Puerto Rico, and Cuba, and it does so grounded in secondary literature. But amid the broad survey pieces [End Page 669] that give the Handbook its distinctive character are a number of sharply focused historical issues that the reader will find in the country-specific section. First is that the somewhat “old history” of eugenics, with its tendency to frame eugenic discussion in the positive–negative dyad and its exclusive focus on sizing how far national debates and legislation were from Nazis’ parameters, finds little support in this volume. Second, the reader will find that although eugenics—and its most conspicuous aim of reducing defected births—has been as Bashford puts it an international phenomenon, it has also been, as this volume convincingly shows, one adjusted to specific local contexts. Finally, the reader will find stimulating discussions on how to interpret eugenics’ continuity post-1945. Some essays draw attention to the pernicious iteration of eugenics through the persistence of its societies well into the 1980s (Britain), the sterilization of the mentally retarded until the early 1970s (Canada), the relocation of Nazi eugenicists into departments of human genetics (Germany), and current biotechnology developments devoted to enhance human capacity (Japan), among others.

There is, as this Handbook rightly proposes, a longue durée history of eugenics that exceeds the Nazi–racism–Holocaust associations that have harnessed its interpretation. To recast eugenics in that historical way would require, however, much more than histories of medicine and science; it would imply an interdisciplinary interpellation of modernity’s political, economic, and philosophical thinking.