Posted on 02/23/2008 2:15:38 PM PST by wagglebee
The lab coats, microscopes and medical instruments on display at the Science Museum of Minnesota are typically seen as noble symbols of knowledge, healing and rational inquiry.
In the case of a new exhibit, however, they are artifacts of science gone astray and medicine perverted to serve the goals of "racial hygiene," mass forced sterilization, segregation, euthanasia and ultimately genocide.
"Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race" is the story of the eugenics movement implemented by Nazi Germany in the 1930s and '40s. The exhibit, created by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., opens Wednesday in the downtown St. Paul museum.
Eugenics is the belief that the human species could be improved by discouraging or stopping reproduction by people with genetic defects or undesirable traits and encouraging reproduction among those believed to have desirable, inheritable traits. It was carried out to its most horrifying extremes in Nazi Germany.
But the exhibit, which includes artifacts, photos and video testimonials, shows that advocacy for eugenics predated the rise of Hitler and that many in the scientific and medical communities embraced its use.
The theory also was promoted and practiced in places beyond Germany, including the United States and Minnesota.
Susan Bachrach, the exhibit curator with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, said the exhibit was created to try to help understand how the Holocaust happened in the most educated society in the world.
It turned out scientists lent a helping hand. 'GOOD BIRTH' The term eugenics, meaning "good birth," was first coined by English scientist Francis Galton in 1883. But the idea took root in early 20th century Germany, which at the time was the world leader in science and medicine. Theories abounded about the superiority of "civilized" people and "Nordic race" versus "primitive" races. German researchers studied twins to try to show that there were hereditary links to everything from criminal behavior to cancer. Keeping the "unfit" alive to reproduce and multiply was a burden on society and interfered with Darwinian natural selection, resulting in a "degeneration" of the population, according to eugenics proponents. The exhibit shows how Germans promoted contests to find examples of Nordic perfection in head and facial features. Displays of eye and skin color charts and sculptures of heads demonstrate the obsession at the time with categorizing people by racial groups and subgroups. When Hitler came to power, racial hygiene theories became policy, with marriage laws designed to forbid unions between "hereditary healthy" and the genetically unfit. Under the Third Reich, the "Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring" sterilized people with conditions ranging from "feeble-mindedness" to chronic alcoholism. Abortions were forbidden for most Germans, with exceptions made for Jews and "genetically diseased." The country's doctors joined the Nazi party in higher numbers than any other professional group, according to the exhibit. The scientists who believed in eugenics "were thrilled that their ideas were finally being implemented as policy," Bachrach said. Eugenics beliefs also informed political thought and public policy in other parts of the world. Fears that the "white, Protestant stock" would be swamped by immigrants from Asia and Southern and Eastern Europe in the early 20th century led to anti-immigration laws here. MINNESOTA STERILIZES THE 'FEEBLE-MINDED' In Minnesota, a 1925 law paved the way for the sterilization of more than 1,200 "feeble-minded" or insane patients at the state hospital in Faribault, according to Neal Holtan, a medical historian and medical director of the St. Paul-Ramsey County Public Health Department. The law was the main achievement of Charles Fremont Dight, a Minneapolis doctor, socialist politician and founder of the Minnesota Eugenics Society. "There used to be a family planning booth at the State Fair that was essentially eugenics," said Stephen Feinstein, director of the University of Minnesota Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. Sterilization laws also were enacted in Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Canada and Switzerland. But they were never implemented on the scale of the Nazis, with an estimated 400,000 mandated sterilizations of Germans between 1934 and 1945. Eugenics was used to justify segregation of Jews in Nazi Germany and the "medicalization of anti-Semitism," the euthanasia of more than 5,000 German infants and children with birth defects and the gas-chamber deaths of more than 70,000 adult patients in hospitals and mental institutions. Those steps laid the groundwork for the "Final Solution" of the mass gassings of Jews, according to Bachrach. "People cross certain thresholds, and then it becomes easier to make the next step," she said. DOCTORS, SCIENTISTS IN FOREFRONT Each step of the way, doctors and scientists were advocates, advisers and implementers of the policies. They also were beneficiaries under the Nazi regime, getting money for research and the raw material for studies ranging from the brains of euthanized children to concentration camp prisoners used as experimental subjects. Bachrach and Feinstein said the exhibit raises questions about present-day concerns over the intersection of science and politics, the rights of individuals versus the larger population and 21st century eugenics. "We have the human genome. As soon as we start passing judgment on what are good genes or bad genes, it's going to start all over again," Holtan said. Richard Chin can be reached at rchin@pioneerpress.com or 651-228-5560. IF YOU GO The "Deadly Medicine" exhibit opens Wednesday and will run daily at the Science Museum through May 4. Admission is included in regular Science Museum exhibit gallery admission. A lecture series and theater performances are part of related programming. Call 651-221-9444 or go to www.smm.org for more information. TO LEARN MORE The Minnesota History Center will host a History Lounge discussion called "Dark Medicine" on Charles Fremont Dight and eugenics on March 18, from 7 to 8:30 p.m., at the Minnesota History Center, 345 Kellogg Blvd., St. Paul. Call 651-259-3000 or go to www.mnhs.org/historycenter.
And now Planned Barrenhood is trying to put one on every street corner.
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Are they going to have a Margaret Sanger display? She used the phrase “human weeds” to describe undesirables.
The past tense of “lead” is “led.”
I know, but what are you talking about?
She also spoke of the “need” to not let Blacks know that she wanted to exterminate them.
I fervently pray that people who visit this museum will see the direct correlation between eugenics and the current pro-”choice” movement. Just because we now exterminate earlier does not make it less wrong.
Beep!
Eugenics is terribly misunderstood, almost as much as it has been misused in the past. It should be broken up into parts, each of which stands or falls on its own merits.
1) Genetic selection.
At its best, this can prevent terrible tragedies from taking place. One example is advising two people not to get married, or if they do, to adopt, not have their own children. Because if they do have children, the odds are high that their children will be hideously deformed and have short and agonized lives. This form of Eugenics is just fair warning.
However, this can be twisted into confronting expectant parents with a great or small problem with their fetus child, to encourage them to kill it before it is born. The flip side of the coin.
2) Selective breeding.
Used extensively for animals, Eugenics might someday result in actually suggesting pairings, for people who really want their children to have the best genes possible. Imagine being given a list of people of the opposite sex, and told that if you were to have a child or children with one of them, that child will have a lot of natural advantages with genetic health.
Ironically, while this is extraordinarily difficult to arrange based on what we know of genetics, it was done very successfully just by guessing alone, by the leader of an idealistic commune in the 19th Century. While they believed in marriage, the leader selected who would make children with who, and who would then raise them. In just three generations, that commune produced children, dozens of whom became national leaders in many fields.
However, this can easily be turned on its ear by forcing people to have children based on prejudice and faulty science.
3) Preventing the propagation of genetic defects.
The best that can be hoped for here is that people with severe genetic defects should be advised early on that it would be kind of them not to make children, but to adopt. The one considered use is by parents of a mentally incapable and institutionalized daughter, to preclude her being impregnated by rape, an all too frequent event.
This is by far the most widely spread part of abusive Eugenics. Forced sterilization is instantly corrupted in its practice, and used against the helpless and oppressed. Performed at some point in most western nations, it is a hideous remnant of the collapse of medical ethics.
It’s not your fault, but I think the headline writer meant “led,” not “lead.”
The title of the article. I know it isn’t YOUR title, but it’s awful that a mainstream paper can’t do better than that.
See Robert Heinlein's BEYOND THIS HORIZON for a society that practices that kind of eugenics. Ironically, in the novel those who failed to practice it were subsidized and kept as "control normals."
In 1865 he began to study heredity, partly brought on by reading his cousin, Charles Darwin's publication Origin of Species. Galton soon discovered that his true passion was studying the variations in human ability. In particularly, he was convinced that success was due to superior qualities passed down to offspring through heredity. His book, Hereditary Genius (1869), outlined this hypothesis and utilized supporting data he had collected by analyzing the obituaries of the Times newspaper, where he traced the lineage of eminent men in Europe. His quest for data and accountability would lead to a series of studies and books on the heredity of mental faculties specifying that "human mental abilities and personality traits, no less than the plant and animal traits described by Darwin, were essentially inherited".Ultimately, these findings sparked the formative years of the eugenics movement, which called for methods of improving the biological make-up of the human species through selective parenthood. Galton would even go so far as to advocate human breeding restrictions to curtail the breeding of 'feeble-minded'.
Source: http://www.indiana.edu/~intell/galton.shtml
The truth is that genetics is a very odd conglomeration of things. For example, one of the most desired traits for offspring is “intelligence”, a vague descriptor at best.
The truth is that what we call intelligence today is most likely a mutation, and one that comes with a lot of baggage. What we think of as intelligence might be a defect.
That is, in blackberries, the same gene that makes the berries delicious is also responsible for the plants thorns, oddly enough. In the case of intelligence, it may be associated with a weakened chromosome, the extreme version of which causes “fragile X syndrome”, one of the major causes of retardation.
So if you tamper with your children so that they might be intelligent, you place them at risk for being prone to other genetic problems.
Other genes are equally fickle. But most surveys stop with the simple question of if you could modify your child, what would you want them to be like? Only one followed it up with greater detail, and made a startling discovery.
Many parents want offspring with noticeably canine and feline features. This is because they think that people relate better to dogs and cats than they do each other; so if their children look more like dogs and cats, they will be popular.
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And soon, we will have it again. Only it will be much worse today than it was in the early part of the 1900’s.
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