Category: insane asylums

Nobel Prize Winner Carrel: Euthanize the Defectives and Criminals

Alexis Carrel, Nobel Prize Winner.  Man the Unknown, 1939.  [Source] There remains the unsolved problem of the immense number of defectives and criminals. They are an enormous burden for the part of the population that has remained normal. As already pointed out, gigantic sums are now required to maintain prisons and insane asylums and protect …

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Karl Pearson on ‘race-suicide’ (1907)

Quoted by Collin Wells in 1907: As Karl Pearson has recently said: The great problem is whether limitation has not begun at the wrong end. If a nation is to be strong, there must be wastage; the reckless and diseased must not be in a condition to multiply like the strong and able. At present …

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Scientific American: “The Science of Breeding Better Men” 1911

Editorial from a 1911 edition of Scientific American [Source]: Sci-Am’s Editor’s note: This editorial was written and published in 1911. Although our editors of a century ago pondered some lofty aspirations for the orderly future of humans, it was only three decades later that the brutal reality of a Nazi social order suffused with a …

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Julian Huxley: Population Control, Eugenics, and Birth Control all part of the same Program

Contemporary advocates for birth control exhibit no awareness whatsoever that birth control was always conceived in the context of ‘eliminating the unfit,’ ie., eugenics.  Eugenics, in turn, was considered a straight-forward logical extension of Darwinism.  Eugenics was seen as human control of human evolution, and was always tied into discussions on ‘population control.’  These are …

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Eugenic Quote of the Day: Compulsory Vaccination and Compulsory Sterilization? Justified on the Same Principle

Oliver Wendell Holmes in the 1927 Buck vs. Bell decision upholding the forced sterilization of Carrie Buck, ‘feeble-minded.’  [Reference] An Act of Virginia, approved March 20, 1924, recites that the health of the patient and the welfare of society may be promoted in certain cases by the sterilization of mental defectives, under careful safeguard, &c.; …

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George William Hunter’s “Civic Biology” — the Eugenics Textbook at the Heart of the ‘Scopes Monkey Trial’

The so-called ‘Scopes Monkey Trial’ was a media sensation at the time, but how it actually went down was shamelessly skewed afterwards to make it seem that the evolutionists were humble seekers of truth and those who stood against them ignorant, religious bigots.  This viewpoint was perpetuated effectively through movies on the trial such as …

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Letter by Theodore Roosevelt to Charles Davenport: Society should not permit degenerates to reproduce their kind.

From The Outlook, January 3rd letter of 1913 [Source] My dear Mr. Davenport: I am greatly interested in the two memoirs you have sent me.  They are very instructive, and, from the standpoint of our country, very ominous.  You say that  those people are not themselves responsible, that it is “society” that is responsible.  I …

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Eugenics and Evolution are Incompatible with Charity and Altruism

One of the common themes of eugenic writers is that if Darwinism and evolution were properly understood, charity and altruism could very well inflict a great harm on a population, and indeed, threatening to do just that.  This post will catalog quotes of eugenicists making that argument. ——— From Madison Grant in The Passing of …

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