Category: public health

Carrel: Children should be conditioned like dogs

Alexis Carrel, Nobel Prize Winner.  Man the Unknown, 1939.  [Source] […] A man’s value depends on his capacity to face adverse situations rapidly and without effort.  Such alertness is attained by building up many kinds of reflexes and instinctive reactions.  The younger the individual, the easier is the establishment of reflexes. A child can  accumulate …

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“Strategic Planning for Mental Health” by J. R. Rees, 1940

Strategic Planning for Mental Health By Colonel J. R. (John Rawlings) Rees, M.D.   [SOURCE: mental-health-vol-1-no-4-october-1940] Summary of an address given at the Annual Meeting of the National Council for Mental Hygiene on June 18th, 1940. By Colonel J. R. Rees, M.D. It would be hard to imagine a time more unusual or more trying than …

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Lord Adrian: “be prepared to separate mothers from children”

Source: Lord Adrian The British Medical Journal Vol. 1, No. 4977 (May 26, 1956), pp. 1189-1192. It is true also that what can be done elsewhere depends in part on what the public opinion of the country allows; preventive health services are bound to interfere with individual liberty, whether they condemn a slaughterhouse or send …

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“Eugenics: Its Definition, Scope, and Aims” by Francis Galton

One of the earliest, more definitive beginnings of the Eugenics movement, was this address given by Francis Galton.  Eugenics got its bad rap by its association with the Nazis.  Its important to observe that its most ardent proponents were Americans. “Eugenics: Its Definition, Scope, and Aims” by Francis Galton. Read before the Sociological Society at a …

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Sterilization May Lead to Sexual Promiscuity, Frank C. Richmond, 1934

Frank C. Richmond, Sterilization in Wisconsin, Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, Vol. 25, Issue 4 (November-December), Winter, 1934.  Page: 593. Human surgical sterilization may lead to sexual promiscuity and incidentally to spread of venereal disease. Voluntary sterilization tends to promote social evils in this way and answers why sterilization should be practiced only on …

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Child Labor Laws as Eugenics Policy

Source:  Dr. Frank a Fetter, Cornell University, in a discussion of “Western Civilization and the Birth-Rate”, as found in The American Journal of Sociology, 1907, page 619. The paper mentions but one recent social change which tends definitely and positively to reduce the families of the unskilled classes, namely, child-labor legislation. Such laws as these …

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Objections to Compulsory Sterilization “are essentially sentimental.”

While eugenics today is castigated as ‘pseudoscience,’ the eugenicists themselves might say that the chief difference between progressives then versus now, is the latter is hindered by ‘sentimentality.’ E.A. Ross, Letter to Charles McCarthy, January 30, 1907.  (As found in Rudolph J. Vecoli’s “Sterilization: A Progressive Measure” in Wisconsin Magazine of History, Spring 1960.  LINK: wisconsin-sterilization-progressives-21585 …

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The Jaffe Memo and Eugenics

After World War 2, it became unwise to advocate for eugenics openly.  However, since eugenicists believed that they were only extending scientific principles, and felt that they stood on the bedrock of Darwinian truth, they could not just abandon the program.  They explicitly took to covert means of advancing their agenda, and, deprived of coercive …

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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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