Better for All the World: The Secret History of Forced Sterilization and America's Quest for Racial Purity (Vintage) - Softcover

Bruinius, Harry

 
9780375713057: Better for All the World: The Secret History of Forced Sterilization and America's Quest for Racial Purity (Vintage)
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0375713050 ISBN 13: 9780375713057
Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2007

Inhaltsangabe

A timely and gripping history of the controversial eugenics movement in America–and the scientists, social reformers and progressives who supported it.In Better for All the World, Harry Bruinius charts the little known history of eugenics in America–a movement that began in the early twentieth century and resulted in the forced sterilization of more than 65,000 people. Bruinius tells the stories of Emma and Carrie Buck, two women trapped in poverty who became the test case in the 1927 supreme court decision allowing forced sterilization for those deemed unfit to procreate. From the reformers who turned local charities into government-run welfare systems promoting social and moral purity, to the influence the American policies had on Nazi Germany’s development of “racial hygiene,” Bruinius masterfully exposes the players and legislation behind one of America’s darkest secrets.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Harry Bruinius was born in Chicago and attended Yale University, where he studied theology, and Columbia University, where he studied journalism. He is a frequent contributor to The Christian Science Monitor, a professor of journalism at Hunter College and is the founder of The Village Quill, a work space for writers in TriBeCa. He lives in Manhattan.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

A Simple and Painless Procedure

On a cloudy afternoon on October 19, 1927, as a chilly autumn wind swept down off the Blue Ridge Mountains, rattling the windows of the infirmary at the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-minded, Dr. John H. Bell jotted a few notes about an operation he had performed earlier that day. He was the superintendent of this sprawling institution, a campus of regimented brick dormitories and rolling farmland set amid the bluffs overlooking Lynchburg, and one of the country’s finest. The morning’s procedure was simple, and dozens of such operations had taken place here over the years. But for this patient he wrote with particular care, since it was a case that might draw a bit of attention.

“Patient sterilized this morning under authority of Act of Assembly in 1926, providing for the sterilization of mental defectives, and as ordered by the Board of Directors of this institution,” he wrote. “She went to the operating room at 9:30 and returned to her bed at 10:30, recovered promptly from the anaesthesia with no untoward after effects anticipated. One inch was removed from each Fallopian tube, the tubes ligated and the ends cauterized by carbolic acid followed by alcohol, and the edges of the broad ligaments brought together with continuous suture. Abdominal wound was united with layer sutures and the approximation of the closure was good.”

The patient lying before him on the operating table that morning was Carrie Buck, a plump, twenty-one-year-old woman who had been under his care at the Colony for over three years. He knew her well. On the day she was admitted, he had been the first to examine her, and he took special note of her dark eyes and slight features, her low, narrow forehead and high cheekbones. He would see her in the Colony’s cafeteria, where she was assigned to work, and his words to her were usually cordial and kind. Yet during most of this time, Dr. Bell and Carrie Buck had been, in name at least, legal adversaries.

So, as he finished his surgical report, he decided to add another formal comment: “This is the first case operated on under the sterilization law, and the case was carried through the courts of the State and the United States Supreme Court to test the constitutionality of the Virginia act, and an appeal before the Supreme Court for a rehearing recently having been denied.”

It was a momentous day. It had taken over three years to test and litigate Carrie’s case, but less than an hour to cut and ligate her Fallopian tubes. But for Dr. Bell, this operation was far more than a legal victory. As a “test case,” it had been a carefully orchestrated lawsuit meant not only to sterilize Carrie against her will, but also to protect a bold but controversial social policy he believed would improve the welfare of the nation. Today was the beginning. It was cold, but outside the window, beyond the white, two-tiered veranda on the front façade of the infirmary, Dr. Bell could look out over the Colony and consider the long battle he and other reformers had been fighting for decades.

Beyond the veranda, the parallel rows of austere brick dormitories made this state-run institution look something like a military camp, its geometric precision imposing order on a vast Virginia wilderness, even as magnolias and elms gave the Colony the gentle, pastoral feel of a Southern plantation, peaceful and decorous, like Jefferson’s Monticello just hours to the north. Dr. Bell, too, had devoted his life, both as a physician and a scientist, to building a more perfect land. Sterilizing Carrie just may have been one of the most important things he had ever done, and as he considered her surgery he may have even dared to think, as a colleague would later tell him, that “a hundred years from now you will still have a place in this history of which your descendents may well be proud.”

Yes, our descendants may well be proud. In the end, real progress in this history, in this quest to battle disease and human suffering, will be found in our descendants, Dr. Bell believed. This was why he had to sterilize Carrie, and this was why he was dedicated to the care of epileptics and feebleminded. To those not familiar with the recent discoveries of “genetics”—a new term in science—Carrie might have seemed a normal girl, if sassy and simple and even a little slow. But Dr. Bell knew she carried within her, like the taint of original sin, the defective “germ-plasm” she would pass on to her children. A defect in her genes made her unusually promiscuous, unable to control herself, and prone to bear a child out of wedlock without shame. It kept her—and her mother Emma before her—from being a productive, law-abiding citizen. And he could say with all confidence, too, that Carrie’s illegitimate daughter Vivian, not quite three years old, would follow the same wanton path.

Yes, our descendants may well be proud. Science was revealing the subtleties of nature, the mysterious, microscopic forces that somehow passed on human traits, the genes that kept generations of families mired in poverty, ignorance, and the cesspool of immoral behavior. These families were a breed afflicted by this low-grade mental deficiency called “feeble-mindedness,” the primary cause, Dr. Bell and other reformers believed, of the social ills weakening the fabric of the nation. These people weren’t insane, exactly. They were not “idiots” or “imbeciles”—terms doctors had long used for people with more noticeable mental defects. No, they were simply a population who behaved like perpetual adolescents—mental dullards without developed moral consciences. To the untrained layperson, someone afflicted with feeblemindedness might even appear normal. So scientists had just devised a new term for these unmasked defectives: “morons.” These people engaged in the unhealthy and antisocial practice of masturbation, which led to sexual impurity and hosts of illegitimate children. These frequented saloons and whorehouses, filled state almshouses and prisons, and worst of all, passed their feebleminded genes to their children.

Biologically speaking, science was revealing perhaps the greatest menace to the future of the human race: fecund, feebleminded females.

This surreptitious menace arose from a strange irony in evolution, Dr. Bell believed. Mankind, the most intelligent and ingenious of creatures, had reached its lofty status through millions of years of toil and struggle. The law of the survival of the fittest had always weeded out the weak and foolish, allowing the best of the race to keep evolving to a higher state. But as this clever species made life less nasty and brutish, as it began to protect the weak of mind and frail of body, the genetic pool began to be polluted. Christian charity and enlightened altruism—and even advances in medical science—had disrupted the natural laws of progress and allowed the weak to live and breed. For Dr. Bell, this irony was made even more ominous as the strong were choosing lives of ease and leisure, shunning large families and the burdens of rearing children. The fitter families of the human race, especially those of the most intelligent Northern European “Nordic” stocks, were reproducing less, while the degenerate stocks were running amok. If nothing were done, the strong might start to lose this battle of genetic survival.

These fears were not simply his own. Many of the...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2007
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0375713050
ISBN 13 
9780375713057
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
416
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
preigu
mail@preigu.de

Lengericher Landstr. 19
Osnabrück
49078
Deutschland

Weitere beliebte Ausgaben desselben Titels

9780375413711: Better for All the World: The Secret History of Forced Sterilization and America's Quest for Racial Purity

Vorgestellte Ausgabe

ISBN 10:  0375413715 ISBN 13:  9780375413711
Verlag: Alfred a Knopf Inc, 2006
Hardcover