Medical History and Research

Eugenics—the project of improving human populations through controlled reproduction—emerged in the late nineteenth century as a confluence of nascent genetics, social reform ideology, and anxieties about race and class, reaching its most violent expression in the Nazi programs of forced sterilization and extermination carried out under the banner of *Rassenhygiene*, or race hygiene. Historians working in this area reconstruct how mainstream medical and scientific institutions, rather than fringe actors, provided the intellectual scaffolding and institutional machinery for these atrocities, drawing on anatomical collections, psychiatric records, and state bureaucracies that still exist in archives today. Understanding this history matters because the same conceptual categories—genetic fitness, population health, the boundary between therapy and enhancement—continue to surface in contemporary debates about genomics, reproductive medicine, and public health policy. Active scholarly questions include how professional complicity was rationalized across different national contexts, what restitution is owed to victims' descendants when biological material collected under coercion remains in museum and university collections, and how medical ethics education can engage this history without reducing it to a cautionary tale safely cordoned off from present practice.

Works

187,717

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214,650

Keywords

EugenicsNazi EraGeneticsRace HygieneMedical EthicsSterilization