Medical History and Research

Eugenics—the organized effort to improve human heredity through selective reproduction—emerged in the late nineteenth century as a would-be science and became state policy across much of the world before reaching its most brutal expression in Nazi Germany, where physicians and geneticists collaborated in mass sterilization programs and racial murder under the banner of "race hygiene." Historians of medicine reconstruct how professional institutions, anatomical research, and psychiatric practice were drawn into these programs, tracing the pathways by which scientific authority lent legitimacy to atrocity. Understanding that history remains urgent because it illuminates how medical ethics can collapse under ideological and political pressure, and because forensic and archival work continues to surface institutional complicity that official postwar narratives obscured. Scholars are now pressing into questions about the long-term genetic and demographic effects of sterilization campaigns, the restitution of remains collected by Nazi-era anatomists, and the degree to which eugenic assumptions persisted in clinical and public-health practice well after 1945.

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187,234

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213,947

Keywords

EugenicsNazi EraGeneticsRace HygieneMedical EthicsSterilization