The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics
Edited by Alison Bashford and Philippa Levine
Abstract
The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics covers the nineteenth century to the post-World War II era and dispels for uninitiated readers the automatic and apparently exclusive link between eugenics and the Holocaust. It provides a world history of eugenics. Eugenic thought and practice swept the world from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century in a remarkable transnational phenomenon. Eugenics informed social and scientific policy across the political spectrum, from liberal welfare measures in emerging social-democratic states to feminist ambitions for birth control, from public health campaigns to totalitarian dreams of the “perfectibility of man.” Eugenics has accumulated generations of interest as experts attempted to connect biology, human capacity, and policy. In the past and the present, eugenics speaks to questions of race, class, gender and sex, evolution, governance, nationalism, disability, and the social implications of science. In the current climate, in which the human genome project, stem cell research, and new reproductive technologies have proven so controversial, the history of eugenics has much to teach us about the relationship between scientific research, technology, and human ethical decision-making.
Keywords:
Holocaust,
social policy,
scientific policy,
liberal welfare,
social-democratic states,
birth control,
public health,
race,
class,
gender,
evolution,
governance,
nationalism,
disability,
human genome,
stem cells,
reproductive technologies,
scientific rese
Bibliographic Information
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- Print Publication Date:
- Sep 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780195373141
- Published online:
- Sep 2012
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195373141.001.0001
Editors
Alison Bashford,
editor
Alison Bashford is Professor of Modern History at the University of Sydney. She has published widely on the modern history of science and medicine, including Purity and Pollution (1998) and Imperial Hygiene (2004), and has coedited Contagion (2001), Isolation (2003), and Medicine at the Border (2006). She is currently completing a history of geopolitics and the world population problem in the twentieth century. In 2009-2010 she was Visiting Chair of Australian Studies, Harvard University, with the Department of the History of Science.
Philippa Levine,
editor
Philippa Levine is the Mary Helen Thompson Centennial Professor in the Humanities at the University of Texas at Austin. Her books include Prostitution, Race and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire, and The British Empire, Sunrise to Sunset.
