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Defective or Disabled?: Race, Medicine, and Eugenics in Progressive Era Virginia and Alabama1
by Gregory Michael Dorr, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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Something was menacing the South during the Progressive Era. Southern physicians located the threat in the "germ plasm," the genes, of the region's inhabitants. Writing in a now-infamous 1893 "open letter" published in the Virginia Medical Monthly, Hunter Holmes McGuire, a Richmond physician and president of the American Medical Association, asked for "some scientific explanation of the sexual perversion in the negro of the present day." McGuire's correspondent, Chicago physician G. Frank Lydston, replied that African-American men raped white women because of "[h]ereditary influences descending from the uncivilized ancestors of our negroes." Lydston's solution to this problem was not lynching, but surgical castration which "prevents the criminal from perpetuating his kind."2 Eight years later in Alabama, Dr. John E. Purdon opined, "It is a proved fact of experience that the inveterate criminal tends to propagate a race of criminals, and that the undeveloped or degraded nerve-tissue will duplicate itself in the next generation." Dr. Purdon then declared, "Emasculation is the simplest and most perfect plan that can be adopted to secure the perfection of the race."3 Twenty-three years later, in 1924, Harry Hamilton Laughlin testified in support of a Virginia law providing for the eugenic sterilization of the "shiftless, ignorant, and worthless class of anti-social whites of the South," who allegedly created social problems for "normal" people. The multiplication of these "defective delinquents," Laughlin and Virginia officials claimed, could only be controlled by restricting their procreation. In 1927, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed, ruling, "Three generations of Imbeciles are enough."4 That same year, an Alabama physician promoted the discussion and dissemination of birth control because "eugenics is the public health of tomorrow."5 These quotations reveal the wave of eugenic conviction—belief in the possibility of improving humanity through directed breeding—that swept across the southern medical profession during this period. |
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This comparative essay analyzes how burgeoning eugenic ideology influenced medical theorizing and practice, and ultimately the definition of disability in the Progressive Era South, by underscoring subtle interstate variations. It recognizes that inhabitants of both the upper and lower South considered themselves distinctly southern, yet remained sensitive to intraregional distinctions. Comparing Virginia and Alabama highlights the dynamics that allowed eugenics to flourish in particular forms in each state. This analysis clarifies the notion of a distinctively "southern" eugenics by relating it to distinctively southern conceptions of disability and public health—ideas that were themselves conditioned by intraregional variations in racial ideology and economic context.6 |
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The harmony between eugenics and public health in the South amplified the "eugenically disabling" stereotypes of "born criminality" and "feeblemindedness." These new categories allowed doctors to merge class, race, and gender prejudices into a new concept of disability. Increasingly between 1890 and 1930, physicians conceived of disabled individuals—those with physical or mental impairments—less as a class to be cured or rehabilitated and more as a dangerous group in need of control.7 Redefining disability and educating people about the eugenic threat posed by "defectives" collapsed racial distinctions that had traditionally separated southern white disabled people from southern African Americans.8 Eugenic ideas facilitated the convergence of race and disability, consigning many individuals to oppressive treatment. |
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