What would bring a physician to conclude that sterilization is appropriate treatment for the mentally ill and mentally handicapped? Using archival sources, Ian Robert Dowbiggin documents the involvement of both American and Canadian psychiatrists in the eugenics movement of the early twentieth century. He explains why professional men and women committed to helping those less fortunate than themselves arrived at such morally and intellectually dubious conclusions. Psychiatrists at the end of the nineteenth century felt professionally vulnerable, Dowbiggin explains, because they were under intense pressure from state and provincial governments and from other physicians to reform their specialty. Eugenic ideas, which dominated public health policy making, seemed the best vehicle for catching up with the progress of science. Among the prominent psychiatrist-eugenicists Dowbiggin considers are G. Alder Blumer, Charles Kirk Clarke, Thomas Salmon, Clare Hincks, and William Partlow. Tracing psychiatric support for eugenics throughout the interwar years, Dowbiggin pays special attention to the role of psychiatrists in the fierce debates about immigration policy. His examination of psychiatry's unfortunate flirtation with eugenics elucidates how professional groups come to think and act along common lines within specific historical contexts.
Ian Robert Dowbiggin is Chair of the Department of History at the University of Prince Edward Island. He is the author of Inheriting Madness: Professionalization and Psychiatric Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century France; A Merciful End: The Euthanasia Movement in Modern America, and A Concise History of Euthanasia: Life, Death, God, and Medicine.
Table of Contents
Preface to the Cornell Paperbacks Edition
v
Abbreviations
xv
Introduction
1
1
An Exodus of Enthusiasm: Psychiatry in Canada and the United States, 1880-1920
23
2
A Confusing Wildness of Recommendations: G. Alder Blumer, Eugenics, and U.S. Psychiatry, 1880-1940
70
3
Keeping This Young Country Sane: C. K. Clarke, Eugenics, and Canadian Psychiatry, 1890-1940
133
4
A Question of Public Health: Psychiatry, Eugenics, and Immigration in the United States, 1880-1925
191
Conclusion: Reflections on the History of Eugenics
A fascinating cautionary tale. In tracing the attraction of eugenics for a number of leaders in North American psychiatry, Dowbiggin has made a valuable contribution to the cultural history of twentieth-century medicine.
Gerald N. Grob
Ian Dowbiggin's study of psychiatry and eugenics in the United States and Canada is a significant contribution to both medical and social history. He demonstrates that the eugenics movement was more complex than is commonly recognized, and that the involvement of psychiatrists was driven less by ideology than by the fact that they were employed within a state bureaucratic system and often had to tailor their beliefs to prevailing policies. His book offers a new perspective on an important social movement.
Nancy Tomes
This timely and balanced account provides a fresh new perspective on the place of eugenics in the history of American and Canadian psychiatry. By putting the profession's ambivalent embrace of eugenics in institutional and professional context, Dowbiggin provides a compelling account of this troubling episode in American history. Beautifully written and cogently argued, Keeping America Sane will remain the standard work on the subject for decades to come.
John C. Burnham
A breakthrough away from dogmatism and toward a fresh understanding of the history of both eugenics and psychiatry. The history of psychiatry and the history of eugenics will never be the same again after this sophisticated new look at both narratives. Dowbiggin shows how the actual experiences of specialist professionals in two cultures shaped the ways in which they tried to influence policy, to improve the world, and to practice medicine. He conjoins nuances to produce a vivid recreation of the world in which good, if sometimes flawed, men and women attempted to make sense of science, bureaucracy, and moral imperatives. Dowbiggin adds important new dimensions to what we thought was a familiar narrative. Neither the history of psychiatry nor the history of eugenics will ever be the same again.
Daniel J. Kevles
This book's exploration of the attitudes and involvements of psychiatrists in the eugenics movement is important and eye-opening. Dowbiggin takes the trouble to get inside the North American psychiatric community, to examine its members at work in the asylums and in struggle with the state. He convincingly shows that they held diverse views on the role of hereditarianism in mental illness and disorder and that their ideas of therapy were shaped at least as strongly by considerations of professional autonomy and practice as by their embrace of eugenic doctrine.
