CONCLUSION Lessons from the History of Eugenics

Frank W. Stahnisch and Erna Kurbegović

The relationship between eugenics, psychiatry, and mental health has always been a very complex and problematic one. In fact, since the emergence of modern eugenic thought in the latter half of the nineteenth century, asylum superintendents, clinical psychiatrists, psychologists, and biological anthropologists have been at the forefront of applying eugenics concepts, protocols, and legislation to medical practice in Western health-care systems at large.¹ This is particularly so when taking into account the new social movements and progressive reform plans that emerged in the early 1900s, often as a reflex to larger economic and technological changes in most Western societies at the fin de siècle.² Growing industrialization of more and more European countries as well as Canadian provinces and American states, an increasing trend toward urbanization, and the settlement of populations in larger metropolises gave rise to increasing social anxieties and situations of unrest.³ Similarly, increasing social conflicts between the proletarian and bourgeois classes and the visible demands of women and individuals from religious and racial minority populations to receive democratic political rights for their general participation in societal, economic, and health-care discourses were widely discussed in Western societies.⁴ This led to the development of new and often large-scale programs in psychiatric genetics and public mental health activities that were inspired by racial and social hierarchical ideas.⁵

As German medical historian Volker Roelcke has pointed out, the tendency in psychiatry and biomedical research to include eugenics and racial elements was a largely international development, which took root in several if not most Western industrialized countries at the beginning of the twentieth century.⁶ This development has, furthermore, been characterized by Austrian historian Philipp Blom as “the vertigo years,” particularly in European and North American societies.⁷ As the individual chapters in this volume show, the history of eugenics in western Canada in its foundational theoretical direction, form of application, and involvement of health-care personnel (such as psychiatrists, nurses, teachers, and public health administrators)⁸ was not too different from the general developments in medicine, psychiatry, and the neurosciences in other countries of the Western world. Diana Mansell, for example, in her pivotal and instructive contribution to this collection, shows how a focus on the role played by other health-care professionals, such as nurses and nursing assistants, can widen the traditional perspective on eugenic programs in Canada and North America in general (see chapter 3, “The Involvement of Nurses in the Eugenics Program in Alberta, 1920–1940”).

This volume on eugenics and psychiatry is concerned primarily with Canadian and transatlantic perspectives from 1905 to 1972. It has endeavoured to explore the intersections of and borders between the topic areas of eugenics history, mental health policies, and prevailing scientific and social views in contemporary psychiatry and health care, by explicitly setting the historical development of eugenics in western Canada in its comparative cultural contexts.⁹ Certainly, we do not wish to ignore the existence of local differences on the level of the execution of eugenics measures, the specific types of legislation used, or—as for the field of psychiatry—the nature of the involvement of psychiatrists and other health-care workers in the “therapeutic” and “preventive” medical and social programs used during the first half of the twentieth century (see Appendix).¹⁰ As applied and theoretical knowledge became further integrated into political spheres, social and psychological considerations within neurology and mental health disciplines also appeared increasingly relevant. In fact, neurological and psychiatric sciences had been involved in the biopolitical discourses between the 1900s and the 1970s.¹¹ This was most notably so in discussions on eugenics and racial hygiene in the Western industrialized world, where particular research assumptions of the nineteenth century—regarding substance abuse, neurodegenerative diseases, and inherited mental illnesses—influenced the biopolitical discourses of the first half of the century that followed.¹²

From a historiographical point of view, the social context regarding psychiatry and mental health issues—particularly, the triad of white supremacy, immigration biases, and persecution of Indigenous populations—played a large and unique role in the course of eugenics-oriented social and health-care programs in western Canada.¹³ This was the case in, above all, the Prairie provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta after they joined Confederation in 1870, 1905, and 1905, respectively.¹⁴ The social context is further visible in the case of Nazi eugenics between 1933 and 1945, with its wide intrusion of German society, politics, and the health-care system, which also prompted Tommy Douglas (1904–87) to reflect on his early advocacy for eugenics from the standpoint of being a social progressivist and close to the religious Social Gospel movement.¹⁵ This is pointed out in depth by Henderikus J. Stam and Ashley Barlow (chapter 1), Mikkel Dack (chapter 4), and Erna Kurbegović (chapter 5). These authors show that western Canadian eugenics developed largely as a means to incorporate social and cultural notions of well-meaning and technocratic progressivism into provincial politics and public health programs. And while often overlooked in historical treatises on eugenics, this trend toward “social progressivism” is quite visible in western Canada and pervades most of the chapters assembled here. Western Canadian eugenics was at once a minute reflection of international eugenics (see Appendix) and at the same time had certain historically unique features, with its origins in agricultural unions, clandestine processes run through a relatively small group of experts, and the centrality of the Alberta Eugenics Board, for instance (Appendix). A special case for psychiatry and eugenics (for reasons of disciplinary hierarchies in medicine, the inheritable nature of many pathologies and conditions in psychiatry, and urges toward professional autonomy, among others) can certainly be made, since the overall concerns of all eugenicists squared front and centre with unease and anxieties about the mentally ill, alcoholics, and people with neurodegenerative disorders. At the same time, psychiatrists and neurologists were strongly involved in the eugenics movement at the time.

While some sociologists and anthropologists might think these are new phenomena, we hope that the chapters on the relationship of eugenics and psychiatry assembled in this book will shed light on the same “modernist” tendencies at work in driving the eugenics programs during the 1920s and 1930s. The analysis and categorization of the problems, players, and institutions in the contemporary eugenics movements—along with the case studies, theoretical and empirical pieces, and comparative approaches—enable such a perspective here. In line with research pursued by a group of Canadian and international historians and interdisciplinary scholars assembled in the Archives on Eugenics in Western Canada initiative,¹⁶ the primary focus of this book is on the history of eugenics developments in Alberta, Manitoba, and British Columbia. These historical developments have been linked to their international contexts, particularly the dimensions of psychiatry, neuroscience, and psychological medicine.

Important similarities and differences to the medical communities in other countries could be identified vis-à-vis their reception of eugenic thought and practices, views that highlight the vast scope with which medical doctors and health-care professionals became active in influencing eugenics legislation in different jurisdictions. Scientific, political, and professional interests instigated psychologists, psychiatrists, and other physicians to collaborate in mutual research programs for policy initiatives and political programs. In an age in which concise pathological and genetic knowledge about diseases of the mind and the brain was largely lacking, intrinsic conceptual assumptions from eugenics and racial hygiene came to foster the scientific and clinical approaches in somatic psychiatry and psychological mental health, both in Europe and North America. Through international training exchanges and incorporation of diagnostic and therapeutic repertoires from Europe and the United States, Canada’s health-care system, especially in the western provinces, was increasingly affected by contemporary international medical and biological trends.¹⁷

LOOKING BACK

Previous scholarship on the relation between eugenics and psychiatry provided essential and critical perspectives on eugenics history in western Canada and its international contexts.¹⁸ Historians have pointed in particular to the heterogeneous levels, agency groups, and legislative and policy principles in many Canadian provinces (see, for example, chapter 1 in this volume). This volume contributes to this work by drawing scholarly attention to the place of psychiatry, public mental health, and the brain sciences in the history of eugenics.¹⁹ Since the early decades of the twentieth century, clinical neurologists, psychiatrists, and superintendents of mental asylums were for the most part inclined to receive the medical and social propositions of the new eugenic and racial hygienic tradition, first in Britain and Europe, then in the United States and Canada.²⁰ Such sentiments were largely fuelled by bourgeois anxieties about racial and nervous degeneration, which increased during and after the First World War and became prominent in many Western countries.²¹ The last decades of the nineteenth century had already witnessed an overall medicalization of the cultural discourse, as Joachim Radkau’s Das Zeitalter der Nervositaet (The age of nervousness) has suggested, describing a historical phase in which the clinical disciplines of neurology and psychiatry were in constant debates and struggles over professional identity and autonomy from their mother discipline of internal medicine.²² Many social and medical historians and scholars have reinterpreted the very phenomena of “eugenics” and “racial hygiene” in terms of a popular cultural trope since the last decades of the nineteenth century.²³ It must be noted, however, that this reflected not only psychiatrists’ professional assumptions, but also opinions prevalent among middle- and upper-class populations on both sides of the Atlantic that held that “cultural degeneration” had rapidly ensued.²⁴ A stronger concern for the individual body resulted in widespread medical reconfigurations, programs to sustain public health, and new cultural conceptions of psychiatric illness (often referred to as inherited feeble-mindedness).²⁵ Irrespective of the somatic or psychic pole of this spectrum, the specific medical reconfigurations took place in a general framework of eugenic theorizing.²⁶ This further translated into shifting social frontiers between right-wing and left-wing political camps, when the eugenics movement brought to light the anxieties and concerns shared by social traditionalists and progressivists regarding the cost-effectiveness of state-run mental asylums and institutions in the first decades of the twentieth century.²⁷

This volume also traces the changing societal emphases on research, along with the new concepts in neurology and psychiatry, during the first half of the twentieth century. Political conflicts, the increasing popularity of the eugenics movement, and economic influences reframed interdisciplinary neurological, psychiatric, and psychological work within the context of mental health care and public health, along with tighter political control mechanisms.²⁸ This becomes increasingly apparent when focusing on international relationships between Germany and the United States or Britain and Canada.²⁹

The work in eugenics and breeding that, for example, German racial anthropologist Alfred Ploetz (1860–1940) pursued as a temporary émigré physician in America was, like that of many of his reformist colleagues and friends, deeply rooted in late nineteenth-century sanitary and hygiene movements.³⁰ Both Ploetz—the doyen of German eugenic thought—and the experimental biologist Charles B. Davenport (1866–1944)—the leader of America’s human breeding movement and later head of the Eugenics Record Office of Cold Spring Harbor—held beliefs in Nordic superiority, which formed the centrepiece of their ideology.³¹ Indeed, Davenport developed strong professional relations with German racial hygienists such as Ploetz and the physician Fritz Lenz (1887–1976), who was invited by leading American eugenicists to describe the status of “Eugenics in Germany” for the Journal of Heredity in 1924.³² In this article, Lenz explicitly emphasized common intellectual ground between white Western Anglo-Saxon and German-speaking eugenicists. He openly referred back to Ploetz, who had “noted in particular that the Anglo-Saxons of America would be left behind, unless they developed a policy that would change the relative proportions of the populations.”³³ Germans understood the problem all too well, since they anticipated soon being in a similar situation—with respect to what they understood as the detrimental effects of the “Rhineland bastards,” the perceived increase of the Jewish population, and above all the “Slavic takeover” of the eastern German lands. Lenz also discussed what he saw as the devastating effects of the First World War.

Although Canadian, American, British, Scandinavian, and German eugenics thus all contained unique elements, there was a lot of common ground between those “national styles” of eugenic thought.³⁴ The British eugenics movement had been largely moulded by Francis Galton (1822–1911) and Karl Pearson (1857–1936) before it was transferred to the United States and Canada; in North America, the movement was particularly driven by Davenport, who kept close contacts with German leaders of the racial hygiene movement.³⁵ He was also well aware of psychiatrist Ernst Ruedin’s (1874–1952) massive research program on psychiatric genetics and epidemiology in Munich and later Germany at large.³⁶ Likewise, subsequent generations of eugenic supporters came from widely diverse political perspectives, but they all shared the belief that effects of modernization and civilization endangered the human species as in contexts of armed conflict. Nevertheless, these eugenic thinkers assumed that modern society could be improved through the “betterment” of the people’s stocks and the marginalization of the feeble-minded, the physically unfit, and the morally corrupt through planned restrictions on the reproduction of “inferior grades of humanity.”³⁷

Research-minded German brain psychiatrists of the late nineteenth century, such as anatomist and histologist Alois Alzheimer (1864–1915) in Frankfurt am Main and Munich—who worked as a colleague of the doyen of modern clinical psychopathology, Emil Kraepelin (1856–1926), at the Psychiatry Clinic of the University of Munich, who helped shape the modern field of psychiatry and mental health on an international scale—promoted the view that basic research into early neurodegenerative diseases (hereditaere Degeneration des Gehirns) should first be advanced before specific actions were taken. Later, psychiatrists like the eugenicists Alfred Erich Hoche (1865–1943) and Ruedin saw little advantage in such experimental basic research of human hereditary conditions. They rather favoured statistical and clinical “phenotype” data banking and meta-analyses to track the biological and psychological traits of the feeble-minded and mentally ill.³⁸ The engagement of psychiatrists in public health discussions of eugenics measures also developed into a strategy of bolstering professional recognition and the renown of their own discipline. Many psychiatrists and brain researchers, including Auguste Forel (1848–1931) and Constantin von Monakow (1853–1930) in Switzerland and Ruedin in Germany, had been instrumental in this regard as they developed a much bigger picture of their discipline as an all-encompassing social-medical program in which eugenics had a major role to play.³⁹ Eugenic thought thus became an important discursive tool that served clinical psychiatry well in establishing its own professional identity vis-à-vis the biological and medical sciences, and it also extended a strong influence on the next generation of young psychiatrists and neurologists such as Kurt Goldstein (1878–1965), described in chapter 7. Moreover, the boundary between the political right and left was increasingly challenged during the first decades of the twentieth century, since the eugenics movement cut across social traditionalism and progressivism in both wider public discourses and the context of mental hygiene from the 1880s to the 1930s.⁴⁰

A special case—in terms of both the rather late establishment of sterilization laws and the drastic means promoted through the negative eugenics legislation and medical measures taken in the Nazi euthanasia program—presented the development of eugenics in the German-speaking countries. While the unstable governments of the Weimar Republic had often introduced positive eugenics–oriented policies to their health and social programs, it was only during the Nazi period that Germany enacted more racial and eugenics laws than the United States and Canada.⁴¹ Nazi Germany further launched large-scale eugenics research programs, in supporting, for example, the Division for Inheritance Statistics at the German Research Institute for Psychiatry and multiple large science programs at the Berlin Kaiser Wilhelm Institute (KWI) for Anthropology and Human Genetics and the KWI for Brain Research.⁴² These programs sought to gather large-scale databases of all Germans diagnosed with inheritable psychiatric and neurological disorders and diseases.

The increasing politicization of the reorganization process of the sciences since the 1910s can be seen in, for example, the continuing creation of working groups at the national German Research Council (DFG) throughout the 1930s, which formed important networks and collaborative relationships between researchers and clinicians from all over Germany.⁴³ One such group was the Arbeitsgemeinschaft II for Racial Hygiene and Racial Politics. Representatives from all major neuroscience and biological psychiatric institutions took part in the proceedings of this specific working group. Its tasks were meticulously laid out in the founding policy paper, which included programs for public education, basic brain research, clinical psychiatric investigations, postgraduate training, research into sterilization practices, demographic statistics, and patient and family counselling.⁴⁴ Members of the advisory committee of the Arbeitsgemeinschaft II met on February 22, 1930; among them were Berlin racial anthropologist Eugen Fischer (1874–1967); the director of the KWI for Brain Research, Oskar Vogt (1870–1959); the surgeon and Preussischer Geheimrat (Prussian privy councillor) August Bier (1861–1949); Munich psychiatrist and eugenicist Ruedin; the Freiburg military pathologist Ludwig Aschoff (1866–1942); Munich public hygienist Friedrich von Mueller (1858–1941); the racial hygienist Ludwig Schmidt-Kehl (1891–1941) from Wuerzburg; venereal hygienist Ernst von Duering (1858–1944); the president of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, Friedrich Glum (1891–1974); and the racial anthropologist Liam Roiste (1882–1959) from the Reichsgesundheitsamt (National public health office) in Berlin.⁴⁵

The organizational network and multiple funding activities were not limited to the self-declared racial anthropologists, who made use of the enormous funding opportunities that were offered through the Arbeitsgemeinschaft II, as historians of psychiatry Matthias M. Weber and Volker Roelcke have shown.⁴⁶ Conversely, Ruedin, the director of the demographic division at the Deutsche Forschungsanstalt (DFA) for Psychiatry, wrote to the minister of state, Friedrich Schmidt-Ott (1860–1956), on January 16, 1930, detailing the future effects of his research on the new public tasks “of counting and identifying the mentally ill and handicapped as well as the respective disease prevalence in the individual regions of Germany” [italics added].⁴⁷ Yet credulous brain researchers also shared the values and promoted the ideals of the new German Research Council (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG), as did Vogt, a human cortex researcher and the director of the KWI for Brain Research in Berlin-Buch. In a letter to the DFG president, Friedrich Schmidt-Ott, on December 2, 1930, Vogt tried to position the emerging brain research activities as a valuable contribution to the major science programs in public health and racial hygiene and helped to move them into DFG’s institutional awareness.⁴⁸ As in many other negotiations with major funding agencies, Vogt promoted his collaborators and offered research aid through the associates in his institutes. In order to support the Gemeinschaftsaufgaben (community responsibilities), which the DFG had singled out as primary areas for its research support, Vogt also advocated for the scientific promises of the new interdisciplinary makeup of his own institute and underlined the huge progress that had been made in the institute since its inception as the small Neurobiological Laboratory in Berlin in Germany.⁴⁹

All of these scholars advocated the position that it was insufficient to consider scientific achievements of clinicians and experimental research teams in isolation from their technological, economic, and cultural environments. Instead, they demanded analyzing such experimental systems as intertwined with political discourses and technological innovations during different historical epochs. The fruitful sociotechnical research conditions also attracted many international postgraduate students and visiting researchers for training in psychiatry and neurology. With financial support from the Rockefeller Foundation for the Munich DFA for Psychiatry, for example, North American students, fellows, and visiting professors flocked again to Munich and other centres of interest after the war.⁵⁰ The individual funding program of the Rockefeller Foundation, in return, enabled numerous German neuroscientists to work on the other side of the Atlantic. There, they introduced scientific practices, which were subsequently “enriched” with utilitarian ideals as well as eugenic perspectives that loomed large in the American medical communities.⁵¹

These political alignments resulted in a differentiation of psychiatric and neurological research activities that became supplemented with psychopathological, anthropometrical, and genetic counselling programs.⁵² The Rockefeller Foundation, for instance, defended its continued funding on the basis of the involvement of individual recipients and their distinct research programs. Ruedin, however, always found ways to channel parts of this financial support into the DFA’s general endowment, thus securing its contribution to the demographic department’s program on psychiatric eugenics and public mental health.⁵³ Frequently, the Rockefeller Foundation’s funding activities added up to quite substantial amounts, due to the concentration of well-supported psychiatrists in the big Reich cities. As such, its continuing support of brain research centres and eugenic psychiatric projects in places such as Munich, Berlin, Breslau, and Wuerzburg can be seen as a direct expression of its own preoccupation with sustaining the research exchanges and training conditions of North American investigators in German laboratories and hospital wards. The director of the foundation’s Division of Medical Education, Alan Gregg (1890–1957), kept a working diary from the 1910s; it shows the extent to which relations with German psychiatrists continued throughout the Weimar Republic and even in the National Socialist period. This collaborative development was particularly based on genetics and social epidemiological research and training programs in psychiatry.⁵⁴ Several chapters in this volume (e.g., chapters 4 and 6) thus resonate with the public perceptions and media portrayals of the pro-nativist conceptions and biopolitical programs from the 1920s to the 1940s, which must be understood as an important background discourse and development that brought eugenic ideals from the delineated scientific and expert circles to the social masses and literally to the streets of Europe and North America.⁵⁵

The cultural and biological contexts of “eugenics” had an important complementary influence on the field of neuroscience, because many diseases of the brain were understood as inherited. It is interesting to see that a great number of physicians in the eugenics movements had previously worked in social medicine and psychiatry.⁵⁶ For them, neurology and psychiatry became “in the true sense of the word a healing medical discipline,” because the therapeutic repertoire—electrotherapy, surgery, pharmacotherapy, and physical therapy—were still very limited at the time.⁵⁷ These social and technological trends developed into a multidisciplinary albeit murderous field in the context of Nazi medicine, where the healing of the sick and the extinction of the weak coincided with barbarous endeavours of health professionals and medical and neuroscientific researchers. Hence, the state and development of medicine and public health in the Third Reich cannot be regarded as mere contingencies. Moreover, the idea that medical knowledge was intrinsically in conflict with ethical values may not be unique to this period.⁵⁸ The narrative has served here to answer some of the questions that arise through the conundrums posed by the Nuremberg trials, from 1945 to 1947: namely, the effect of prima facie absent ethical rules for scientific and medical aberrations during the first decades of the twentieth century (see also chapter 8). This absence eventually made it necessary to treat Nazi atrocities legally as “war crimes” rather than as medical misconduct.⁵⁹

There are many adherents to the thesis that “science thrives only under democracy and that democracy in turn benefits from values implicit in the free pursuit of science” and one could even see it as a well-entrenched view in the Anglophone research literature.⁶⁰ One such example, Robert N. Proctor’s work Racial Hygiene: Medicine under the Nazis, is very fitting, with regard to both recent developments in the biomedical sciences and respective scholarship in science and technology studies.⁶¹

LOOKING AHEAD

Researching the history of eugenics in relation to psychiatry and mental health also offers us important insights into many ongoing debates in sociobiology, political philosophy, and anthropology regarding reproductive rights and modern biopolitics in North America and elsewhere. As the final two academic commentary chapters—which were individually solicited from specialists in the field of disability policy and disability studies—have shown, disability studies and disability policy still deal with the socially problematic long-term effects of eugenic legacies and preserved legislation. The findings of the two commentary chapters strengthen the argumentation in this edited collection through highlighting the plurality of recent scholarly debate. They focus on eugenics’ thrust to actively set parental and women’s reproductive choice and agency in the same philosophical and moral context as eugenics. They also stress that eugenics as state policy differed substantially from active decision-making by parents about whether to terminate their own pregnancy, since the former was about state-sponsored efforts at societal manipulation. At the same time, this line of thinking speaks to emerging theoretical and social debates about the relationship between early to mid-twentieth-century eugenics and modern-day reproductive technologies. For some disability scholars, in utero diagnoses of trisomy 21, for example, fall on the same philosophical plane as early twentieth-century psychiatric assertions of feeble-mindedness and idiocy. Linking these two ideas is part of what disability theorist Rosemarie Garland-Thomson calls a broader “eugenic logic.”⁶² Along these lines, the commentaries note that eugenics was based on widespread beliefs that “idiocy” and “feeble-mindedness” needed to be weeded out of society for the good of society and, further, that the state and its agents had a duty and a responsibility to make this happen. They also suggest that parents’ choice to terminate pregnancies based on knowledge of disabilities in the fetus amounts to the same thing; that is, it is reflective of a society that does not value disability, that sees disability as a “misfortune,” as “regrettable” and “limiting.” This, of course, raises difficult questions about how societies value or potentially do not value human life. Who decides what lives are valuable? And who plays an active role in determining how to promote valuable lives and curb (or terminate) so-called valueless lives?

While Canada and the United States witnessed new “social reform movements” during the twentieth century in areas such as public health and psychiatry, they also saw the rise of eugenics in its first decades—the separation of “abnormal” populations from the “normal” and the commencement of drastic and often inhumane public mental health measures. Specifically, in the public mental health sector, the Canadian provinces of Alberta, British Columbia, and Saskatchewan experimented with different levels of forced sterilization, institutionalization, and segregation, by also looking at the “therapeutic consequences” of an eugenics program (see Appendix). To emphasize the case of Saskatchewan here further, attention can be drawn to the work and contributions of historian Erika Dyck, at the University of Saskatchewan, who established that the relationship between psychiatry and the legacies of eugenics was not one of an organized eugenics program in that province. Her argument has been, rather, that an unorganized and non-policy-based eugenics situation and movement existed in Saskatchewan. It did not allow too strong of a connection to be made between eugenics and psychiatry—other than the comparable cases of Alberta and Manitoba (which are both addressed in our volume, particularly in chapters 2, 3, 4, and 5)—as also depicted in Dyck’s publication, co-authored with Alex Deighton, titled Managing Madness, on the Weyburn Mental Hospital in Saskatchewan.⁶³

The Sexual Sterilization Act, enacted in Alberta in 1928, legalized coerced sterilization of the mentally ill and “morally deficient.” It was a radical piece of legislation that marked a stark change in psychiatric care programs and in the extent to which the mentally ill were perceived as patients or even as a threat to society. In response, official legislation also impinged on medical practice in psychiatric institutions, such as the asylums at Ponoka and the Michener Centre in Red Deer, and became likewise informed by the physicians’ knowledge and practices that shaped governmental and public views considerably.⁶⁴ In this volume, historians, philosophers, psychologists, sociologists, and disability scholars have discussed the knowledge basis and sociocultural background in the public mental health sector from the 1920s to the 1970s. In particular, questions were raised and answered about the contemporary factors that brought the eugenics movement, psychologists, psychiatrists, and other physicians together in their respective eugenics endeavours. The chapters explored the intrinsic conceptual assumptions that fostered biological and somatic views in psychiatry about mental illness, following the brain-psychiatric assumptions of leading figures (such as diagnostician and clinical researcher Emil Kraepelin) and their North American counterparts, by drawing attention to Canada’s health-care system—which was affected by the same international discussions as in the United States, Britain, and Europe—and by shedding light on the impact of brain psychiatry and developments in the neurological sciences within the context of socioeconomic developments shortly before or during the first half of the twentieth century.

Eugenic discourses at the turn of the twentieth century had remarkably widespread appeal not only to medical doctors, biological, and social scientists. In this context, eugenics programs promised a biological redefinition of human morality and particularly of the modern soul. This prospect likewise accounted for the fact that professional psychiatrists were attracted to the specific implications of eugenic thought for questions of diagnosis and psychiatric treatment.⁶⁵ Quite frankly, biological scientists, psychiatrists, and social philosophers were not the only ones to have been influenced by ideas projecting an “improvement of the race” or the “breeding of social elites.”

Taken together, the historical and recent considerations regarding the development of the eugenics movement and its specific influences on the field of psychiatry and neurology in Alberta and beyond offer us the opportunity to recognize how holistic neurologists developed views of degeneration and eugenics in line with the public demands and cultural discourses of the time. Far from being restricted to the transformation in neurological and psychiatric laboratories, the integrative character of the sociotechnical concepts of “neurodegeneration,” “mental illness,” and “hereditary nervous diseases” were strongly reflected in brain researchers’ discourses of the time. Their hinge character—comprising both a researcher’s assumptions about societal issues and deliberate strategies to meet wider public demands—emerged in the contemporary psychiatric and neurological conferences in North America and Europe alike.⁶⁶ In the middle of World War I, physicians, mental health nurses, and other health-care providers emphasized that the problem of degenerative psychiatric and neurological conditions was just a reflection of the phenomena of modern cultural degeneration. It slowly but steadily crept into the behaviours, value systems, and therapeutic approaches not only of medical doctors, but also of public health nurses and nursing aids, as Mansell shows in chapter 3. Interestingly, after the First World War ended, clinical neurologists diagnosed fewer instances of “civil” degenerative diseases. These developments were all part of a transformation of the research fields of eugenics and psychiatry, which led to altered views about hereditary diseases, human behaviour, and mental health concerns.

This book complements the existing literature and provides an original understanding as to the intersections between eugenics programs in western Canada and international developments and influences. In addition, it brings the psychiatric and mental health angle into the history of eugenics, which has largely been marginalized in Canadian historiography. The editors intended to contribute a new perspective on the history of eugenics in Canada, by encouraging the contributors to apply an international and thematically, as well as geographically, comparative lens. In his ground-breaking work The Wellborn Science: Eugenics in Germany, France, Brazil, and Russia, Mark Adams stresses the importance of a comparative approach in understanding the history of eugenics.⁶⁷ While it is important to study eugenics in the local, regional, or national contexts, a comparative approach allows for the emergence of broader patterns that might not be evident in single case reports and complements the international picture of a sociobiological movement in significant global scope.

This volume may further serve as a backdrop for further research on the history of eugenics in Canada and North America. In adding to recent scholarship particularly on eugenics issues regarding the involvement of families, the contributions of communities, and analyses of the legal aspects of eugenics programs in Canada and the United States, this volume also offers a perspective that takes into account the psychiatric, mental health, and neurological dimensions of eugenics movements internationally. Eugenics was steadfastly a transnational phenomenon, where exchanges of ideas took place among different communities and societies. For example, while Canada actively received physicians from Britain to staff its hospitals and asylums, many prominent eugenicists in North America also connected with their counterparts on the Continent, in countries such as Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.⁶⁸

Among the main scholarly intentions and goals of this book, as we seek to emphasize here again in our conclusion, was to complement the received view that eugenics was a general science and practice for the improvement of the human species through selective mating of people with desirable inheritable traits. Eugenics held particular importance and meaning for psychiatrists, mental health administrators, and care workers, as the individual chapters in this edited collection show from specific western Canadian and international angles. In our narrative, we connect the individual historical perspectives assembled here with contemporary discussions about disability and human rights. An important intersection piece in this respect is chapter 8, on compensation claims, by Paul J. Weindling, which as a chronological contribution bridges the historical case studies and also offers a perspective on the global longer-term social, legal, and political effects of eugenics programs and movements in their respective psychiatric and mental health contexts. Yet, the compensation claims that Weindling investigates were subject to German and Austrian restitution laws—with the last ones expiring in the 1980s—which rather stirred the discussion toward historical (not contemporary) questions of cover-up and defensive juridical practices at the time.

Finally, ongoing debates over who has control over reproductive rights can be fundamentally understood and also deeply related to the heterogeneous developments in the historical relationship between eugenics and psychiatry. Technological advances have basically allowed modern citizens to be more selective, to decide voluntarily against handicapped and disabled children, and, in the latest turn of “newgenics,” to opt even for the genetic manipulation of particular character and biological traits through the prospects and “brave new worlds” of current bioengineering technologies.⁶⁹ The history of eugenics allows for important insights into longer-term scientific research, medical ethics developments, and current reproductive policies and practices. It highlights the need to create awareness that such positive and well-meaning historical ways of thinking are in fact similar to those that have “re-emerged” in the recent fields of newgenics and “euthenics” during the past two decades.

The history of eugenics in western Canada thus provides us with important insights into longer-term scientific research, medical ethics developments, and current reproductive policies and practices, which cannot be dissociated from their wider international psychiatric and mental health implications.