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Healing Society: Medical Language in American Eugenics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

Debora Kamrat-Lang
Debora Kamrat-Lang
Affiliation:
Program in the History and Philosophy of Science The Edelstein Center, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
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Abstract

American eugenics developed out of a cultural tradition independent of medicine. However, the eugenicist Harry Hamilton Laughlin and some legal experts involved in eugenic practice in the United States used medical language in discussing and evaluating enforced eugenic sterilizations. They built on medicine as a model for healing, while at the same time playing down medicine's concern with its traditional client: the individual patient. Laughlin's attitude toward medicine was ambivalent because he wanted expert eugenicists, rather than medical experts, to control eugenic practice. In contrast, legal experts saw eugenics as an integral part of medicine, though one expert challenged basing the judicial system on eugenically minded medicine. All in all, the medicalization of American eugenics involved expanding the scope of medicine to include the mutilation of individuals for the benefit of society. The judicial system was medicalized in that an expanded medicine became the basis of legislation in the thirty states that permitted eugenic sterilizations

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Article
Information
Science in Context , Volume 8 , Issue 1 , Spring 1995 , pp. 175 - 196
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995

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