Keeping
America Sane: Psychiatry and Eugenics in the United States and Canada,
1880-1940 (Cornell Studies in the History of Psychiatry)
by Ian Robert Dowbiggin
ALL the world knows of Adolf Hitler and the
atrocities committed under his leadership during the Nazi era. But were
he and his small band of accomplices alone? Psychiatrists supplied the
flawed theories and ideas of eugenics and biochemistry which provided the
justification for wholesale slaughter of the "inferior". Timely reading
because modern psychiatry is treading down the same path once again - forgetting
about healing and concentrating instead on biology, genetics, and brain
chemistry.
Reviews
From The Publisher
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 U.S. and Canadian psychiatrists in the
eugenics movement of the early twentieth century. He shows 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. Eugenics
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 shows
how professional groups come to think and act along common lines within
specific historical contexts.
From Library Journal
Psychiatric historian Dowbiggin
(Inheriting Madness, Univ. of California, 1991) traces the role of American
and Canadian psychiatrists in the eugenics movement of the late 19th and
early 20th centuries. Dowbiggin portrays these psychiatrists, especially
those working in mental institutions, as neither heroes nor villains but
as public servants caught up in the progressivism of the times, pressured
by governments and officials to change the focus of their profession from
managing custodial care to implementing cost-effective treatment of mental
disorders. Focusing on the professional careers of prominent psychiatrists
G. Alder Blumer, C.K. Clarke, and their colleagues and successors, the
author demonstrates how psychiatrists under the influence of the eugenics
movement often advocated, and sometimes protested, the regulation of marriage,
reproduction, immigration, and segregation of the mentally handicapped.
Recommended for medical history collections. Lucille M. Boone, San Jose
P.L., Cal.
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