Psychiatry and the Legacies of Eugenics

Psychiatry and the Legacies of Eugenics PDF

Author: Frank Stahnisch

Publisher:

Published: 2020

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 9781771992688

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"From 1928 to 1972, the Alberta Sexual Sterilization Act, Canada's lengthiest eugenic policy, shaped social discourses and medical practice in the province. Sterilization programs--particularly involuntary sterilization programs--were responding both nationally and internationally to social anxieties produced by the perceived connection between mental degeneration and heredity. Psychiatry and the Legacy of Eugenics illustrates how the emerging field of psychiatry and its concerns about inheritable conditions was heavily influenced by eugenic thought and contributed to the longevity of sterilization practices in Western Canada. Using institutional case studies, biographical accounts, and media developments from Western Canada and Europe, contributors trace the impact of eugenics on nursing practices, politics, and social attitudes, while investigating the ways in which eugenics discourses persisted unexpectedly and remained mostly unexamined in psychiatric practice. This volume further extends historical analysis into considerations of contemporary policy and human rights issues through a discussion of disability studies as well as compensation claims for victims of sterilization. In impressive detail, contributors shed new light on the medical and political influences of eugenics on psychiatry at a key moment in the field's development."--

Psychiatry and the Legacies of Eugenics

Psychiatry and the Legacies of Eugenics PDF

Author: Frank W. Stahnisch

Publisher: Athabasca University Press

Published: 2020-07-28

Total Pages: 413

ISBN-13: 1771992654

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From 1928 to 1972, the Alberta Sexual Sterilization Act, Canada’s lengthiest eugenic policy, shaped social discourses and medical practice in the province. Sterilization programs—particularly involuntary sterilization programs—were responding both nationally and internationally to social anxieties produced by the perceived connection between mental degeneration and heredity. Psychiatry and the Legacies of Eugenics illustrates how the emerging field of psychiatry and its concerns about inheritable conditions was heavily influenced by eugenic thought and contributed to the longevity of sterilization practices in Western Canada. Using institutional case studies, biographical accounts, and media developments from Western Canada and Europe, contributors trace the impact of eugenics on nursing practices, politics, and social attitudes, while investigating the ways in which eugenics discourses persisted unexpectedly and remained mostly unexamined in psychiatric practice. This volume further extends historical analysis into considerations of contemporary policy and human rights issues through a discussion of disability studies as well as compensation claims for victims of sterilization. In impressive detail, contributors shed new light on the medical and political influences of eugenics on psychiatry at a key moment in the field’s development. With contributions by Ashley Barlow, W. Mikkel Dack, Diana Mansell, Guel A. Russell, Celeste Tuong Vy Sharpe, Henderikus J. Stam, Douglas Wahlsten, Paul J. Weindling, Robert A. Wilson, Gregor Wolbring, and Marc Workman.

Keeping America Sane

Keeping America Sane PDF

Author: Ian Robert Dowbiggin

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2018-10-18

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 1501723804

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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.

Eugenics as a Factor in the Prevention of Mental Disease

Eugenics as a Factor in the Prevention of Mental Disease PDF

Author: Horatio M. Pollock

Publisher: DigiCat

Published: 2022-11-21

Total Pages: 24

ISBN-13:

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This work aims to provide adequate and reliable information on mental health. It will help prevent nervous and mental disorders and raise the standards of care and treatment for those suffering from them. It is for anyone who, because of mental troubles, cannot adjust to their environment to live happy and efficient lives.

Plastic Legacies

Plastic Legacies PDF

Author: Trisia Farrelly

Publisher: Athabasca University Press

Published: 2021-07-12

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 1771993278

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There is virtually nowhere on earth that remains untouched by plastics and the situation presents a serious threat to our natural world. Despite the magnitude of the problem, the interventions most often put in place are consumer-led and market-based and only nominally capable of addressing the issue. As the problem worsens and neoliberal ideologies limit the world’s responses to this crisis, there is a growing need for legislative frameworks that attend to the complex social and ecological issues associated with plastics. The contributors to this volume bring expertise from across academic disciplines to illustrate how plastics are produced, consumed, and discarded and to find holistic and integrated approaches that demonstrate an understanding of the wide-ranging problem. From the plasticization of earth’s oceans to the endocrine disrupting chemicals that have the potential to seriously harm life as we know it, these essays beg the question that we all must answer: what is our plastic legacy? With contributions by: Imogen E. Napper, Sabine Pahl, Richard C. Thompson, Sasha Adkins, Stephanie B. Borrelle, Jennifer Provencher, Tina Ngata, Sven Bergmann, Christina Gerhardt, Elyse Stanes, Tridibesh Dey, Mike Michael, Laura McLauchlan, Johanne Tarpgaard, Deirdre McKay, Padmapani Perez, Lei Xiaoyu, and John Holland.

In the Public Good

In the Public Good PDF

Author: C. Elizabeth Koester

Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP

Published: 2021-09-15

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 0228009715

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In the early twentieth century, the eugenics movement won many supporters with its promise that social ills such as venereal disease, alcoholism, and so-called feeble-mindedness, along with many other conditions, could be eliminated by selective human breeding and other measures. The provinces of Alberta and British Columbia passed legislation requiring that certain “unfit” individuals undergo reproductive sterilization. Ontario, being home to many leading proponents of eugenics, came close to doing the same. In the Public Good examines three legal processes that were used to advance eugenic ideas in Ontario between 1910 and 1938: legislative bills, provincial royal commissions, and the criminal trial of a young woman accused of distributing birth control information. Taken together, they reveal who in the province supported these ideas, how they were understood in relation to the public good, and how they were debated. Elizabeth Koester shows the ways in which the law was used both to promote and to deflect eugenics, and how the concept of the public good was used by supporters to add power to their cause. With eugenic thinking finding new footholds in the possibilities offered by reproductive technologies, proposals to link welfare entitlement to “voluntary” sterilization, and concerns about immigration, In the Public Good adds depth to our understanding. Its exploration of the historical relationship between eugenics and law in Ontario prepares us to face the implications of “newgenics” today.

Disalienation

Disalienation PDF

Author: Camille Robcis

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2021-05-03

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 022677788X

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From 1940 to 1945, forty thousand patients died in French psychiatric hospitals. The Vichy regime’s “soft extermination” let patients die of cold, starvation, or lack of care. But in Saint-Alban-sur-Limagnole, a small village in central France, one psychiatric hospital attempted to resist. Hoarding food with the help of the local population, the staff not only worked to keep patients alive but began to rethink the practical and theoretical bases of psychiatric care. The movement that began at Saint-Alban came to be known as institutional psychotherapy and would go on to have a profound influence on postwar French thought. In Disalienation, Camille Robcis grapples with the historical, intellectual, and psychiatric meaning of the ethics articulated at Saint-Alban by exploring the movement’s key thinkers, including François Tosquelles, Frantz Fanon, Félix Guattari, and Michel Foucault. Anchored in the history of one hospital, Robcis's study draws on a wide geographic context—revolutionary Spain, occupied France, colonial Algeria, and beyond—and charts the movement's place within a broad political-economic landscape, from fascism to Stalinism to postwar capitalism.

A Human Garden

A Human Garden PDF

Author: Paul-André Rosental

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2019-12-01

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 1789205441

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Well into the 1980s, Strasbourg, France, was the site of a curious and little-noted experiment: Ungemach, a garden city dating back to the high days of eugenic experimentation that offered luxury living to couples who were deemed biologically fit and committed to contractual childbearing targets. Supported by public authorities, Ungemach aimed to accelerate human evolution by increasing procreation among eugenically selected parents. In this fascinating history, Paul-André Rosental gives an account of Ungemach’s origins and its perplexing longevity. He casts a troubling light on the influence that eugenics continues to exert—even decades after being discredited as a pseudoscience—in realms as diverse as developmental psychology, postwar policymaking, and liberal-democratic ideals of personal fulfilment.

A New Field in Mind

A New Field in Mind PDF

Author: Frank W. Stahnisch

Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP

Published: 2020-03-12

Total Pages: 587

ISBN-13: 0228000513

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In recent decades, developments in research technologies and therapeutic advances have generated immense public recognition for neuroscience. However, its origins as a field, often linked to partnerships and projects at various brain-focused research centres in the United States during the 1960s, can be traced much further back in time. In A New Field in Mind Frank Stahnisch documents and analyzes the antecedents of the modern neurosciences as an interdisciplinary field. Although postwar American research centres, such as Francis O. Schmitt's Neuroscience Research Program at MIT, brought the modern field to prominence, Stahnisch reveals the pioneering collaborations in the early brain sciences at centres in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland in the first half of the twentieth century. One of these, Heinrich Obersteiner's institute in Vienna, began its work in the 1880s. Through case studies and collective biographies, Stahnisch investigates the evolving relationships between disciplines – anatomy, neurology, psychiatry, physiology, serology, and neurosurgery – which created new epistemological and social contexts for brain research. He also shows how changing political conditions in Central Europe affected the development of the neurosciences, ultimately leading to the expulsion of many physicians and researchers under the Nazi regime and their migration to North America. An in-depth and innovative study, A New Field in Mind tracks the emergence and evolution of neuroscientific research from the late nineteenth century to the postwar period.

Legacies of Modernism

Legacies of Modernism PDF

Author: P. McBride

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2007-01-22

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 0230603181

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Between 1890 and 1950 modernist art and culture set out to challenge century-old notions of the individual and the community, culture and politics, morality and freedom, placing into question the very foundations of Western civilization. The essays in this volume present a novel assessment of various manifestations of modernism in Germany and Scandinavia by posing the question of its critical and political impact beyond traditional polarities such as right vs. left, illiberalism vs. Enlightenment, apolitical vs. engaged. In drawing on a wide range of disciplinary perspectives, including literary studies, art history, film and visual studies, urban studies, musicology, political theory, and the history of science and technology, the essays in this volume reexamine modernism's bold inquiry into areas such as the relation of art to technology and mass politics, the limits of liberal democracy, the reconceptualization of urban spaces, and the realignment of traditional art forms following the rise of new media such as film. The volume's contributors share a belief in the timeliness of modernism's critical impulse for a contemporary age confronted with ethical and political dilemmas that the modernists first articulated and to which they attempted to respond.