Publisher's Synopsis
In the last two decades of the 19th century and the first three decades of the 20th century, it was widely assumed that society ought to foster the breeding of those who possessed favourable traits and discourage or prevent the breeding of those who did not. To individuals across the political spectrum, controlled human breeding - or "eugenics" as it was labelled in 1883 by Francis Galton - seemed only good common sense.;How did eugenics come to exert such powerful and broad appeal? What events shaped its direction? Whose interests did it finally serve? Why did it fall into disrepute? In spite of eugenics's bad reputation, has it survived in other guises? These are the questions this book aims to answer. The US experience is compared with those of Canada, Britain, Germany and the Scandinavian countries.;As questions about eugenics have become more urgent, scholarly and lay understandings of its history have increasingly diverged. This book aims to bridge the gap between these understandings of the history of eugenics and, thereby, enrich debate on perplexing contemporary choices in genetic medicine.
