Legacies of pre-war Eugenics and British Psychiatry[1]

John P. MASON

Abstract: Over a century ago the eugenics movement had started to become openly influential in UK society. The Eugenics agenda reinforced a negative view on the prospects of those it condemned as „unfit”. Galton took Darwin’s Natural law a step further and he suggested celibacy and institutionalised refuges for “the weak”. By 1913 it had been possible to pass the Eugenics Society inspired Mental Deficiency Act establishing the legal means to segregate ‘mental defectives’ in asylums. However, significantly a 1930’s Parliamentary Committee for Legalising Sterilisation, as a solution for eliminating heritable “feeblemindedness” was thwarted by public opposition. However, it would be another thirty years before the 1959 Mental Health Act removed in law the means to segregate individuals who might have otherwise become victimised under the looser eugenics-based terminology of the 1913 Mental Deficiency Act.

Keywords: eugenics, scientific-racism, degeneration, self-domestication, psychiatry, genetic-determinism, segregation, sterilisation.

The exhibition on the legacies of eugenics was launched at the College and marked an important historical moment of institutional reflection. The over-riding aim of the Exhibition had been to respond to the College’s Diversity and Inclusion Leads for Race Equality challenge: – i.e., to raise awareness around the lived experience of stigma and discrimination. The College’s History of Psychiatry Special Interest Group (HoPSIG)’s response was to be by education; with the Exhibition on the historical roots of Eugenics and ”scientific racism”, and how that ideology has influenced medicine, psychiatry and society. The exhibition also described the history of involvement of British psychiatrists in the eugenics movement of the twentieth century.

Over a century ago the eugenics movement which had originated in UK started to become openly influential in UK society. At that time Eugenics racist discriminatory ideas were widely adopted by the international science and psychiatry community through various institutions, this led to attempts to introduce health and mental hygiene policies and laws to try to implement a programme of Eugenics in the UK, as part of what was already becoming a global movement.

Perhaps the most unfortunate influence of the Eugenics agenda was how it reinforced a negative view on prospects of those it condemned as ”unfit”, by stating in effect that those people were less than human, and that they needed to be extracted or cut off ”weeded out” from the rest of human society, losing their rights and voice. This negative view became inculcated into the philosophy of the influential psychiatric models of psychopathology of that era, and some physical and pharmacological treatment approaches. This school of thought in medicine and the life sciences formed part of what later became known as ”Naturalism”.

Eugenics first became formalised as a science in the UK. Darwin’s Origin of Species 1859 described the theory of natural selection. Sir Francis Galton’s 1869 Hereditary Genius took Darwin’s Natural law a step further and sought firstly to apply those ideas to positively promote as he described it, “the desirable” through reproduction of their desired traits first focusing on the “inheritance of intelligence”, and he suggested celibacy and institutionalised refuges for “the weak”. Galton invented the term Eugenics in 1883.

For Galton, Eugenics stated aim was to achieve results at a population level to “improve the Race” as he termed it, at that time concerns were discussed about “Declinism” and the “Crisis of Imperialism” regarding increased urbanisation, immigration and fears grew of the dangers of a perceived rowdy and hungry multitude, the most vulnerable groups were a target for those who saw in them – what symbolised evidence of degeneration of the “genetic stock” physically, mentally and morally all became conflated in their view of what was reality and the imaginary.

Where the cause of complicated social political problems was not known, the presumption of an internal process of degeneration, of “genetics gone wrong” seemingly added legitimacy and a “progressive means” for those scientists and physicians seeking a platform to offer a solution; and it also suited social planners who favoured a eugenic focus to control rather than a socio-economic programme to help the poor and uneducated, rather than investing in people who might have seemed to be upsetting the social order as it stood.

Galton was particularly fascinated by Darwin’s concept of ”Variation under Domestication”, concerning animal breeding, and Galton extrapolated and came to believe in degeneration theory that due to domestication of civilisation the “unfit” were outbreeding the “fit”. Eugenicists on behalf of the “race” hoped to select who were “fit” and “unfit”, and therefore who were to be permitted to reproduce and to live fully and participate in society. Galton’s ideas resonated with many of his peers and were influential in the “upper echelons”.

Later Galton’s Laboratory sought with psychometrics and statistics to validate his theories as a science. The statistical methods were further developed by later chairs of the Galton Laboratory Karl Pearson and Ronald Fisher, statistical approaches that were adapted from agriculture and animal breeding as well as Mendel and Darwin were introduced to study human responses and behaviour to attempt to create the evidence base for the Eugenics science.

Eugenics ideology assumed that the value of a person was decided by “genetic determinism” located in the germ-protoplasm that was inherited, and society’s complex social problems were also simply inherited and were also genetically determined. Eugenics was proposed by those who were self-described as “Wellborn” and offered a simple solution to societal problems, and in effect a means to scapegoat, control, and blame the poor and other minority groups for the socio-political economic difficulties in society, rather than by improving social conditions. This political view of life lead to the application and attempted implementation of discriminatory policies of control over the poor and other people viewed as undesirable by the state and this was for the “good of the Race”.

The Eugenics Education Society – renamed the Eugenics Society in 1926 – was founded in London in 1907, The Society sought to promote their agenda to the general public, via The Eugenics Laboratory and the Eugenics Society, and they jointly published The Eugenics Review.

By 1913 it had been possible to pass the Eugenics Society inspired Mental Deficiency Act establishing the legal means to segregate ‘mental defectives’ in asylums. Due in part to the opposition of Lord Robert Cecil and Josiah Wedgwood, the Act rejected sterilisation. Wedgwood, with some prescience, warned in a letter to The Times that it was ”impossible for any of us to be certain as to the ultimate result of our actions, or Acts of Parliament”. The Mental Deficiency Act remained in effect until 1959, when it was repealed following the First Mental Health Act. However, people detained by the act were still being held in institutions up to the 1990s.

In 1930, the Eugenics Society’s members helped form a Parliamentary Committee for Legalising Sterilisation, produced propaganda pamphlets touting sterilisation as their solution for eliminating heritable feeblemindedness, their campaign again was not successful in Parliament due to notable public opposition.

The eminent biologist and eugenicist Julian Huxley mentored his former student CP Blacker, a Maudsley Hospital psychiatrist who later joined the Ministry of Health in 1942. Blacker was viewed as a new kind of eugenicist, more liberal, a reformist secretary of the Eugenics Society in 1931–52. Under Blacker in the post-war era there was greater attention paid to the role of contraception in reducing fertility, and to population policies.

Statistical science quantitative statistical methods from the Eugenics Laboratory claimed to confirm validity for Eugenics categories that could classify some humans into “othered” groups. However, the medical Eugenic categories (which were formal psychiatric terms at that time) such as ”idiot”, ”imbecile”, ”moral imbecile”, “defective”, “delinquent” or “feeble minded” were loose and woolly, and vague descriptions of grouped stereotypes of kinds of behaviours. This allowed large numbers of different groups of people to become subject to this control measure. The poor, the disenfranchised, and other vulnerable groups according to their race, or class or mental condition could be discriminated against segregated and confined.

Though importantly, and positively in the UK at least due to prominent public campaigns against these proposals, vulnerable groups of people were not to be subject to being sterilised under the law as a Eugenics measure. Later developments in psychopharmacology however were to place novel burdens on the brains and reproductive bodies of those individuals who became defined as mental patients and as such understood to be implicitly biologically defective according to the eugenics philosophy creed.

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”Report of the Departmental Committee on Sterilisation, 1933”, Wellcome Collection.

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[1] This paper was written for the opening of the exhibition “We Are Not Alone”: Legacies of Eugenics, curated by Professor Marius Turda at the Royal College of Psychiatrists in London. The exhibition run between 22 September 2022 and 24 February 2023.