Darwinism, medical progress and eugenics : the Cavendish lecture, 1912 an address to the medical profession / by Karl Pearson.

  • Pearson, Karl, 1857-1936.
Date:
[1912]
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Darwinism, medical progress and eugenics : the Cavendish lecture, 1912 an address to the medical profession / by Karl Pearson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    2 THE CAVENDISH LECTURE sure that it is ralher the office I hold than my personal opinions which explain that invitation and my presence here to-night. I ask myself: What is the bond between the Director of the Francis Galton Laboratory for National Eugenics and the medical profession? How far have we common ends, and how far do we follow the same path towards increased social welfare ? The founder of our laboratory, Sir Francis Galton, was descended on one side from a stock which was clinical by instinct, and produced a number of medical men of distinction. Erasmus Darwin and Robert Darwin are still honoured names in medicine. Sir Francis Darwin, being on a pleasure journey in the East, settled down in charge of a plague hospital that he might understand the nature of plague. His nephew and godson, Francis Galton—then a medical student of the Birming¬ ham General Hospital —found his chief disappointment in visiting Smyrna that the plague was over, and that he could not study it at first hand. He spent nearly four years in medical studies, partly before and partly after his mathematical work at Cambridge, and when independence came to him on the death of his father, he tells us : I abandoned all thought of becoming a physician, but felt most grateful for the enlarged insight into Nature that I had acquired through medical experiences (Memories, p. 82). Sir Francis Galton was, like his grandfather, by instinct a clinician, and that instinct, together with his four years' medical study, influenced both his lines of research and all he wrote. AVithin a few months of his death he approved the scheme we had drafted for the University Commissioners, by which the first application of any new funds accruing to the laboratory should be the provision of a permanent medical officer. I mention these matters because, from our founder downwards, we have always sought co-operation with the medical profession, and I venture to think—as a study of our publications will indicate—that that co-operation has been as generously given as it was frankly sought. Examine with me for a moment the definition of my science : National eugenics is the study of those agencies under social con¬ trol, which may improve\or impair the racial qualities of future gene¬ rations, either physically or mentally. How can you expect to do anything in a science such as that without the hearty co-operation of the medical profession ? Hereditary deformities and diseases,