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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    THE CAVENDISH LECTURE 3 influences of special environments, alcohol, syphilis, tuberculosis, insanity, feeble-mindedness, all racial defects known or asserted to influence future generations, fall at once into the category of medical experience, even if ability, genius, physique, and crafts¬ manship belong less markedly within its sphere. Who are the men who, alone in the present state of our develop¬ ment in this country, can provide adequate data as to the influence of occupation, environment, parental history, on the racial quali¬ ties of future generations ? Why, in the first place they are the local medical officers of health, who, directly and through their district visitors, are recording home environment, parental occupa¬ tion, and infantile and child health and mortality. And in the second place they are the school medical officers, who are annually examining thousands of children and scheduling their character¬ istics. And in the third place they will shortly be the medical officers of the National Insurance scheme, who will have material at their disposal of even wider importance and of more interesting scope. To the outsider, like myself, it appears as if a sharp dividing line were being at present drawn right across the medical pro¬ fession. I do not suggest that men will not at first pass from one division to the other, but the interests of the two divisions will be largely distinct, the tastes of the men who follow them will be widely different, and ultimately the training will be markedly differentiated. The one class of men will be in public service, they will be studying and recording humanity in the mass—the normal and the pathological, side by side—their objects will be to enforce medico-social legislation, and to provide data from which proposals as to further legislation can be judged. The limits to the public health service seem for the time beyond our ken ; we are only at the very beginning of the movement, and its possibilities are enormous, and in one sense or another every man in that service is concerned with what makes for the racial efficiency of future generations—he must nolens volens become a eugenist. Pray understand me. I am using the term eugenist in no narrow sense. I do not signify by it membership of any pro¬ pagandist body—such societies often do more harm than good to the cause we have at heart. 1 do not understand by eugenist one who desires to segregate the mentally defective or prohibit the epileptic from parentage, although I might sympathise with i§