Eugenics

At Hathi trust we find Sigerist's book
Civilization and disease, by Henry E. Sigerist

the book was listed as based on lectures givein in 1915 but here is an outtake:

SE AND THE LAW
psychiatrist, sterilized a woman who was suffering from a sexual
neurosis. In 1892 he castrated individuals for purely eugenic
reasons. Castration, however, was a serious matter because the op-
eration upsets the endocrine balance. The new methods of steriliza-
tion inaugurated in 1897 and 1898 by Kehrer in Heidelberg and
Ochsner in Chicago, namely, the severing, tying, or occlusion of
the Fallopian tubes in the woman, of the vas deferens in the man,
represented a great advance because they are relatively minor
operations which have no ill after-effects.
As soon as sterilization began to be practised by physicians as
a measure of preventing hereditary diseases, the legal question
arose. Sterilization , obviously, could be abused. If society was to
be protected, some legal regulation was necessary. The Catholic
Church has always taken a very drastic stand against all forms of
sterilization , finding its strongest sanction in the papal bull Casti
connubii of 1930. Legislation, therefore, was enacted primarily in
Protestant countries and, in Europe, first in the Swiss canton of
Vaud in 1921. An amendment to the Public Health Act declared
that an individual suffering from an incurable mental disease or
from feeble-mindedness could be sterilized. The operation had
to be authorized by the Public Health Council, which in turn
would act after having sought the expert advice of two physicians.
In the United States Indiana enacted a sterilization law as early
as 1907. It was declared unconstitutional in 1921, but new laws
were passed in 1927 and 1931. The situation was similar in other
states, and the question came before the Supreme Court in 1926.
Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes' opinion was very important.
He said: 2*
It is better for all the world if instead of waiting to execute de-
generate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their im-
becility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from
continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vac-
cination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes.
105

alas, when I tried to get the text for the following pages, the OCR wasn't working. so here are images of the pages