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Legacies of Eugenics: How Eugenics Shapes Science and Medicine

By Nova Scholar Osagie Obasogie 
July 22, 2024

Back in 2018, two years after joining the University of California, Berkeley School of Public Health, an administrator sent an email to the faculty listserv about new funding opportunities. As I read through the message, I noticed something called the “Genealogical Eugenic Institute Fund,” which was described as “a fund . . . [to] support research and education in the field of eugenics.” I was stunned. 

Eugenics is selective breeding among humans. It’s the idea that only the “fittest” people should have children, and that science and medicine should be used to discourage reproduction by those who don’t meet this standard. At its inception in the late 19th century, “fitness” was thought to implicate everything from mental and physical health to class status to notions of sexuality and education. Educated, able-bodied, and wealthy people were thought to be ideal; people exhibiting disability or poverty, or of a racial/ethnic “stock” deemed inferior, were seen as costly burdens on society that should be avoided. The results were disastrous. The turn of the century saw the growth of troubling practices such as forced sterilization, immigration and marriage restrictions, and genocide – all in the name of eugenics.  

I worked with a group of faculty members to raise concerns about the fund and to learn more about it. The fund was suspended by campus administrators and later repurposed for anti-eugenic programs and activities. 

Over the past several years, we have been reminded of the various ways that eugenics was not simply a fringe idea among Nazis during a limited period, but rather a global phenomenon that shaped the worldview of many influential people. Less attention has been paid to how eugenic ideas persisted after World War II to shape important aspects of science and medicine. 

With the support of the Nova Institute for Health, I have partnered with the Los Angeles Review of Books to begin a series titled Legacies of Eugenics that solicits original essays from prominent writers who will explore how eugenics continues to impact science and medicine, what this means for our human future, and opportunities for reflection, resistance, and re-making our work as health scientists and professionals. I recently wrote an introduction to the series, and subsequent essays will be published every few weeks. I hope that you will follow our work and share it with your colleagues. 

Legacies of Eugenics essay series:

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Healing is facilitated through safety, persistence, and trust.

  • Persistence: “People did not simply progress through this sequence and experience healing. The healing journey was a recursive, back and forth process. They found helpers, used the skills/resources that those helpers provided, found other helpers that provided more resources and used those skills and resources. As this process continued, people experienced a gradual amelioration of their suffering. Although many despaired at times, all demonstrated the quality of persistence—they refused to give up.”
  • Safety & Trust: “To connect to helpers, it was essential for people to feel safe in those relationships and able to trust that the person would be a helper and not a barrier to healing. Persons whose wounds included a violation of trust were especially careful about testing the safety of new relationships.”

Resources support us as we heal. They include reframing, responsibility, and positivity. “Making connections enabled participants to acquire and refine resources and skills that were essential in their healing journey. People also brought their own personal strengths to the journey.”

  • Reframing: “A particularly important skill was the ability to reframe—that is to look at suffering through a different lens.” This does NOT mean minimizing trauma or pain, but rather it often means the opposite: understanding what happened was wrong, unfair, or uncontrollable and that we are not to blame for it.
  • Responsibility: While we don’t have control over what happened to us, we are the only ones who can help ourselves heal. “A third essential resource that people acquired or refined was the ability to take an appropriate amount of responsibility for their healing journeys. They participated actively in the process of healing. Once again, some participants already had developed this skill, and some acquired or refined it from their helpers.”
  • Positivity: “Another resource that people acquired or refined during their healing journey was choose to be positive—that is to have some optimism about their situation.” People have varying predispositions to positivity. In the study, positivity was important in helping people heal. This doesn’t mean a toxic positivity, but rather simply finding some good in life and feeling hopeful about our situations.

“Connection to others was an essential part of all the healing journeys.” Humans are social creatures, and even the most introverted of us need close relationships. Friends and family add meaning and value to life and help support us, in good times and bad. 

When we experience relational trauma, relationships can feel scary, but reestablishing safety and trust in relationships is where the healing happens. (To be clear, we do not mean reestablishing safety and trust with abusers, but rather finding other healing relationships.) 

“When safety and trust had been established, people were able to connect with helpers. The nature of the behaviours of helpers that fostered healing ranged from small acts of kindness to unconditional love.”

  • “Moving from being wounded, through suffering to healing, is possible. It is facilitated by developing safe, trusting relationships and by positive reframing that moves through the weight of responsibility to the ability to respond.”
  • “Relationships with health professionals were among these but were not necessarily any more important to the healing journey than other kinds of helpers, which included family members, friends, spirituality and their God, pets, support groups, administrators, case workers and supervisors.”

Healing probably means different things to different people, but one definition that emerged from the study is: “The re-establishment of a sense of integrity and wholeness.” 

Healing was an emergent property that resulted from each individuals’ complex healing journey, a result of bridged connections between resources and relationships. “…they gradually found relief from suffering and began to exhibit emergent characteristics: a sense of hope, self-acceptance, and a desire to help others—the immediate precursors to healing.”

 In varying degrees, “they were able to transcend their suffering and in some sense to flourish.” 

  • Helping Others: We find meaning in helping others. “Understanding that suffering gives the strength and experience to help others in similar situations.”
  • Hope: We begin to have hope that we will not always feel this bad. A Crohn’s patient said, “I think gradually I realized that I was going to feel better. I did have days when I actually didn’t vomit, when I did feel better. And I think gradually I came to believe that maybe I could have a normal life again.”
  • Self-Acceptance: We see our inherent value and understand that we are not to blame for our suffering. A participant living with HIV said, “I’m really proud of myself. I think that now I still want to live. I don’t want to die, and I really love myself a lot. I have a lot of comfort in myself.”

Suffering is the ongoing pain from wounding. 

There is some debate about whether people always experience suffering on the path to healing.

Wounding happens when we experience physical or emotional harm. It can stem from chronic illness or by physical or psychological trauma for which we do not have the tools to cope, or a combination of those factors. 

“The degree and quality of suffering experienced by each individual is framed by contextual factors that include personal characteristics, timing of their initial or ongoing wounding in the developmental life cycle and prior and current relationships.”

Characteristics: How predisposed someone may be to wounding/how many tools and resources someone may have to deal with trauma/illness.

Lifestages: Developmental timing plays an important role in the impact of trauma — young children often do not have the same resources as older adults.

Relationships: Relationships can provide solace and support for those suffering, while lack of healthy relationships can prolong suffering.