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Latin Eugenics in Comparative Perspective

2016; Duke University Press; Volume: 96; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-3424970

1527-1900

Marcos Cueto,

Medical History and Research

Eugenics evokes themes dear to Latin American historians, such as race, social Darwinism, and social engineering. During the past few years, some historians of medicine have emphasized the hegemony in the region of a hybrid version of eugenics inspired by the works of French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who believed in soft inheritance. This version, also known as Latin eugenics, argued that national racial stocks could be improved by social and political forces—mainly preventive medicine and mass education—without resorting to population control, abortion, or euthanasia. In contrast, an orthodox version of eugenics ruled in Germany, the United States, Great Britain, and Scandinavian countries, which applied the strict hereditarianism of Gregor Mendel and Charles Darwin to human beings. This version advocated “negative,” and sometimes radical, interventions by the state to accelerate the process of natural selection via the elimination or segregation of “inferior” races and individuals (such as Jews, Roma, and some criminals) and the sterilization of individuals that lived with so-called heritable diseases (such as alcoholism and mental diseases). Both versions supported “positive” interventions such as promoting the reproduction of individuals with “superior” racial traits. However, the boundary between the two versions of eugenics is not clear in most scholarly studies on the history of eugenics.This book is a sound effort to identify this boundary. It is also a valuable effort to explain how the hybrid version of eugenics was transnational, marking the political and medical life of central and southern European and Latin American societies during the first half of the twentieth century. An important commonality across all these spaces was the ability of supporters of Latin eugenics to reinvent themselves and adapt to adverse conditions. A significant difference between Europe and Latin America was that Latin eugenics was only embraced by a minority of doctors in the former, while it became dominant in the latter. The authors explain the origin and development of key concepts in Latin eugenics, including pronatalism and opposition to birth control methods (which was related to Catholicism); puericulture, or the hope that maternal care combined with state measures would protect infants and mothers; and homiculture, or the physical improvement of individuals. The authors also describe in detail major international meetings and summarize the publications of Latin eugenicists. The nuanced discussion of changes and continuities in eugenics in France and Italy—the leaders of Latin eugenics—is comprehensive and will be useful to Latin American researchers and any historian interested in the global circulation of medical knowledge during the first half of the twentieth century. The sophisticated examination of eugenics in Romania can illuminate future investigations and suggest topics of comparison for a region of the world that might appear remote to Latin American scholars. The brief discussion of what happened with eugenics during the early post–World War II period is also very interesting. The authors suggest that Latin eugenic ideals endured in Latin America after World War II precisely because they were heterodox, because they did not contradict Catholic traditions and the pronatalism of governments and politicians, and thus could easily blend with official politics and culture (in contrast to Europe, where all versions of eugenics were discredited with the defeat of the Nazis).Unfortunately, this book has some problems. First, the treatment of Latin America is frequently superficial. Latin American medical doctors and institutions appear with insufficient consideration of the dense historiography of eugenics in the region, of local and subnational dynamics, of why different eugenic discourses coexisted, and of the subtle hierarchies within medical communities that made some physicians more relevant than others. The little attention paid to context means that the authors miss topics related to eugenics such as racism against the indigenous population, the acute prejudices against Asian American communities, the link between machismo and the glorification of motherhood, and the manipulation of population and immigration policies by authoritarian regimes. A second problem is that the term Latin is taken for granted; there is no discussion of how it has been supported, criticized, or problematized by some historians. A paragraph of the introduction explains in simplistic terms the common features of Latin countries, such as the linguistic legacies of the Roman Empire and Roman Catholicism, and includes among such countries France, Italy, Spain, Belgium, Romance-speaking Switzerland, Portugal, Romania, and several Latin American nations (especially Argentina, Mexico, Cuba, Brazil, Paraguay, Peru, Venezuela, and Chile). A third problem is that important historical studies on Latin America do not appear in the bibliography or the book's discussion. Some of the publications of well-known authors such as Nancy Leys Stepan, Alexandra M. Stern, Marisa Miranda, and Gustavo Vallejo—to mention a few—do appear in the bibliography, but no articles from the Brazilian journal História, Ciências, Saúde-Manguinhos (which has published several studies on eugenics and race) are cited. The book edited by Marisa Miranda and Gustavo Vallejo entitled Darwinismo social y eugenesia en el mundo latino (2005), which has a similar perspective to the book reviewed here, is also missing.Despite these problems, this work systematizes some essential information on the origins of Latin eugenics during the turn of the twentieth century, helps us understand the development of the official goal of modernization in Latin American societies during the interwar period, and presents a suggestive idea for how to comprehend the persistence of eugenics and racism in Latin America after World War II.