Month: February 2018
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Exterminate poverty
Dr Marie Stopes and Mr Humphrey Roe opened the first birth control clinic in the British Empire on 17th March 1921. Sir James Barr recognised that dispensing contraceptives could be the check on the propagation of undesirables that he had sought. On the eve of Stopes’ Queens Hall address on Tuesday May 31st 1921, Barr…
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The marriage of undesirables
Sir James Barr made a speech The Future of the Medical Profession on 21st September 1918. At the time, tuberculosis killed 70,000 and disabled 150,000 people in Britain each year. When it struck the breadwinner, whole families would be thrown into destitution. How then could it be said that the disappearance of this terrible disease…
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Check the unfit
“The bulk of the tuberculous belong to stocks which we want ab initio to discourage. Everything which tends to check the multiplication of the unfit, to emphasize the at the fertility of the physically and mentally healthy, will pro tanto aid Nature’s method of reducing the phthisical death-rate.” Karl Pearson F.R.S. Galton Professor of Eugenics, University of London, 1912 in Tuberculosis, Heredity and Environment. “Between 1903 and 1918…
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Race breeders
“There are some self-styled eugenists—…race breeders with the souls of cattle-breeders—who declaim that the prevention of disease is not in itself a good thing. They say the efficiency of the State is based upon what they call ‘the survival of the fittest.’ This war has smashed their rhetorical phrase. Who talks now about survival…
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On miracles
On miracles, Dr Sutherland wrote: Mental attitudes towards miracles are often curious. Thus a person may blindly believe that the astral body of a fakir has been seen walking about in Canada whilst the fakir himself was asleep by a dusty roadside in India; that Home, the medium, was levitated in a trance so that…