Book: Exterminating Poverty: The true story of the eugenic plan to get rid of the poor and the Scottish doctor who fought against it.

Exterminating Poverty is the true story about the 1921 eugenic plan to get rid of the poor, and the Scottish doctor who fought against it. It book is available for sale on amazon.com, amazon.co.uk and amazon.com.au.

Three elements set the conflict in motion:

• Tuberculosis (TB) – an infectious disease that killed 70,000 Britons each year, mostly among the poor (50,000 died from Consumption or TB of the lungs);
• Eugenics – a pseudo-science whose adherents believed that Consumption was caused primarily by the defective heredity of its victims, and
• The heartless eugenicists who saw TB as beneficial for Britain because it did a rough but effective job of killing the so-called “unfit”.

It was at that point that a eugenic clinic was opened in a poor part of London that aimed to get rid of poverty by breeding out the poor. While the founder dispensed her “Prorace” (and later “Racial”) brand contraceptives to the poor women who wanted them, she campaigned for the compulsory sterilization of the poor women (and men) who did not.

Dr Halliday Sutherland attacked the clinic. He received a writ for libel from its founder, Dr Marie Stopes.

To a contemporary reader, it perhaps sounds easy… after all, who would be in favour of eugenics? Yet the list included most of the most eminent persons of the era: John Maynard Keynes, Bertrand Russell, Sir James Barr, Sir William Arbuthnot Lane, G.B. Shaw, H.G. Wells., Karl Pearson (Professor of Eugenics at University College, London), the Rt Hon George Roberts M.P., the Lady Constance Lytton and, if Stopes herself is to be believed, Prime Minister Lloyd George.

Exterminating Poverty tells the true story of Dr Halliday Sutherland’s fight against the “settled science” of his era.