The doctrine put forward by Francis Galton (1822-1911) that encouraged breeding among persons of presumed higher moral and intellectual standing and discouraged it in the lower classes or those considered to be ‘inferior’. Eugenics was still practised in parts of western Europe until the middle of the 1970s. At the beginning of the 20th century, in both the UK and the US, it was considered to be a valid form of scientific practice, which indicates how changes in value judgments that determine what constitutes ‘normality’ occur across historical time. In the UK, the eugenics movement received support from left-wing politicians, but was opposed by those on the right wing of the political spectrum (perhaps because it would lead to a loss of ‘canon fodder’ for the British imperial army). In the US, it was readily accepted and promoted by the likes of Andrew Graham Bell (1847-1922), the inventor of the telephone, the civil rights lawyer Clarence Seward Darrow ((1857-1937), and (probably most surprisingly of all) the blind and deaf education reformer Helen Keller (1880-1968), perhaps reaching its apotheosis with the Chicago surgeon Harry J. Haiselden. The latter, between 1915 and 1918, allowed the deaths of about six infants whom he considered to be ‘unfit’. He even went as far as exhibiting the dying infants to the media and playing himself in the infamous pro-eugenics film The black stork in 1917.
See Asperger’s syndrome, Mental retardation, Normality, Race-ethnicity, Theory of population pressure, Typological thinking