Eugenics in Ireland: the Belfast Eugenics Society, 1911–15

Abstract

In 1927 a classic textbook of human genetics made the following remark: We are coming to recognise more and more clearly that racial factors and especially hereditary mental factors, although they work (it cannot be too often repeated) in conjunction with other factors, are among the most influential in determining the course of a nation’s history . . . What historians regard as degeneration, sickness and ageing of a nation, what they look on as the decline of a nation are the outcome of the racial constituents of the people concerned.This view was typical of a large constituency of opinion-formers, policy-makers and scientists in the period from the late nineteenth until the middle of the twentieth century. Anxiety about the social effects of bad heredity led to the formation of eugenics societies in a considerable number of countries. These included the Eugenics Education Society of London in 1907, the German Society for Race Hygiene in 1905, the American Eugenics Society in 1912, and, in the same year, the French Eugenics Society. By the 1920s eugenics societies could be found in the Soviet Union (a legacy from Tsarist times), Mexico, Scandinavia, Brazil, Japan, and many other countries.