The Early Eugenics Movement and Emerging Professional Psychiatry: Conceptual Transfers and Personal Relationships between Germany and North America, 1880s to 1930s

Abstract

French-Austrian psychiatrist Bénédict Augustin Morel’s (1809–1873) Traité des dégénérescences physiques, intellectuelles et morales de l’espèce humaine (1857) was fully dedicated to the social problem of “degeneration” and it became very attractive to German-speaking psychiatrists during the latter half of the 19th century. Auguste Forel (1848–1931) and Constantin von Monakow (1853–1930) in Zurich integrated Morel’s approach and searched for the somatic and morphological alterations in the human brain; a perspective of research that Ernst Ruedin (1874–1952) at Munich further prolonged into a thorough analysis of hereditary influences on mental health. This paper investigates the continuities and major differences within some early eugenic traditions of the emerging field of psychiatry in the German-speaking countries and North America.