Racial hygiene

Racial hygiene was a set of state-sanctioned policies in the early twentieth century by which certain groups of individuals were allowed to procreate and others not, with the expressed purpose of promoting characteristics deemed desirable. The most extensive implementation of such policies occurred in Nazi Germany (Nazi eugenics), but similar policies were implemented throughout Europe, North America, and Southern Africa.

The idea that some races were superior to others emerged in the 19th century. The concept of racial purity was developed by Arthur de Gobineau, who argued that race created culture and that race-mixing leads to chaos. Racial hygiene was historically tied to traditional notions of public health, but usually with an enhanced emphasis on heredity.The states of poverty and sickness were attributed to the individual and not social causes. A poor person was considered lacking in terms of heredity. The kind of medicine that evolved from turning these labels of “degeneration” into scientific categories was known as racial hygiene.

Francis Galton began working in 1869 to find a statistical science of heredity which he believed could encourage voluntary care in selecting partners, and in 1883 he introduced the term "eugenics" for this subject, but in the early 20th century a eugenics movement adopted ideas of Mendelian genetics and promoted negative eugenics to prevent those thought to be unsuitable from having children, and eugenics was used to legitimise policies of racial hygiene.

German social Darwinists felt the need for intervention in what they believed was the degeneration of humans. This desire for intervention was based on their belief that provision of heath care to the lower social ranks and the rapid multiplication of the poor and weak members of society contributed to the corruption of the human race. However, this discussion was not restricted to Germany. British Social Darwinist voiced his opinions on the race problem by saying that diseases such as scrofula and tuberculosis were “our racial friends” because they rid society of the weak of constitution.

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