KEEPING AMERICA SANE: Psychiatry and Eugenics in the United States and Canada, 1880-1940. (RACE, HEREDITY, EUGENICS, IQ, PSYCHOLOGY, GENETICS, GERMANY, RACISM NAZI HITLER)

Ithaca, New York, U.S.A.: Cornell Univ Pr. New. 1997. Hardcover. 0801433568 .*** FREE UPGRADE to Courier/Priority Shipping Upon Request *** - *** IN STOCK AND IMMEDIATELY AVAILABLE FOR SHIPMENT - 245 pages. -- -- DESCRIPTION: What would bring a physician to conclude that sterilization is appropriate treatment for the mentally ill and mentally handicapped? Using archival sources, Ian Robert Dowbiggin documents the involvement of both American and Canadian psychiatrists in the eugenics movement of the early twentieth century. He explains why professional men and women committed to helping those less fortunate than themselves arrived at such morally and intellectually dubious conclusions. Psychiatrists at the end of the nineteenth century felt professionally vulnerable, Dowbiggin explains, because they were under intense pressure from state and provincial governments and from other physicians to reform their specialty. Eugenic ideas, which dominated public health policy making, seemed the best vehicle for catching up with the progress of science. Among the prominent psychiatrist-eugenicists Dowbiggin considers are G. Alder Blumer, Charles Kirk Clarke, Thomas Salmon, Clare Hincks, and William Partlow. Tracing psychiatric support for eugenics throughout the interwar years, Dowbiggin pays special attention to the role of psychiatrists in the fierce debates about immigration policy. His examination of psychiatry’s unfortunate flirtation with eugenics elucidates how professional groups come to think and act along common lines within specific historical contexts. -- REVIEW: Library Journal: "Psychiatric historian Dowbiggin (Inheriting Madness, Univ. Of California, 1991) traces the role of American and Canadian psychiatrists in the eugenics movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Dowbiggin portrays these psychiatrists, especially those working in mental institutions, as neither heroes nor villains but as public servants caught up in the progressivism of the times, pressured by governments and officials to change the focus of their profession from managing custodial care to implementing cost-effective treatment of mental disorders. Focusing on the professional careers of prominent psychiatrists G. Alder Blumer, C. K. Clarke, and their colleagues and successors, the author demonstrates how psychiatrists under the influence of the eugenics movement often advocated, and sometimes protested, the regulation of marriage, reproduction, immigration, and segregation of the mentally handicapped. Recommended for medical history collections." - Lucille M. Boone -- with a bonus offer-- .