A Brief History of Eugenics

This image comes from a long but readable tweet thread by Craig Spencer, physician and public health history professor at Brown University:

As you can probably guess, the subject of the thread is the history of eugenics. The term isn't as old as one might think: it was coined only in the late 19th century.

Reading Spencer's thread, I found mention of names I've posted about before (here and here): Charles Davenport, H.H. Laughlin, Alexander Graham Bell, and the Eugenics Record Office, which was located in Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y.

The eugenicists' deep well of belief in protecting some form of purity, or their fear of contamination, is alien to me. Much as I dislike invoking Jonathan Haidt these days, it brings to mind his finding from The Righteous Mind that conservatives feel much more strongly about sanctity than liberals.