Confronting "hereditary" disease: eugenic attempts to eliminate tuberculosis in progressive era America

The burden of tuberculosis as a permanent medical and legal challenge for mankind through centuries

Tuberculosis (TB) is a contagious disease, and throughout human history, it has been permanently opening numerous medical and legal questions, for which the answers are implied by the current social circumstances. In ancient times, insufficient knowledge of the etiopathogenesis of TB resulted in discrimination and isolation of patients. In the Middle Ages, kings used TB as a disease to secure their political power over the citizens, while TB culturally took a romanticized form during the 19th and 20th centuries, together with a great social phobia of contagion, disease, and dying on the other hand. Stereotypes were formed around all TB victims, while society tried to understand the nature of the disease and establish a civilizational relationship with it as a health problem having numerous social implications. Modern public health measures for the control of the TB pandemic were established after the discovery of the Koch bacillus in the 19th century. The invention and mass use of the BCG vaccine, the discovery of streptomycin and isoniazid, and the new era of TB treatment, with the consequent emergence of drug resistance, coepidemic with AIDS, neglect of public health facilities and the current COVID-19 pandemics threaten many legal rights of the infected and the sick and pose new challenges in its global elimination. Numerous attempts by society over the centuries to devise preventive and therapeutic measures for TB, through different levels of social obligations and activities, have had and continue to have a profound impact on the human race, shaping its further response to the victims of this deadly disease.

Reflections on the Historiography of American Eugenics: Trends, Fractures, Tensions

By the 1950s, eugenics had lost its scientific status; it now belonged to the context rather than to the content of science. Interest in the subject was also at low ebb. But that situation would soon change dramatically. Indeed, in an essay-review published in 1993, Philip Pauly commented that a "eugenics industry" had come to rival the "Darwin industry" in importance, although the former seemed less integrated than the latter. Since then, the pace of publication on eugenics, including American eugenics, has only accelerated, while the field has become even more fractured, moving in multiple and even contradictory directions. This essay explores the trajectory of work on the history of American eugenics since interest in the subject revived in the 1960s, noting trends and also fractures. The latter are seen to result partly from the fact that professional historians no longer own the subject, which has attracted the interest of scholars in several other disciplines as well as scientists, political activists, and journalists, and also from the fact that the history of eugenics has almost always been policy-oriented. Historians' desire to be policy-relevant and at the same time attentive to context, complexity, and contingency has generated tensions at several levels: within individuals, among historians, and between professional historians and others who also engage with the history of eugenics. That these tensions are resolved differently by different authors and even by the same authors at different times helps explain why the fragmentation that Pauly noted is not likely to be overcome anytime soon.