By the mid-1880s, Ploetz had propounded a eugenic racial theory. Galton’s term eugenics had not yet been translated, and Ploetz coined the term Rassenhygiene (racial hygiene). He articulated his notions of racial and social health in a multivolume 1895 work, The Foundations of Racial Hygiene. Volume one was entitled Fitness of Our Race and the Protection of the Weak. His colleagues later argued that the term Rassenhygiene should not be translated into English as race hygiene, but as eugenics. The two were one and the same.
