The Gene: An Intimate History

by Siddhartha Mukherjee

The vast sterilization and containment programs required the creation of an equally vast administrative apparatus. By 1934, nearly five thousand adults were being sterilized every month, and two hundred Hereditary Health Courts (or Genetic Courts) had to work full-time to adjudicate appeals against sterilization. Across the Atlantic, American eugenicists applauded the effort, often lamenting their own inability to achieve such effective measures. Lothrop Stoddard, another protégé of Charles Daven port’s, visited one such court in the late thirties and wrote admiringly of its surgical efficacy. On trial during Stoddard’s visit was a manic-depressive woman, a girl with deaf-muteness, a mentally retarded girl, and an “ape-like man” who had married a Jewess and was apparently also a homosexual—a complete trifecta of crimes. From Stoddard’s notes, it remains unclear how the hereditary nature of any of these symptoms was established. Nonetheless, all the subjects were swiftly approved for sterilization.