The scientific charity movement relied on a slew of new inventions: the caseworker, the relief investigation, the eugenics record, the data clearinghouse. It drew on what lawyers, academics, and doctors believed to be the most empirically sophisticated science of its time. Scientific charity staked a claim to evidence-based practice in order to distinguish itself from what its proponents saw as the soft-headed emotional, or corruption-laden political, approaches to poor relief of the past. But the movement’s high-tech tools and scientific rationales were actually systems for disempowering poor
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