A Eugenics Experiment: Sterilization, Hyperactivity and Degeneration

chapter 10 A Eugenics Experiment: Sterilization, Hyperactivity and Degeneration Erika Dyck John Smith first came to the attention of medical authorities at the age of nine- teen. He had struggled at school and his teachers claimed that he was dull. His parents were both identified as criminals and John admitted that he had mas- turbated since he was a boy about the age of twelve. As a young adult he sought medical help for his chronic masturbation. The doctor met with him, assessed his situation, and recommended a vasectomy to relieve his urge to masturbate, which authorities surmised might then alleviate his mental and intellectual problems. Two months after the operation John complained that he had gained weight and that the desire to masturbate had grown even stronger. He pleaded with his doctor to perform a more invasive surgery to remove this mental anguish and physiological burden. At this point his doctor recommended castration and the surgery proceeded apace. A year after the operation John had gained more weight but felt significant relief from his mental pains. He had also stopped masturbating. When the doctor inquired about how he had curbed his masturbation, John responded, “the desire is as great as ever, but I have the will to resist.”1 John Smith is a pseudonym I have applied to a case that appeared in the New York Medical Journal at the turn of the twentieth century. It refers to an unnamed boy in Missouri who sought help at the Indiana Reformatory in the period leading up to the passage of the first eugenics law in North America.2 1 H.C. Sharp, “The Severing of the Vasa Deferentia and its Relation to the Neuropsychopathic Constitution,” New York Medical Journal (1902) vol. lxxv (10), 413. 2 Indiana passed the first involuntary sterilization law in the world in 1907. For a careful study of the American developments, see: A Century of Eugenics in America: From the Indiana Experiment to the Human Genome Era (ed) Paul Lombardo, (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2011), p. ix for the Indiana beginning, but see the collection of essays for more on American eugenics. See also: Paul Lombardo, Three Generations No Imbeciles: Eugenics and Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008); Gregory Michael Dorr, Segregation’s Science: Eugenics & Society in Virginia (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008); Edwin Black, War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2003); Alexandra Minna Stern, Eugenic Nation: Faults & Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��6 | doi �0.��63/9789004�867�9_0�� <UN> A Eugenics Experiment 261 This example illustrates one of the characterizations of deviant or abnormal male behavior and the consequent experiments aimed at boys and men that culminated in sterilization, even including castration. It also indicates the vol- untary nature of this exchange, emphasizing that the boy himself sought medical intervention to curb activity that he believed transgressed normalcy. This self-discipline and even self-policing might attract a Foucauldian analysis con- sidering the ways in which medicalized views extended into the private realm, and even invaded the personal, intimate thoughts of this young boy such that he mastered self-control as proof of his restored health.3 Examining the actions of the medical and psychiatric community, however, suggests that concerns over male sexual habits and actions attracted attention from eugenicists and psychiatrists particularly interested in legitimizing their professional aims through experimental practices. Historian Angus McLaren has written extensively on mental health and sexuality, and in the context of male masturbation and impotence he argues that medical interventions and individual concerns had a long history of experimentation. For men suffering from impotence, for example, he found that throughout the 19th century doctors searched for reliable aphrodisiacs, which commonly resulted in “external stimulation of the genitals by fric- tions, flagellations, and galvanism” and even electrical shocks,4 aligning these (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Mark A. Largent, Breeding Contempt: the History of Coerced Sterilization in the United States (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2008); Ian Robert Dowbiggin, Keeping America Sane: Psychiatry and Eugenics in the United States and Canada, 1880–1940 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997); Harry Laughlin, “The Eugenical Sterilization of the Feeble-Minded,” in Mental Retardation in America (eds) Steven Noll and James W. Trent Jr. (New York: New York University Press, 2004), 225–231; Diane B. Paul, The Politics of Heredity: Essays on Eugenics, Biomedicine, and the Nature-Nurture Debate (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998); Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985); Wendy Kline, Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality, and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom (Berkely: University of California Press, 2001); and Johanna Schoen, Choice and Coercion: Birth Control, Sterilization and Abortion in Public Health and Welfare (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005). 3 See any range of works by Michel Foucault, including and especially: Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (New York: Vintage Books, 1994, first English transla- tion1973), which introduces his concept of the “medical gaze” emanating from clinical insti- tutions and ultimately imposing a discipline and order over bodies in a sophisticated deconstruction of the process of medicalization. 4 Angus McLaren, Impotence: A Cultural History (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007), 138. <UN>.

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