The history of Eugenics
Sir Francis Galton
Sir Francis Galton first used the term ‘eugenics’ in 1883. He defines eugenics as the “study of agencies under social control that may improve or impair the racial qualities of future generations, either physically or mentally.” Galton was born in 1822. He was pressured to follow in the footsteps of Erasmus Darwin, his great-uncle. No one knows why Galton decided to study eugenics as had little experience in biology.
Galton believed that mental, moral and physical traits were hereditary. He also believed that people could be manipulated so that the next generation would be better in quality. Finding a solution to this problem was absolutely essential to Dalton. He stated that “all creatures would agree that it was better to be healthy than sick, vigorous than weak, well-fitted than ill-fitted for their part in life; in short, that it was better to be good rather than bad specimens of their kind, whatever that kind might be.” (3)
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Galton came up with the law of “deviation from an average” to classify humans into groups. Galton established an Anthropometric Laboratory at the International Health Exhibition in 1884. Around nine thousand people volunteered to be measured for height, weight, etc. The data from Anthropometric Laboratory was converted into a statistical table. When represented graphically, the table was a curve. The further from the average somebody was, the more rare they were. The ‘defectives’ are on the far left of the chart and the most genetically gifted are on the far right. Galton hoped these results could be used to show whether a person was a good genetic specimen or not at an early age so that people with favourable genetics could