Raymond Pearl and Eugenics

Raymond Pearl. Unknown photographer.
Taken from the website of
The Medical Archives of The Johns
Hopkins Medical Institutions.

In 1908 influential biologist Raymond Pearl authored an article entitled “Breeding Better Men.” In it, he endorsed the logic of eugenics: those with better genes ought to have more children, those with genetic diseases or innate predispositions toward antisocial behavior ought to refrain from having children. Writing just as laws providing for the involuntary sterilization of mental hospital patients were beginning to be adopted throughout the country, Pearl wrote, “How can eugenic ideals be made practically effective? Obviously not by any system of compulsion—at least, not for a long time to come.”

In the late 1920s, scientists were abandoning eugenics and Raymond Pearl led the way. In a 1927 article entitled “The Biology of Superiority,” he argued that the eugenicists’ model of human heredity had been rendered obsolete. Geneticists simply couldn’t predict which parents would have “superior” children. “It would seem high time that eugenics cleaned house,” he wrote, “and threw away the old-fashioned rubbish which has accumulated in the attic.”

But the message of reputable scientists like Pearl came too late for many. The 1930s was the height of involuntary sterilization in the United States. Pearl’s endorsement and later critique of eugenics reminds us that eugenics was never the exclusive province of quacks and that scientists often have limited influence over scientific or pseudoscientific ideas once those ideas are taken up by individuals and movements outside the academy.

Pearl's 1908 article is available here.

Pearl's 1927 article is available here.

For a thoughtful discussion of the ambiguities of Pearl's rejection of eugenics and the lessons to be drawn see Melissa Hendricks's article in Johns Hopkins Magazine.

A map of the dates on which each state adopted its sterilization laws is available here.

For statistics on involuntary sterilizations carried out in the United States as well as the political and legal contexts of such laws see Victoria Nourse's In Reckless Hands: Skinner v. Oklahoma and the Near Triumph of American Eugenics.