Expertise and the "new science" of eugenics
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4600463 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Margaret R Eby (0000-0003-1004-5934, University of Pennsylvania, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 369 |
| Pages | 117829 |
| Publication date | 2025-03-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Social Science & Medicine (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0277-9536 • E-ISSN: 1873-5347 |
| Publisher | Elsevier BV (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1016/j.socscimed.2025.117829 |
| PMID | 39970513 |
| OpenAlex | W4407252111 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 36 |
How are unsettled forms of expertise settled to the advantage of established, but insecure, professional authorities? This research draws on the emergence of eugenics as a "new science" during the first decades of the twentieth century, investigating how medicine came to provide disciplinary authority and organization to eugenic interventions. I do so by analyzing medical publications between 1907 and 1927 to trace physicians' engagement with eugenic hypotheses, their original research pertaining to eugenics, and the growth of eugenics as an explanatory medical factor. First, I analyze the professional challenge eugenics presented to the rapidly transforming field of medicine and the domain of medical authority. Next, I show first how physicians cast eugenics as both a historical norm and a new science, reinforcing it as part of their domain while protecting their skepticism. Finally, I argue that medicine was able to legitimize unsettled science through a process of "expertise laundering" in which medicine dominated an interdisciplinary exchange of eugenic claims which obscured the unsettled science behind eugenics while bolstering its legitimacy
Engineering ethics · Eugenics · Political science · Sociology · Engineering · Law · Medical History and Research · Mental Health and Psychiatry · Race, Genetics, and Society
The Disability Studies Reader
Towards an ethics of pronatalism in South Korea (and beyond)
Eugenic Nation
Second-rate victims
Rethinking scientific authority
Trying to Reverse Demographic Decline
(Re)Defining disability in the ‘genetic age’
The Journal of the National Medical Association
Field Analysis and Interdisciplinary Science
Disability and Infanticide in Ancient Greece
From Right to Responsibility
Technologies of Expertise
The Societalization of Social Problems
Demography and the rise, apparent fall, and resurgence of eugenics
The Feminist Movement and Eugenics
The specificity of the scientific field and the social conditions of the progress of reason
Professionalism and Social Control in the Progressive Era
The Politics of Life Itself
Medicalization and Social Control
Toward a General Theory of Strategic Action Fields
From preventive eugenics to slippery eugenics
Fewer and Better Children
For a Sociology of Expertise
Eugenics
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |