by Rosemarie Garland-Thomson
Eugenics
“Eugenics” is the modern scientific term that emerged in the late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century West to name the contemporary rationales and actions with which modern nation-states shaped the membership of their citizenry. The word “eugenics” itself was coined in 1883 by Sir Francis Galton, a prominent English anthropologist and statistician. Derived from the Greek to describe the pursuit of the “well born,” eugenics was promoted as the new science of improving the human race through selective breeding. Galton’s theories about creating a better future with a better population captivated American scientists in the industrial age. Yet the ideology and practice of controlling who reproduces, how they reproduce, and what they reproduce in the interest of shaping the composition of a particular population group long predate the industrial age.
Disability
Nowhere is the concept of health humanities more filled with contradictions than when it considers the human variations we call disabilities. While we might think of disability as the antithesis or lack of ability, the concept is, in fact, a historical invention born in the nineteenth century. There were and are other ways of thinking about disability, and when it comes to conceiving of disability, the goals and practices of health and those of the humanities are, at times, divergent if not conflicting. The conflict is generative.