A miscarriage of medicine
How flawed evidence led to eugenic sterilization.
An involuntary residence
The Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded became home for Carrie Buck, (left) and her mother, Emma. At the 1924 court trial that tested the state's eugenic sterilization law and resulted in Carrie's sterilization, several witnesses testified that Emma -- who had been committed to the colony in 1920 -- had many children out of wedlock, though that testimony was based mostly on rumor.
Mother committed to protect foster parents
Carrie's infant daughter, Vivian, was cared for by Carrie's foster mother, Alice Dobbs. Carrie's pregnancy -- which the book reported was thought to be the result of a sexual assault by Alice's nephew -- spurred Alice and her husband, John, to have Carrie institutionalized at the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded. The fact that one of their foster children was pregnant would have endangered the Dobbs' standing with welfare officials.
"Shiftless, ignorant and worthless class"
For a 1929 treatise, leading eugenicist Harry Laughlin created this Buck family pedigree chart purporting to show how feeblemindedness ran in the family. The case, he wrote, "made use of the best available method of biological analysis of family stocks." Although Laughlin's language seems judgmental, his terms actually were meant to be the disinterested labels of hereditary analysis based on well-understood scientific categories of the day.
Honor roll for an "imbecile"
Carrie's daughter, Vivian, the supposed third imbecile in Supreme Court Associate Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.'s infamous formulation, earned honor roll grades as a 7-year-old in 1931. She, too, was sterilized. She died a year later after contracting the measles and an intestinal infection.
Shameful legacy
John H. Bell, MD, took over as superintendent of the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded when his predecessor, Albert S. Priddy, MD, died. He became the named party in the case of Buck v. Bell. By 1929, he had overseen more than 100 sterilization procedures, 90% of them on women. Sterilization, Dr. Bell said at a meeting of the American Psychiatric Assn., was an important spoke in the "wheel of progress."
"Prevent our being swamped with incompetence"
Associate Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote the Supreme Court's 8-1 majority opinion in Buck v. Bell that upheld Virginia's eugenic sterilization law. Holmes was a longtime supporter of eugenics, writing to a friend in 1920 that he favored "restricting propagation by the undesirables and putting to death infants that didn't pass the examination."