The Black Stork: Eugenics and the Death of Defective Babies in American Medicine and Motion Pictures Since 1915

by Martin S. Pernick

In the late 1910s Dr Harry J. Haiselden, a prominent Chicago surgeon, electrified the nation by allowing the deaths of at least six infants he diagnozed as defectives. Seeking to publicize his efforts to eliminate the unfit, he displayed the dying infants to journalists, wrote about them for the Hearst newspapers, and starred in a feature film about his crusade. Prominent Americans from Clarence Darrow to Helen Keller rallied to his support.; This work tells his story, using rediscovered sources and long-lost motion pictures, in order to illuminate many broader controversies. The book shows how efforts to improve human heredity (eugenics) became linked with mercy-killing and with race, class, gender and ethnic hatreds. It documents how mass culture changed the meaning of medical concepts like heredity and disease, and how medical controversies helped shape the commercial mass media. It demonstrates how cultural values influence science, and how scientific claims of objectivity have shaped modern culture. While focused on the formative years of early 20th-century America, this work traces these issues from antiquity to the rise on Nazism, and to the Baby Doe, assisted suicide: and human geonome initiative debates of today.

Genres: History, Eugenics, Nonfiction, Science, Medicine, Disability, Film

295 pages, ebook

First published April 1, 1996

Reviews

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read this in manuscript before it was published, as the author was my professor. Excellent discussion of eugenics, both from a medical, historical, and film perspective.

[Casey · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was not the book I expected.