History of Healthcare Part 9: Eugenics and Medical Progressivism

As the AMA gained power and scripted a plan to commandeer the medical system, it used its medical-racial script to leap on the progressive train, including an embrace of eugenics. Eugenics flowed from the medical racial script, and according to historians, was the secular religion of progressives.  It was deemed to be sanctified science, taught at all major universities, and penetrating the hearts and minds of those who believed that science would solve the world's problems.  Like German progressive medical science, eugenics relied on discrete numerical measurements to reach conclusions about race, intelligence, and even body habitus deemed to be scientifically unassailable.  Thus were most of those who reformed health care in the German-progressive tradition also deeply steeped in eugenics.  While we call eugenics pseudoscience today, that's very deceptive, because in its day it was solid science, and those who discredited eugenics were considered pseudoscientists.  Hence we see that medical science had from the beginning specious origins, and it would only get more muddled and dogmatic as the AMA grew and spread its gospel across the nation.