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A Brief Look at Lucien Howe and his Eugenics

Dr. Lucien Howe (1848-1928), a noted ophthalmologist practicing in the late 19th Century, is remembered primarily for his groundbreaking work in blindness prevention. In addition to founding a prestigious laboratory (1926) that still bears his name today, the American Ophthalmology Association has named its highest award - the Lucien Howe Medal - after him.

He was also one of many prominent figures of that age who supported the eugenics movement.

Eugenics, or "good breeding," developed as a result of then-new scientific discoveries about the nature of heredity - about the role genes played in transmitting certain characteristics from one generation to the next. Based on their limited knowledge, many eugenicists came to believe that everything from poverty and criminality to epilepsy and blindness was a physically heritable condition (regardless of its actual cause). As such, children of "sufferers" could be expected to present with the same constellation of undesirable characteristics as that which had hobbled their parents.

Howe saw the new ‘science’ as just one more weapon in his war against preventable blindness. He believed that by sterilizing the blind, and perhaps their parents, this undesirable characteristic would be wiped out along with the suffering he said it caused. Rather than seeing the blind as people first, he saw them more as units of misery, the elimination of which created a net good for society.

And severe visual impairment - or rather, the social consequence of it - did indeed cause suffering in that era, when most educators and doctors warehoused affected people on the mistaken assumption that they could not participate in a sighted world without constant supervision.

Although new scientific discoveries, along with the perversions of the Second World War, caused a backlash against 'eugenics' itself, the underlying principles of it were still practiced and codified by law in some places (as legal forced sterilization) until the early 1970's.

Even while blind and visually impaired people have made great strides in their fight for equality, most people are still ignorant about the true effects of the condition, and would unknowingly subscribe to eugenic ideas in order to avoid seeing it in their offspring. Nothing drives home the existence of this fear more than the conclusions presented at the excellent Cost of Blindness Conference (January 2004) held in Toronto, Canada. Not only did speakers discuss the social costs associated with vision loss, but many tried to differentiate between the negative effects of blindness, and the negative effects of social attitudes towards it.

The betterment of humanity should be the foundation and purpose of all science - this, eugenicists like Howe knew - but the human race is improved best when it is advanced as a whole and not at the expense of some of its members.

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