Operations For Goats Of All Ages

The recent shootings at the Holocaust Museum in Washington by an 88-year old white supremacist and of Dr. George Tiller, an abortion doctor in Wichita, by another white-supremacist-Montana-Freeman-wacko made me think of a fascinating book I had read a couple of years ago that also concerned sex.

The book is “Better For All The World: The Secret History Of Forced Sterilization And America’s Quest For Racial Purity” by Harry Bruinius. I kept extensive notes when I read it because of his premise that America’s attempt to keep the mentally retarded (called imbeciles, morons, defectives and other choice labels) from reproducing themselves ended up supplying the Nazi Party and Adolf Hitler with the guidelines, principles, techniques and philosophy of how to create and maintain a master race.

People who are greedy, ambitious, and sometimes filled with larceny can take advantage during a period when science is still dazzled by ignorance. In the 1930s Dr. John Brinkley became one of the richest men in America, a medical quack and a serial killer all at the same time. He took advantage of our perpetual rut. He convinced impotent men that he could solve all of their erectile dysfunctions by transplanting goat testicles into their scrotum. Old and young goats have a certain reputation, jumping both young and old bones, whether human or goat. Evidently the goat testicles lost their potency in the transfer, and many men died. Brinkley thought that he could get to the billfolds of men by concentrating on the genital area. He opened up a specialist hospital to treat prostate and rectal problems in Del Rio, Texas and one in San Juan for colon malfunctions.

It was said Brinkley was a great actor, looking important and rich in a white suit, Vandyke beard and driving one of his dozen Cadillacs. The cars were all painted to match the red of his Bavarian mansion in Del Rio. He owned three very expensive yachts, renting one to the Duke and Duchess of Windsor whenever they required one. His mansion featured a huge theater organ played by an organist he hired away from the famous Grauman’s Theater in Los Angeles. In the entrance hallway was displayed a giant hand-painted photograph of Brinkley in an admiral’s uniform with a prize tuna he caught. It was titled “Tuna Fish and Self.” He also owned powerful radio stations that introduced country music to the country. He featured the Carter Family (including a very young Johnny Cash) Jimmie Rogers, Red Foley and Gene Autry.

In 1930, the Kansas Board of Medical Examiners pulled his license after confirming he had caused the deaths of 42 patients. But that didn’t matter to Brinkley. He moved down close to the Mexican border and started to send his “prescriptions” to patients in many states who wrote and described their symptoms to him, making another fortune.

It Is Better For The World If….

 

Dr. Brinkley concentrated on the testosterone side during his reign of error in the 1930s. Many doctors, medical boards, legislators and state governors studied the eugenics of the 19th and 20th centuries, brought about by men who thought that reproduction by “defectives” would bankrupt the world. Eugenics centered around the idea that certain people “were fitter than others” by birth. If matched with the right “breeder,” the union could produce “fitter” children. Actually this idea is still around, with some people still talking about and trying to produce “superbabies.”

Good people all over the world were very enthusiastic about the science of eugenics. According to an article in the Star Tribune in February of 2008, one of the leaders was Dr. Charles Dight of Minneapolis, founder of the Minnesota Eugenics Society in the 1920s. Dr. Dight believed that the feeble-minded were unfit to have children, so in 1933 he sent a letter to Adolf Hitler, chancellor of Nazi Germany, praising Hitler’s plan “to stamp out mental inferiority among the German people.”

Hitler had already started to sterilize thousands in the early 1930s, using medical science developed in Great Britain and the United States. Even ten years later, during the Holocaust, German concentration camps such as Auschwitz and Buchenwald the Nazis were still experimenting with sterilizations. The Tribune reporter revealed the case of 87-year-old Margot de Wilde of Plymouth, Minnesota, a Jew sent to Auschwitz with her husband at age 21. Her husband was gassed but she, because she had been a married woman, was saved for medical experiments.

She described the experiments later: “You were just called down to the room. They took X-rays and then inserted fluids into the vaginal area, and we didn’t know what it was. We thought either artificial insemination or sterilization. It didn’t hurt… but I never had children.” She later learned after the war that the Nazis were trying to develop mass sterilization methods.

 

What’s The Difference Between A Genius And A Complete Dolt?

 

A Victorian Englishman by the name of Francis Galton came up with the idea that genius must be inherited. When he studied evolution and the theories of survival of the fittest developed by his cousin Charles Darwin, Dalton theorized that man’s abilities, especially intelligence, are passed on to the next generation. He named his science “eugenics” from the Greek word “eugenes,” which means “hereditarily endowed with noble qualities.”

Later in the 19th century proponents and practitioners would use examples from history to support Darwin’s “Origin of The Species” and Dalton’s preliminary studies. They cited the cases of the Romans who threw “defective” babies into the Tiber River or left them on mountainsides to starve.

Dr. John Bell, who conducted the sterilization operation that was challenged in the courts and finally approved by the U.S. Supreme Court, wrote: “The idea of elimination… of those who were expected to be disqualified for a certain standard of physical and mental perfection, has come down to us through a great space of time… Such efforts to preserve a healthy race, cruel as they may seem, were after all but the pursuit of natural laws: the buds unfit to mature, fall; and the weaklings of the flock must perish.”

The object of restrictive marriage laws around the turn of the century was to keep “defectives” from breeding. As an example, an 1896 law in Connecticut prohibited the marriage and sexual activity of eugenically unfit women under 45. The minimum penalty for breaking the law was three years in prison. Indiana passed a law in 1905 making illegal any marriage of “mentally deficient” persons, those who would have had a “transmissible” disease (such as feeble-mindedness) or those who were habitual drunkards. By 1914, 30 states had eugenic marriage laws. As early as 1894, the superintendent of the Kansas Asylum for Idiots and Feeble-minded Youths made the announcement he had castrated 14 girls and 44 boys so they wouldn’t practice the “evil habit of masturbation.” Dr. F. Hoyt Pilcher later lost his job when newspapers discovered his actions, calling them “cruel” and “brutal.”

Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, the corn flakes pusher from Battle Creek, lectured the conferees at a 1915 conference on race betterment in San Francisco: “The world needs a new aristocracy… made up of real Apollos and Venuses and their fortunate progeny. Instead of such an aristocracy, we are actually building up an aristocracy of lunatics, idiots, paupers, and criminals. These unfit persons already have reached the proportions of a vast multitude — 500,000 lunatics; 90,000 idiots; 90,000 epileptics; and 80,000 criminals, and we are supporting these defectives in idleness like real aristocrats at an expense of $100 million a year.” Evidently corn flakes couldn’t solve all problems.

So the operation that ended up making sterilization legal in the United States was conducted on mentally retarded Carrie Buck by Dr. Bell in Virginia (an ironic note). He made accurate notes because this was going to be a court case: “She went to the operating room at 9:30 and returned to her bed at 10:30, recovered promptly from anesthesia… One inch was removed from each Fallopian tube, the tubes ligated and the ends cauterized by carbolic acid followed by alcohol, and the edges of the broad ligaments brought together with continuous suture. Abdominal wound was united with layer sutures and the approximation of the closure was good.”

 

“Three Generations Of Imbeciles Are Enough”

 

Eventually the Supreme Court ruled 8-1 that the Constitution “did not prohibit the compulsory sterilization of a U.S. citizen.” Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote the majority opinion: “We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already tap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

Holmes, who had been interested in the “science” of eugenics for years, wrote in a letter to British intellectual Harold Laski: “I have no respect for the passion of equality, which seems to me merely idealizing envy” (!).

 

 

Winston Churchill, later to become British prime minister, also supported the Court’s decision: “The unnatural increasingly rapid growth of the feeble-minded and insane coupled as it is with a steady restriction among all the thrifty and superior stocks, constitutes a national and race danger impossible to exaggerate… A simple surgical operation would allow these individuals to live in the world without causing inconvenience to others.”

 

Germans Used American Laws To Defend Themselves In War Crimes Trials

 

By the end of 1927, 28 states would have sterilization laws that could immediately survive any constitutional attacks by religious fundamentalists. Before science caught up with the reality of sterilization in the middle of the 20th century, over 65,000 women, most of them very poor, would be officially sterilized. It’s estimated that thousands more were sterilized when agreements were made between doctors and families. Americans always seem ready to accept pseudo-science in our ever-dynamic quest for moral, social, and religious purity in our society. The Nazi Party passed a comprehensive sterilization law for Germany in 1933 based on American legislation. At the Nuremberg Trials after WWII, German doctors based their war crimes defense on the fact that they had copied American precedents!

Thousands of victims of sterilization laws, both male and female, are still alive in this country because forced sterilizations took place through the 1970s. A woman in Denver, who sued the state of Colorado and lost (like every lawsuit involving forced sterilizations in the U.S.) said: “What they did to me was sexual murder. I’m just like a female spayed animal. They made me half a woman. They took my heart and left a stone, you hear me?”

Many governors have apologized for their state’s actions of the past.” There are always people who want to bring forced sterilization back. Colorado, as an example, after dropping it’s original law, has turned back new forced sterilization bills five times. The science of genetics continues to develop at a rapid pace, particularly with the identity of DNA and the human genome. We have thousands of doctors, researchers and other scientists working on the intricacies of gene inheritance, disease, cell abnormalities and hundreds of other absorbing problems. But we also have to remember that 41 percent of the world population has no access to a toilet or outhouse.

Before we put too much faith in this complicated work we should remember the sterilization of Carrie Buck by Dr. Bell. Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes was wrong when he said: “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” Carrie Buck had a three-year-old daughter named Vivian when she was sterilized. Vivian later attended one of the better public schools in Charlottesville, completing four semesters of study — and made the honor roll each semester.