"In the 1930s, America was infatuated with the pseudoscience of eugenics and its promise of strengthening the human race by culling the "unfit" from the genetic pool. Along with the "feebleminded," insane, and criminal, those so classified included women who had sex out of wedlock (considered a mental illness), orphans, the disabled, the poor, the homeless, epileptics, masturbators, the blind and the deaf, alcoholics, and girls whose genitals exceeded certain measurements. Some eugenicists advocated euthanasia, and in mental hospitals, this was quietly carried out on scores of people through "lethal neglect" or outright murder. At one Illinois mental hospital, new patients were dosed with milk from cows infected with tuberculosis, in the belief that the undesirable would perish. As many as four in ten of those patients died. A more popular tool of eugenics was forced sterilization, employed on a raft of lost souls who, through misbehavior of misfortune, fell into the hands of state governments. By 1930, when Louie was entering his teens, California was enraptured with eugenics, and would ultimately sterilize some twenty thousand people."
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Essayists from the United StatesNon-fiction authors from the United StatesWomen authors from the United StatesPeople from Virginia
Original Language: English
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Ch. 1: The One-Boy Insurgency, p. 11
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Laura_Hillenbrand
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Laura Hillenbrand
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