ON EUGENICS, THE QUAKERS, AND MENTAL HEALTH

HERE IS AN EXCERPT FROM MY SPECULATIVE NOVEL THAT IS VERY RELEVANT TO OUR PROBLEMS OF THE MOMENT. SOME IMPORTANT HISTORICAL EVENTS ARE FACTUALLY DESCRIBED

                                                                                            

                                                                             1.4. ANNIVERSARY CONGRESS

       During July 2712, Drs. McCull and Skulltwister attended an event of singular importance in a luxurious conference centre on the lakeside campus of the University of the Sunrise in Trivoli. The 111 th. Interstellar Eugenics Congress was organised by the Eugenics Society of Qinsatorix, and the Society's president, Princess Margaret of the Asturias officiated at the opening ceremony. Knuddy was scheduled to present a short contributed paper during the second afternoon of the conference, entitled Winnowing and Sifting in Negative Eugenics.

      When Alistair and Knuddy entered the conference vestibule they were just in time to see the fast fading Dowager Empress unveiling an 800 year anniversary plaque. The inscription celebrated the First International Eugenics Congress, which was attended by over 1000 delegates and hangers-on, including the influential British politicians Arthur Balfour and Winston Churchill. The Congress took place during July 1912 at the University of London in South Kensington, England. All the delegates were invited to a prestigious schmoozefest in the Duchess of Marlborough's mansion. They included high-powered groups of Italians, Germans and Yanks, and Dr. Evil himself, the notorious Eugen Fischer, the future Director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology in Berlin, and torturer by medical experimentation of numerous Jews, gay people and gypsies in the Nazi concentration camps,

      Knuddy struggled through the heaving masses and into the Kennedy-Galton lecture theatre, where a paltry audience of 11 assorted humanoids awaited him. But he was glad to see the hairy First Minister and Foreign Secretary chewing the cud on the velvet sofa The panoramic view of the mercurial Lake Nefertiti, from the purple pines on Picnic Point to the golden Statue of Liberty by the source of the Tiber, was truly magnificent.

        Knuddy talked crap for fully twenty minutes about how beneficial he felt the winnowing and sifting of 'inferior' sub-populations had been, ever since 1912, when seeking to 'improve' the humanoid stock in the Sol and Aton solar systems. When Knuddy finished, there was a ripple of applause, and a single question. That came from a green-eyed Quaker with a wispy beard, an eminent historian of Statistics, Psychiatry and Eugenics.

       Knuddy agreed with the historian that the Society of Quakers should take much of the credit for the early developments in Eugenics (after Francis Galton coined the term in 1883), since Galton and several other leading eugenicists were either born into wealthy Quaker families or influenced by Quaker doctrine. And in his 1911 will, Sir Francis financed the first three Professors of Eugenics at University College London from £42000 of Quaker family wealth, which had been acquired through arms and slave trading. But Knuddy argued that the Shiners of the Aton solar system had assumed the spiritual mantle during the twenty-fifth century, and borne the brunt of the moral leadership ever since. The Quaker felt forced to concede the point.

      The Kennedy-Galton lecture theatre was packed to the rafters that evening when a Professor of Public Health from Planet Claudius Ptolemy presented his plenary lecture. The studious Apollo Penguin described how the delegates to the 1912 conference, including Home Secretary Winston Churchill, cobbled together the terms of the 1913 Mental Deficiency Act. Tens of thousands of supposedly mentally defective Britains were subsequently incarcerated for life, forceably sterilized, or grossly maltreated.

     The First Minister was glad that similar measures had long since been enacted on Qinsatorix, as they had been in Germany, Canada, and the U.S.A. so many centuries ago. What happened in the much repressed Italian Empire at the behest of the renowned socio-economic statistician Professor Corrado Gini of the Papal University of Rome was a different kettle of fish. The 1912 Gini Coefficient helped to take care of that.