PHRENOLOGY AND EUGENICS IN SCOTLAND

 

                  This is an incomplete excerpt from my book 

                    Lavender Rising; An Intersectional History of the LGBT+ Struggle (in preparation)

 

7.13  EUGENICS IN SCOTLAND

George Combe (1788-1858 ) was a highly successful advocate of phrenology (Britannica [1], British Library [1]),a pseudo-scientific precursor of eugenics that used features of the skull and the surface of the brain to predict criminality, mental defect, and a variety of other human attributes. Thriving during the height of Britain’s empire and slave-owning, phrenology was used in debates about racial supremacy. According to Sack (2017), Combe helped to found the Edinburgh Phrenological Society in 1820. He lived in Stockbridge in Edinburgh.

According to Becky Howell (2018), phrenology was never universally accepted, but it did have a profound impact on psychiatry. During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, the care given to people with mental health issues and learning difficulties was under scrutiny. Many doctors campaigned for better moral care, as asylums were seen as prison-like, with treatment being akin to punishment. Patients were often shackled to restrain them and beaten as punishment instead of given care. ,

Sir James Crichton- Browne (1840-38) was a leading Scottish psychiatrist, neurologist, and eugenicist who was much influenced by phrenology. He spent much of his childhood in Dumfries, where his phrenologist father William was superintendent of the Crichton Royal Asylum. According to Neve and Turner (1995), Crichton-Browne was a Victorian, steeped in eugenics, degeneration and an awful fear of being "on the same level as a Hottentot". The "Half-Mads" were a particular problem, for which "eugenism (the acme of evolution) must do something" and he drew an interesting historical link with the phrenologists whom he termed "The First Eugenists". To him, eugenics was "ethical selection, which like natural selection aims at the elimination of the less unfit and the preservation of the fit". In his view, brains could be exercised, could be nurtured, could be damaged: above all, in the early career of James Crichton-Browne, brains could be opened up and looked at, their gyri delineated, their densities measured.

According to Information Services [1] at the University of Edinburgh, Francis Crew (1888-1973) was a pioneering geneticist who paved the way for Edinburgh to become a centre of genetics research. In 1920 he became the first director of the Institute of Animal Breeding and in 1928 he became the first Professor of Animal Genetics at the University of Edinburgh. From 1945 he was chair of public health and social medicine, and it has been said that during this tenure he laid the foundations of medical genetics.

According to the intersectional historian Henry Dee (2021), who graduated from the University of Edinburgh in 2020 with a Ph.D. in History and has communicated with Scott and I since, Francis Crew was Edinburgh University’s leading eugenicist in the 1920s. A member of the Eugenics Society and president of the British Population Survey, his 1927 book, Organic Inheritance of Man (Crew, 1927) is full of crude racist theories. A building is still named after him on campus. Crew recruited Frank Fraser Darling, another eugenicist, to work at Edinburgh's Imperial Bureau of Animal Genetics (IBAG). Both Crew and Darling wrote for Eugenics Review about the implications of animal genetics research for eugenics. Other Edinburgh eugenicists included Charles Galton Darwin, the Tate Professor of Natural Philosophy, who published The Next Million Years in 1952, which predicted the decline of populations through “dysgenic” degeneration, and contributed to Mankind Quarterly in the 1960s.