The sterilization act allowed for the legal sterilization of people deemed to have undesirable traits, this included people with epilepsy, mental illness, and cognitive disabilities. The Racial Integrity Act prohibited interracial marriage and defined as white a person “who has no trace whatsoever of any blood other than Caucasian.” These laws were shaped by the race science of eugenics.
Eugenics, the study of the inheritance of physical, intellectual, and emotional characteristics, brought together many disciplines with the goal of advancing society and health. Eugenics became part of the program to combat venereal disease and other infections, thereby easily overlapping with public health measures. At the same time, these measures contributed to exclusionary policies that stigmatized certain groups. Termed “scientific racism,” these policies were part of overarching health campaigns that included a variety of people and groups – nurses, physicians, public health workers, eugenic societies, and governments.
Eugenics flourished at UVA under the leadership of President Edwin Alderman, who recruited several leaders of the eugenics movement to teach at UVA. These included Harvey Jordan, Robert Bean and Lawrence Royster in the medical school, and Ivey Lewis in biology. Nursing students at UVA learned about eugenics in their curricula, from UVA physicians (including Jordan), and the 1917 the National League for Nursing Education’s Standard Curriculum for Schools of Nursing. Its recommendation of guidelines for all basic nurse training programs included a course in eugenics. Eugenics profoundly affected social science, nursing, and public health in the early twentieth century. The legacy of eugenics in health care was prejudice and structural racism.
1934
University of Virginia Special Collections
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