<i>Psychiatry and the Legacies of Eugenics: Historical Studies of Alberta and Beyond</i>. Edited by Frank W. Stahnisch and Erna Kurbegovic
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This edited collection places the history of eugenics in Western Canada—Alberta in particular—in an international context while highlighting how the ideology remained embedded in psychiatry and mental health practice long after the horrors of Nazi Germany came to light. Psychiatrists and psychologists played a central role in labeling individuals as “unfit” and helped justify segregation and institutionalization, marriage regulation, and restrictive immigration policies. Of particular note is how this arm of medicine contributed to the longevity of eugenic sterilization. The eight chapters in this collection each examine these intersections through different emphases—individual eugenic champions, their core beliefs and collaborative relationships; the role of different professions in promoting or carrying out eugenics programs; the social, cultural and international context informing the workings of sterilization legislation; and the extent to which media discourses on eugenics reflected international trends and societal acceptance. These chapters are supplemented by two commentaries that consider contemporary human rights and policy issues from a disability rights perspective, and a forward, prologue, introduction, conclusion and appendix. The strengths of this volume center on the role and responsibility of medical professionals in promoting coercive and self-serving ideologies and practices. Most interestingly, Erna Kurbegovic considers the near passage of sterilization legislation in Manitoba, resulting largely from pressure exerted by the medical community, and reminds us that “significant enthusiasm” (p. 120) can exist for eugenics even in provinces without explicit sterilization legislation. In his systematic review of compensation schemes offered to victims of eugenic sterilization in post-war Germany, Paul Weindling finds compensation was limited and “lamentably late” (p. 197) and this neglect resulted largely from the medical profession effectively condoning mass sterilizations—a chapter that holds lessons for ongoing discussions on how to address more recent instances of coerced sterilization.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".