Development, dissemination and effectiveness of eugenic (racial public health) ideas in the abuse of the prevention concept in medicine
Schneck, P.
Zeitschrift für die Gesamte Hygiene und ihre Grenzgebiete 35(2): 109-111
1989
ISSN/ISBN: 0049-8610 PMID: 2741494 Document Number: 344125
The scientific social hygiene and the eugenics (racial hygiene) based on biologistical concepts nearly simultaneously developed by the turn from 19th to 20th century. Whereas the prophylaxis has been a centralized social-hygienic request, the eugenics has been orientated on the transfer of the principle of selection and the regulations of the human procreation. The intermixture of partial aspects of both these concepts by uptake of eugenic ideas into social-hygienic samples and the declaration of the eugenics to be the "generative prophylaxis" or "hygiene of procreation" during the first third of the 20th century caused a temporary abuse of the term prophylaxis in the medicine. The modern efforts at a genetic prophylaxis differ by their exact and individual performance and the principle of an absolute voluntariness from eugenic conceptions of any provenance. There term eugenics has for objective, ethical and historical reasons no longer its basis of existence to characterize this purpose of the medicine.