![]() In what follows I develop further my arguments about the peculiar historical trajectory of eugenics in Russia, as seen through the biography of Florinskii’s treatise, and its implications for the understanding of the history of eugenics, locally and globally. Indeed, they will quickly discover that Galton’s works, in which he actually advanced his understanding of eugenics, never appeared in their native language, while Hereditary Genius, which was translated into Russian in 1874, and is currently available in a 1996 facsimile edition, does not even contain such words as “degeneration,” “pathological heredity,” and “eugenics,” to say nothing of “genetics.”ģOn the previous pages I have described exactly when, how, by whom and for what purposes the linkage between Florinskii and Galton was constructed and how medical/clinical genetics became “heir” to both Florinskii’s eugamics and Galton’s eugenics in Russia. But they will face considerable difficulties in finding Russian translations of Galton’s publications. Today, unlike a century ago, they will have no trouble finding a version of Florinskii’s book in their school library or, better still, online. 1ĢIn the unlikely event that the Russian medical students for whom Nikolai Bochkov wrote (and Valerii Puzyrev updated) this textbook decide to actually check on this claim and read the original works listed in the captions under the portraits of the two “founders” of clinical genetics, they would be in for a surprise. With this understanding of pathological heredity, the concept of the degeneration of humankind and of the necessity of its betterment was born what is more, simultaneously and independently from each other, this concept was enunciated by V. We can say definitively that by the mid-nineteenth century the notion of pathological heredity was firmly established and accepted by many medical schools. Bochkov, Klinicheskaia genetika (M.: GEOTAR-Media, 2002), p. The caption under the second portrait introduces its subject as “one of the founders of human genetics and eugenics” and provides the list of his major works as follows: “Hereditary Talent and Character (1865),” “Hereditary Genius: Studies of its Laws and Consequences (1869),” and “Essays on Eugenics (1909).” The textbook’s “historical introduction” states unequivocally: ![]() The caption under the first portrait introduces its subject as a “gynecologist-obstetrician and pediatrician,” the author of the book “Human Perfection and Degeneration (1865),” and the founder of Tomsk University. This peculiar linkage is visualized in the leading current Russian textbook, Clinical Genetics: the same page carries portraits of both Florinskii (on the upper left) and Galton (on the lower right). “If blind, opportunistic, and automatic natural selection could conjure man out of a viroid in a couple of thousand million years, what could not man’s conscious and purposeful efforts achieve even in a couple of million years, let alone in the thousands of millions to which he can reasonably look forward?”ġVasilii Florinskii and Francis Galton, two of the major protagonists of this study, never met and were not aware of one another’s efforts to tackle their common subject, the “improvement of humankind.” But in Russia their names and their ideas became intimately linked.
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