1926: Mainstream Eugenics
January 11, 2022
By AHNZ
The Great War marked Dr Percival Fenwick so that when he came home to Christchurch he became determined to take decisive dispassionate action to ‘correct’ society…
“It is necessary for all who care for New Zealand and its future to face facts. We are carefully conserving the life of every mental degenerate, lunatic, epileptic, deaf-mute, or person affected with incurable disease…we are permitting these unfortunate people to increase and multiply and to hand down to future generations the dreadful burdens of hereditary disease, without the slightest attempt to save our country from a degenerating population.” – The Christchurch Hospital : historical and descriptive sketch, Fenwick (1926)
“Plunket Society, had been founded by the renowned health reformer Frederic Truby King, whose strong eugenic beliefs helped set the public health agenda in the 1920s. He urged New Zealanders to do all they could to breed an ‘Imperial race’ and condemned birth control and abortion as instruments of ‘race suicide’.” – Ref. Nzhistory.govt.nz, 1907: Plunket; AHNZ
Fenwick became the leader of the eugenics movement in New Zealand. A movement backed by the famous Dr Truby King and the Attorney General himself Dr Findlay. Fenwick sought sterilisation and euthanasia as means to ‘correct’ the majority of cases.
State-written history tends to skip over this sort of thing and blame eugenics and sterilisations on the NAZIs, for which we fought the good fight to end them. Really, the same sentiments were all the rage here in New Zealand as well.
Research eugenics and you will run into Progressives at every turn. “They absolutely *loved* the theory, and they didn’t just talk about it, they put it into action.”- Dave Hitt
You can view a giant model of Dr Fenwick at Te Papa as part of the WW1 exhibit still on now (2022:) Gallipoli: The Scale of Our War
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Image ref. Katana Photography, Facebook (2017)
3 thoughts on "1926: Mainstream Eugenics"
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My g-grandfather William Brown fled to Nelson with Truby King when they were children, to escape the armed conflict surrounding New Plymouth during the Taranaki Wars.
Truby gained his medical degree from Edinburgh University and William went farming in Lepperton. At some moment in time William became convinced he needed to place his eldest daughter Sophia into Truby’s medical care at Seaview Lunatic Asylum and she remained institutionalised for 53 years until her death in 1961. Dunedin Archives have blocked her descendants from accessing her medical notes until 2061, to protect the medical professionals practice from scrutiny, not out of concern, since she is dead, to her rights to privacy.
Wow. It would be very interesting to go deeper into the psychological history of King the refugee and how it informed his powerful role in later life.
An 100 year embargo is highly suspicious to me. Dark Secrets.
Have you considered an appeal to the Ombudsman?