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11 The first professionals to advocate coerced sterilization as a solution to America’s social ills were physicians interested in reducing the incidence of crime, or, more accurately, in reducing the number of criminals who produced children who would themselves presumably demonstrate the weaknesses they inherited from their parents. Degeneracy, transferred from parent to child through either genetic or cultural inheritance, was a concept that drew increasing study throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century. American physicians used the term degenerate to describe anyone who exhibited diminished mental, moral, or sexual capacities, and they believed that the sources of degeneracy were a combination of biological and environmental factors.1 The language used to describe such people was often brutal and dehumanizing, and it reflected the subhuman status many authors ascribed to the degenerate. Decades before any American biologist ever advocated the study of eugenics, long before Francis Galton coined the word eugenics, and even years before Charles Darwin published his theory of evolution by natural selection, American medical doctors considered the merits of sterilizing the nation’s degenerates as a method to penalize them, to prevent them from committing future crimes, to reform them, and to prevent the propagation of their kind. The Memorial The earliest American advocate of sexual surgery to control or eliminate social ills appears to have been Gideon Lincecum. A prominent Texas physician and ardent proponent of castration, Lincecum was decades ahead of most of his colleagues in linking the topics of animal breeding, human health, and social policy. In 1849, he authored a bill for the Texas legislature, which he called “the Memorial.” The bill would have substituted castration for execution as penalty for certain crimes. Lincecum published and mailed copies of it to nearly 700 Texas politicians, journalists , prominent citizens, and medical doctors. He described how the threat of Nipping the Problem in the Bud  c h a p t e r 1 Chap-01.qxd 6/20/07 9:59 AM Page 11 castration would serve the punitive purposes of deterrent and punishment at least as well as execution, plus it would serve as a check on the criminal type by preventing them from propagating their kind.2 Written ten years before Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, Lincecum’s Memorial demonstrated that even though Darwin’s work was used by some to justify eugenics and coerced sterilization, evolutionary theory was not at all necessary for the development of compulsory sterilization laws in the United States. Using arguments that would become common among eugenicists half a century later, Lincecum discussed how selective breeding could improve the human race by preventing the lowest citizens of the state from reproducing.“Like begets like,”he wrote to another physician.“The laws of hereditary transmission cannot be overruled . When the horse and the mare both trot, the colt seldom paces.” Likewise, he reasoned, these laws were applicable to breeding better humans: “To have good, honest citizens, fair acting, truthful men and women, they must be bred right. To breed them right we must have good breeders and to procure these the knife is the only possible chance.”3 Lincecum’s Memorial was widely discussed after being published in most Texas newspapers and in the Colorado Democrat. Much to his dismay, the proposal was generally rejected and often made the object of jokes. The bill was introduced in the Texas state legislature in 1855 and again in 1856, and Lincecum reported that the legislators“did it in a manner better calculated to excite ridicule and opposition than a philosophical consideration of the matter.”Ultimately, the Memorial was referred to the committee on stock raising. Lincecum responded to the criticism and mocking dismissal of his plan with a joke of his own: the Lincecum Law “can not progress as rapidly as it should without the aid of the press. . . . But the Press must have the benefit of the purifying implement itself before they can be moved to the advocacy of righteousness.”4 As was the case in many other states, Texas judges, juries, medical authorities, and vigilantes did not need the legislature’s approval to carry out coerced sexual surgeries. In 1864, for example, a jury in Belton, Texas, found a black man guilty of rape and sentenced him to “suffer the penalty of emasculation.”5 From the 1860s through the 1880s, newspapers reported the castration of men who were convicted of rape and of violent assaults on suspected rapists, almost all of whom were...

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