UNASSIGNED: Autism self-advocates\' views regarding genetic tests for autism are important, but critical questions about their perspectives arise.
UNASSIGNED: We interviewed 11 autism self-advocates, recruited through autism self-advocacy websites, for 1 h each.
UNASSIGNED: Interviewees viewed genetic testing and its potential pros and cons through the lens of their own indiviudal perceived challenges, needs and struggles, especially concerning stigma and discrimination, lack of accommodations and misunderstandings from society about autism, their particular needs for services, and being blamed by others and by themselves for autistic traits. Their views of genetic testing tended not to be binary, but rather depended on how the genetic test results would be used. Interviewees perceived pros of genetic testing both in general and with regard to themselves (e.g., by providing \"scientific proof\" of autism as a diagnosis and possibly increasing availability of services). But they also perceived disadvantages and limitations of testing (e.g., possible eugenic applications). Participants distinguished between what they felt would be best for themselves and for the autistic community as a whole. When asked if they would undergo testing for themselves, if offered, interviewees added several considerations (e.g., undergoing testing because they support science in general). Interviewees were divided whether a genetic diagnosis would or should reduce self-blame, and several were wary of testing unless treatment, prevention or societal attitudes changed. Weighing these competing pros and cons could be difficult.
UNASSIGNED: This study, the first to use in-depth qualitative interviews to assess views of autism self-advocates regarding genetic testing, highlights key complexities. Respondents felt that such testing is neither wholly good or bad in itself, but rather may be acceptable depending on how it is used, and should be employed in beneficial, not harmful ways. These findings have important implications for practice, education of multiple stakeholders, research, and policy.

Though only one component product of the larger eugenics movement, the eugenic family study proved to be, by far, its most potent ideological tool. The Kallikak Family, for instance, went through eight editions between 1913 and 1931. This essay argues that the current scholarship has missed important ways that the architects of the eugenic family studies theorized and described the subjects of their investigation. Using one sparsely interrogated work (sociologist Frank Wilson Blackmar\'s \"The Smoky Pilgrims\") and one previously unknown eugenic family study (biologist Frank Gary Brooks\' untitled analysis of the flood-zone Oklahomans) from the Southern Plains, this essay aims to introduce \"environment\" as a schema that allows for how the subjects of the eugenic family study were conceptualized with respect to their surroundings. Geospatially and environmentally relevant constructions of scientific knowledge were central to the project of eugenics during its formative years, but remain largely and conspicuously absent from the critical literature which engages this project to separate the fit from the unfit in American society. The dysgenic constituted a unique human geography, giving us significant insight into how concatenations of jurisprudence as well as cultural and social worth were tied to the land.

This article presents a part of the results of an empirical study conducted at a Parisian hospital between 2011 and 2014. It aimed at understanding the women and couples\' motivations to terminate or not a pregnancy once a prenatal diagnosis has revealed a genetically related disease in the embryo or fetus. The article first presents the social and legal context of the study, the methodology used and the pathologies that were encountered. Then, it examines the results of the interviews conducted with 5 women alone and 23 couples explaining their reasons for deciding to terminate or not the pregnancy. Finally, it explores the patients\' views about the doctor\'s involvement in the decision-making process. The findings reveal the reasons they formulate when they ponder whether to terminate or not the pregnancy. It highlights the process of their deliberation, their hierarchisation of arguments and concerns. They also show how patients, though often consumed in sorrow, claim to be the legitimate decision-makers, especially women, in a social and legal context in which the rejection of eugenics is viewed as an undisputable principle.

In the early 20th century, there were few therapeutic options for mental illness and asylum numbers were rising. This pessimistic outlook favoured the rise of the eugenics movement. Heredity was assumed to be the principal cause of mental illness. Politicians, scientists and clinicians in North America and Europe called for compulsory sterilisation of the mentally ill. Psychiatric genetic research aimed to prove a Mendelian mode of inheritance as a scientific justification for these measures. Ernst Rüdin\'s seminal 1916 epidemiological study on inheritance of dementia praecox featured large, systematically ascertained samples and statistical analyses. Rüdin\'s 1922-1925 study on the inheritance of \"manic-depressive insanity\" was completed in manuscript form, but never published. It failed to prove a pattern of Mendelian inheritance, counter to the tenets of eugenics of which Rüdin was a prominent proponent. It appears he withheld the study from publication, unable to reconcile this contradiction, thus subordinating his carefully derived scientific findings to his ideological preoccupations. Instead, Rüdin continued to promote prevention of assumed hereditary mental illnesses by prohibition of marriage or sterilisation and was influential in the introduction by the National Socialist regime of the 1933 \"Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring\" (Gesetz zur Verhütung erbkranken Nachwuchses).

The eugenics movement attracted a wide range of supporters. This article explores this theme with relation to literature about the charitable work of the Salvation Army in Britain and Canada c.1890-1921, with a focus upon the emigration scheme outlined in William Booth\'s book In Darkest England and the Way Out. These writings indicate the widespread dispersal of eugenic ideology, and demonstrate the flexibility with which these theories were interpreted in this period. It will be shown that the Salvation Army adopted elements of both hereditarian and environmentalist views regarding racial health. These arguments were unified by the claim that the work of the organization made a worthy contribution to public health, both in the present and in the future. This case study sheds new light upon the history of a prominent evangelical Christian organization and upon the development of the international eugenics movement.

OBJECTIVE: After the Nazi occupation, there was a determination to deal with collaborators, coming to the fore with the trial of the traitor Vidkun Quisling. This became as much a contest between psychiatrists as a legal tussle. Norwegian psychiatrists supported the public opinion that collaborationists were mentally ill or intellectually handicapped, and this was evident in the reports they prepared.
CONCLUSIONS: Norwegian psychiatry, their distinguished stand during the war notwithstanding, was caught up in the emotion and controversy of the Quisling trial and the treatment of collaborators. Later, there was tacit agreement that their stand had been less than objective, sharing the public repulsion towards collaborators and influenced by still-prevailing eugenic views.

This study, performed in Madrid, Spain, evaluates nursing students\' understanding and attitudes about bioethical dilemmas that they will likely confront as health care providers. We asked 86 juniors in the King Juan Carlos University Nursing baccalaureate program about their knowledge of and personal attitudes on five biomedical advances: eugenics, experimentation with unimplanted embryos, human cloning, abortion, and euthanasia. Students reported being most knowledgeable about abortion and euthanasia and least familiar with eugenics. Examining the data for a correlation between the two phenomenon (knowledge and position) with respect to each of these five biomedical issues, the students reported significantly Conversely, they held significantly neutral positions on eugenics, a virtually unfamiliar topic for them (r = 0.618, p < 0.0001). The data also revealed a significantly direct correlation between knowledge and position for experimentation with non-implanted embryos (correlation coefficient = 0.380, p < 0.0001), that is, little knowledge and neutral attitudes. The trend findings for abortion and cloning were not significant. Based on these data, we concluded that the nursing program would benefit from additional biomedical curriculum.

Despite the fact that much has been written in recent years about the science of heredity under the Third Reich, there is as yet no satisfying analysis of two central questions: What, if anything, was peculiarly \"Nazi\" about human genetics under National Socialism? How, under whatever set of causes, did at least some of Germany\'s most well-known and leading biomedical practioners become engaged in entgrenzte Wissenschaft (science without moral boundaries)? This paper attempts to provide some answers to these two questions comparing three institutes that studied eugenics and human heredity in the 1920s and 1930s: the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor, New York, directed by Charles B. Davenport; the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics, in Berlin, directed by Eugen Fischer; and the Maxim Gorky Medical Genetics Institute in Moscow, directed by Solomon G. Levit. The institutes are compared on the basis of the kind and quality of their research in eugenics and medical genetics, organizational structure, leadership, patronage (private or state), and the economic-social-political context in which they functioned.

Between 1927 and 1944 the psychiatrist Adele Juda (*1888-+1949) studied the biographies of more than 600 German-speaking \"geniuses\" and their families from a period between 1648 and 1920. The concept of this so-called \"Höchstbegabtenstudie\" (study on high-gifted persons) had been developed by the psychiatrist, human geneticist and racial hygienist Ernst Rüdin, director of the Deutsche Forschungsanstalt für Psychiatrie in Munich from 1917 to 1945. Juda\'s study was aimed at a re-examination of the \"Genie-Irrsins-Hypothese\" (genius-madness-theory) having been much discussed in medicine and anthropology since Cesare Lombroso, as it was hardly consistent with some of Rüdin\'s racial-hygienic concepts. While trying to make a selection of probands as objective as possible and to overcome a so far common purely casuistic approach, Juda\'s study also gave cause for criticism, for example as to the subjectivity of psychopathological assessment or the political and ideological conditions under which data were gathered. Nevertheless the \"Höchstbegabtenstudie\" has to be seen as the most extensive and as well as the last scientific piece of research concerning the \"Genialenproblem\" having been done in the 20th century, with the material gathered being an important cultural-historical source independent of its originally intended use. As one of the most important results Juda was able to prove a significant relation between mental illness and gift. For different reasons this result was not published until after Juda\'s death by Bruno Schulz, one of her former colleagues at the genealogical-demographic department, in 1953 and 1955. Last not least due to the fact that they came from Rüdin\'s former institute these publications were not taken much notice of.

This article reviews newly declassified US intelligence files and other sources, including relevant trial documents, related to the Nazi killing of mentally and physically sick individuals deemed to be of little further use to society. It both supplements and revises existing work on the so-called \'Euthanasia\' programme at the Kaufbeuren psychiatric institution in Bavaria, and highlights a series of gender issues related to the involvement of women nurses including Catholic nuns, in this institute. In addition, this study not only casts new light on the way in which patients were, from admission onwards, redefined as disposable objects but also emphasises contradictions within the defence case of the defendants.