Eugenics And Nation In Early 20TH Century Hungary

In 1900 Hungary was a regional power in Europe with imperial pretensions; by 1919 it was reduced to the status of a small Central European country, crippled by profound territorial, social and national transformations. This book chronicles the development of eugenic thinking in early twentieth-century Hungary, examining how eugenics was an integral part of this dynamic historical transformation.

It served as a vehicle for transmitting social and biological messages that transcended the differences between political parties and opposing ideological world views. Hungarian eugenicists not only engaged in the same speculative debates concerning heredity and evolution as their counterparts did elsewhere in Europe and the USA, they also conjured up a national interpretation of the application of eugenics to society, one which aimed at solving long-standing social, economic and medical problems specific to Hungarian society.

Review: This impressive study comes as a prequel to a number of other studies by the prolific historian Marius Turda, which focused on questions of race and nationalism in the history of twentieth century central Europe. If several of his previous works interrogated incisively the ideas and impact of eugenics in interwar Hungary, Romania and more broadly in the post-Hapsburg countries, this latest publication focuses on the origins of these ideas, starting roughly in 1900. ...

Eugenics and Nation is a work of thorough research, as anyone reading Turda's earlier work has come to expect. He has scoured the relevant archives and has an excellent command over all the languages needed to do a project like this justice. - Social History of Medicine In sum, [the book] discussed here represents a significant contribution on the history of eugenics and physical anthropology in Central Europe ...

In Eugenics and nation, Turda draws on an impressive amount of sources to make a strong case for the sophistication of Hungarian debates on eugenicsand the excitement around the possibilities for social and biological improvement that came along. - Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences