Contemporary discussions on medical genetics are often overshadowed by the ‘spectre of eugenics’, the fear that human genetics will lead us into a new era of control over sexual reproduction and the discrimination of ‘genetically inferior’ people. Past political manifestations of eugenic beliefs – of which the eugenic laws in Nazi-Germany obviously have been the horrific summit – have given rise to these fears. However, the dominant focus on racial eugenics blurs the fact that genetic and eugenic thinking have had much more widespread impact on Western culture and societies before the Second World War.
The Netherlands, where the official eugenics-movement has always been fairly marginal, is a good example. “Hard-line” eugenics-supporters were not in the position to monopolize the public discourse. The aim of this paper is to show that did not mean genetic and eugenic thinking was not present in Dutch society. On the contrary, it could spread more through various domains – either latently or explicitly – just because it did not necessarily possess a strong political and racial connotation. This claim is based on an analysis of historical news media. After all, these have been a playing ground for (re-) shaping the meanings of eugenics and human heredity in a broad spectrum of discourses within various contexts. In other words, historical records offer us various scenarios of how societal hopes and fears about genetics may influence public health and social policies.
The project this paper is based on not only aims to contribute to the historiography on eugenic thinking in Western culture. Its goal is also to develop a new data-mining tool for this type of research. After all, historical research on the above mentioned dynamics has been severely hampered by the extraordinary task of manually gathering and processing large sets of opinionated data in news media. In this way, it is, furthermore, almost exclusively possible to take into account documents that explicitly refer to eugenics issues and debates. Digital tools are, in contrast, able to provide information on ideas and notions about heredity, genetics and eugenics that circulate in discourses that are not directly related to eugenics (entertainment, sport and culture). The tool will enable historians in general to collect and process large sets of opinionated text-data from news media and extract discourse identity and intensity patterns.