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This article analyzes the speeches of leading doctors in the creation of the specialty in childbirth care: gynecotology. Between 1920 and 1940, under the influence of eugenic and maternalist thinking, in a context of valuing the well-being of children, medicine built a new obstetric interventionism under the foundation of improving fetal viability. The supposed female "maternal instinct" was, thus, appealed to improve acceptance of the medical mandate. At the same time, doctors recognized their difficulties in providing adequate care. They did not wait long enough and tended to intervene in unnecessary physiological processes.

This article discusses the similarities between certain knowledges and practices focused on "improving the race" in Colombia from 1920-1930, showing how they can be located within a framework defined by historiography as the "Latin American eugenic movement." The term "social hygiene" appears in some Colombian medical texts during this period to describe the improvement of a fraction of the population defined as "degenerate." This study contributes to discussion of the need to rethink "racial improvement" strategies as local, heterogeneous, diverse problems.

Eugenics arrived in Argentina as a discipline at the beginning of the twentieth century. It was widely embraced by intellectuals and healthcare professionals, in the midst of a series of actions undertaken to strengthen networks within the academic and political worlds. One of those initiatives was the magazine Viva Cien Años, founded in 1934 as a popular science publication. This article presents the possibilities of the body of documentation relating to the magazine, which was published in Argentina until 1947. The central thesis argues that the appearance of this publication shows the impact of eugenics in the 1930s in Argentina, and its strategies for conquering public opinion.

Anarchist neo-Malthusianism is increasingly receiving historiographical attention. This article deals with the following question: Did early anarchist neo-Malthusianism in Barcelona have anything to do with eugenics? To what extent, and how? To answer this, the article examines the transnational nature of the anarchist movement, in which cities played an essential role. This is shown in the strong connection between the Barcelona group and the French one, which had inherited the teachings of Paul Robin. The article's thesis is that, although neo-Malthusianism and anarchism were different movements, the fact that they shared the goal of regenerating the species allows us to establish points of contact between them, even though the anarchists formally rejected eugenics on occasion.

This article seeks to outline the main features of the stereotype of family promoted by the emblematic institution of the Argentine eugenics movement, the Argentine Eugenics Society (Sociedad Argentina de Eugenesia), an organization founded in 1945 that remained active in the country until the 1970s. It explores the conduct expected both of the man/husband and of the woman/wife, and shows the principal behaviors required to constitute the ideal family, the outlines of which were based on set of sexual moral with an eminently religious bias.

The Chilean physician Hans Betzhold published the book Eugenesia (Eugenics) in 1939, which was a work that received multiple awards and ran to a second edition in 1942. Both editions and the participation of Betzhold at the Second Peruvian Conference on Eugenics in 1943 attest to the fact that he was an important actor in the field of Chilean eugenics. This paper analyzes his transition from the publication of Eugenesia, in which he proposes a National Eugenics Department combining existing projects and laws to make the eugenic ideal a reality until its intervention, in the year 1943, when his optimism yields to disillusion regarding the task of creating a "Chilean superman."

This article analyzes the debate on neo-Malthusianism and eugenics in Spanish anarchist publications in the first third of the last century. Using theoretical frameworks that have been under-utilized thus far, it provides new interpretations of what the term "eugenics" meant in pro-anarchist neo-Malthusian journals. Framed within a "struggle over meaning," Spanish neo-Malthusianism re-signified eugenic ideas in an attempt to recover political ground that had been lost in the drive to promote individual control of human sexuality. This study also analyzes the role of the anarcho-syndicalist movement's "direct action" strategy, in which actions undertaken by individualist anarchists were seen as a complement to revolutionary action.

From the 1930s until the end of the Second World War, Count Keyserling's statement that "the hour of eugenics is at hand" was used to champion ideas and practices that Nancy Stepan argues were shared by different Latin American countries. We focus on the period prior to that, a sort of zero hour of eugenics in Argentina, which began institutionalizing in 1910 and emerged as a new scientific field. This period was marked by intra- and interdisciplinary tensions, a struggle to monopolize scientific authority, and dialogues between ideology and power in which a viscous type of eugenics was inscribed, whose initial polyphony lasted until 1932.

This article analyzes the notions of degeneration and eugenics in the field of psychiatry in the first decades of the twentieth century, stressing the existence of similarities and continuities, but also differences and conflicts between them. It analyzes a particular moment in the history of Brazilian psychiatry when arguments from degeneration theory and eugenic arguments and interventions became superimposed and mingled. It focuses, among other texts, on the work of Renato Kehl, "A esterilização dos grandes degenerados e criminosos".

Biopolitics has played an important role in fascist totalitarianism and the-Francoist regime was no exception. From the and with ultimate goal or regulating the population, measures were implemented to increase, care for and indoctrinate the population. This present study analyses the selection and promotion measures of some populations and the marginalisation of others proposed the Spanish Falangist Movement's official publication in the field of medicine, the journal Ser, Revista Medico-Social by the National Delegation of Health of the Traditionalist Spanish Phalanx of the Committees of the National Syndicalist Offensivie (F.E.T y de las J. O. N. S. 1942-1957). In this respect, the analysis of eugenic ideas and practice defended therein become especially interesting, claiming that, through indoctrination and health development, the race would be improved both physically and mentally. From the systematic analysis of the journals's contenets it has been demonstrated that this was one of the instruments used by the dictatorial regime to reconfigure eugenics in accordance with Catholic morals and national syndicalist politics.

During the first half of the twentieth century, the presence of leprosy in modern societies provoked various reactions. As ancient prejudices had not disappeared yet, the medical-legal discourse dealt with a problem that exceeded the strictly sanitary framework. From a scientific perspective, this paper analyzes the way in which answers find that seemed the population and the future of the race in the physical and symbolic isolation of the leper, were developed in Argentina. In that context, the eugenics legitimated strong restrictions of rights to sick persons on whom this ancestral stigma continued to carry much weight.

Created in the early 1920s, at a moment when the country's psychiatric field was embracing the preventive outlook, the Liga Brasileira de Higiene Mental included within its members the elite of Brazilian psychiatry, along with a number of physicians and intellectuals. The article discusses the institution's proposals for intervention among children. The league ended up incorporating into its theoretical arsenal the basic themes of mental hygiene and eugenics as part of its general goal of collaborating in Brazil's process of "racial sanitation". With this objective in mind, and viewing the child as a "pre-citizen" who is a "fundamental part within the man of the future", league members included the children's issue in their projects and saw an imperative need for mental health care from early ages on.