In June and August 1865, in London, the capital of the “perpetually sun-lit” British empire, the influential monthly Macmillan’s Magazine carried Galton’s article, titled “Hereditary Talent and Character.”10 This short twenty-page piece laid the first stone in the foundation of what nearly twenty years later its author would name “eugenics” and define as “the science of improving [human] stock” devoted to “the investigation of the conditions under which men of a high type are produced.”11 Based on the statistical analysis of “blood relations” among “British men,”
Galton suggested that “if a twentieth part of the cost and pains were spent in measures for the improvement of the human race that is spent on the improvement of the breed of horses and cattle, what a galaxy of genius might we not create!”12 Galton’s grand idea was quite simple:
“by selecting men and women of rare and similar talent, and mating them together, generation after generation, an extraordinarily gifted race might be developed.”13
7 The Faces of Eugenics
At almost exactly the same time, thousands of kilometres from London, in the capital of the “perpetually-frozen” Russian Empire, St. Petersburg, the August 1865 issue of the leading “literary-political”
journal Russian Word opened with a nearly sixty-page-long essay, titled
“Human Perfection and Degeneration.”14 Three more essays appeared under the same general title in the journal’s October, November, and December issues.15 In late August 1866, the journal’s publisher released the essays in book format.16 This 200-page treatise was not penned by one of Russian Word’s renowned regular contributors, which included such leading intellectuals of the day as Dmitrii Pisarev, Nikolai Shelgunov, Petr Tkachev, Varfolomei Zaitsev, and Grigorii Blagosvetlov, the journal’s editor and publisher. It was authored by Vasilii Florinskii (1834-1899), a little known (outside of narrow professional circles) adjunct professor of gynecology and obstetrics at the Imperial Medical-Surgical Academy (IMSA), the country’s premier medical school.
Florinskii’s stated goal was to acquaint the journal’s readers with an “as yet unexamined, one can even say untouched, subject,” namely the “general conditions of human perfection and degeneration.” The treatise’s brief introduction charted its main lines of inquiry and its two-pronged approach. The first half was to focus on “the variability and perfection of the human type in general.” It was to include special sections on “heredity as the main cause of human variability and perfection”
and on “conditions conducive to stock perfection” such as “taste and demand for certain qualities, influence of the external conditions of life, rational marriage, and sex life.” The second half was to discuss “the degeneration of the human type in general” and “conditions that could facilitate such degeneration.” Among such conditions Florinskii listed
“incest and the lack of stock renewal, inequality [of partners] in marriage, [and] the influence of drunkenness, debauchery, diseases, poverty, and slavery.”
Like Galton, Florinskii drew parallels with animal breeding:
Much attention is paid to, and whole doctrines exist about, the betterment of stocks in cattle, sheep, horses, dogs, even chickens, pigeons, and so on, and the goal is actually being achieved. Systematically cultivated breeds of animals astonish us by their perfection; whilst man in the successive generations breeds diseases and physical weakness rather than perfection.
8 With and Without Galton
But in contrast to Galton’s ultimate goal of breeding “an extraordinarily gifted race” and producing “men of a high type,” Florinskii’s was to perfect “the human type in general” and to stave off its possible degeneration. Accordingly, instead of Galton’s selective mating of “men and women of rare and similar talent,” Florinskii proposed removing existing barriers to “mixed” marriages between men and women of different ancestry, confessions, ethnicities, talents, physiques, social standings, and so on. Were Florinskii to search for a moniker for his major idea of “hygienic” or “rational” marriage, he would probably have coined the word eugamics — well-married (from the Greek gámos [γάμος] — marriage), not eugenics — well-born, as did Galton.17
The fact that Florinskii’s “eugamic” treatise was published nearly simultaneously with Galton’s first “eugenic” article is not a mere coincidence. As Galton himself once said, “Great discoveries have often been made simultaneously by workers ignorant of each other’s labours. This shows that they have derived their inspiration from a common but hidden source, as no mere chance would account for simultaneous discovery.”18 Such a common and very obvious source for the two approaches to the “improvement of the human stock” was Charles Darwin’s evolutionary concept formulated just six years earlier in his book On the Origin of Species (whose very publication, ironically, had been prompted by the “simultaneous discovery” of Darwin’s main idea of natural selection by his compatriot Alfred Russel Wallace). It was Darwin’s detailed examination of such fundamental factors of species evolution (both in nature and under domestication) as variability, heredity, and selection that inspired the futuristic vision of a directed human evolution accomplished by manipulating human reproduction and embodied in both Galton’s “eugenics” and Florinskii’s “eugamics.”
Darwin’s analysis of various forms of selection (natural, sexual, and artificial) as the mechanism of such basic evolutionary processes as species adaptation, divergence, and extinction provided a solid grounding to this vision.
The contemporaneity of Galton’s and Florinskii’s ideas not only suggests the shared intellectual impulse, but also points to their common mid-nineteenth-century scientific contexts, most important, the emergence of science as a particular social institution. This development included the entwined processes of the formation of a professional
9 The Faces of Eugenics
workforce (the scientist), the institutionalization of separate disciplines, the increasing efforts to find patrons to support scientific endeavors, the popularization of science among the educated public, and the rising appreciation of science as the engine of social progress, all of which unfolded during the middle decades of the nineteenth century.19 In this respect, the rapid growth of two particular disciplines — physical anthropology and social hygiene — both of which were institutionalized during the 1860s in Russia and Britain, provided much fodder for, and played an especially prominent role in, the formulation of both Galton’s and Florinskii’s concepts.
These common intellectual and social contexts indicate that, based on the analogy with animal breeding, the central idea underpinning both Galton’s eugenics and Florinskii’s eugamics — the possibility to direct human future evolution to a desired end by manipulating human reproduction — likely have found similar “national” expressions in other locales. After all, the same processes of science professionalization and institutionalization were taking place around the same time in soon-to-be-united Germany and Italy, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, France, and the United States.20 Consider, for instance, the following statement:
If the same amount of knowledge and care, which has been taken to improve the domestic animals … had been bestowed upon the human species in the last century, there would not have been so many moral patients for the lunatic asylum, or for our prisons, at present. That the human species are as susceptible of improvement as the domestic animal, who can deny?
This excerpt echoes almost verbatim both Galton’s and Florinskii’s pronouncements. But it appeared two years earlier, in a revised 1863 edition of New Domestic Physician, a popular medical manual published by John C. Gunn in Cincinnati, Ohio.21
Notwithstanding the striking resemblance between Galton’s and Florinskii’s approaches to their common subject, certain significant differences between them point to profound dissimilarities between the cultural, social, political, and economic terrains of their respective homelands in the aftermath of the 1853-1856 Crimean War that had pitted the two empires against each other. These dissimilarities were clearly reflected in different social concerns, which held the attention of contemporary British and Russian societies and to which Galton’s
10 With and Without Galton
and Florinskii’s concepts responded. To give just one example, unlike in Britain, in mid-nineteenth-century Russia marriage remained an exclusive domain of the church. The notion of “civic marriage” was only beginning to make inroads into the country’s social conscience.
The Russian Orthodox Church had a number of very strict regulations regarding marriage, including the prohibition of “mixed” marriages (between individuals of different religious confessions) and “kin”
marriages (between relatives in both blood and “spirit” — such as God-mothers and God-fathers — to the fourth degree), as well as the nearly unsurmountable barriers to getting a divorce or a marriage annulment.22 In the heady atmosphere of the Great Reforms, which had been initiated in post-Crimean Russia by the young Emperor Alexander II and dramatically reshaped almost every facet of the country’s life, Florinskii’s essays clearly responded to and challenged what historian Gregory L. Freeze has described as the “marital order of a rigidity unknown elsewhere in Europe.”23 Although Florinskii presented “kin”
marriages as a main source of degeneration, thus, in a way endorsing the church’s prohibition, he saw “mixed” marriages — between individuals of different social standings, religious confessions, talents, and physique — as a major instrument for averting degeneration and advancing human perfection.
Much as happened to Galton’s 1865 article, at the time of its publication Florinskii’s treatise went virtually unnoticed. Not a single review of his book appeared in Russian medical, scientific, or “literary-learned” periodicals. But unlike Galton, who would spend the rest of his life and a large portion of his personal fortune on developing his eugenic concept by investigating both the “laws of inheritance” that underpin it and the possible ways it could be implemented in the actual life of his homeland, Florinskii never returned to the subject of “rational”
marriage in the course of his long and distinguished career. He did absolutely nothing to promote it among his colleagues or the general public. As a result, his treatise was soon completely forgotten.
Yet, in 1926, exactly sixty years after its first publication as a book, Mikhail Volotskoi (1893-1944), an anthropologist and a founding member of the Russian Eugenics Society established in Moscow six years prior, reissued Florinskii’s treatise, hailing its author as a “precursor” to
11 The Faces of Eugenics
Galton and his eugenic ideas.24 Volotskoi’s reprint gave Florinskii’s book a new lease on life. This time it found an attentive audience and proved influential in shaping the debates among the proponents of eugenics in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) that emerged on the ruins of the former Russian Empire. Volotskoi found in Florinskii’s book an inspiring model for creating a “proletarian,” “socialist,”
“bio-social” eugenics, instead of what he came to see as a “bourgeois”
eugenics created by Galton and propagated by his fellow members of the Russian Eugenics Society. The resurrection of Florinskii’s ideas, however, proved short-lived. In 1930 in the Soviet Union eugenics was condemned as a “bourgeois,” “fascist” science and Florinskii and his treatise again slipped into oblivion.
But in the early 1970s, Florinskii’s name resurfaced in some Soviet publications on the history of human genetics, where his Human Perfection and Degeneration was again viewed through the prism of Galtonian eugenics. This time, however, it was hailed as the foundational work not of eugenics, but of medical genetics.25 In 1995, almost seventy years after its previous publication, Florinskii’s treatise was reprinted again by Valerii Puzyrev, director of the Tomsk Institute of Medical Genetics.
In his foreword to the new edition, Puzyrev reiterated the idea that the book was a foundational work of both eugenics and medical genetics.26 Finally, in 2012, Florinskii’s tract was reissued once more, this time as part of a reader on “Russian eugenics” published by Vladimir Avdeev, a self-styled expert on a “new science of raciology,” who claimed that its author had founded a particular “Russian,” “racial” eugenics.27
For nearly a century, practically all of the commentators on Florinskii’s treatise have followed the simplistic trope of seeing this work and its author as mere “precursors” to or “contemporaries” of Galton and eugenics.28 The focus of this book is different. It looks at Florinskii’s treatise through the lens of its own time and reads it within its own multiple (personal, social, scientific, national, medical, philosophical, etc.) contexts. Human Perfection and Degeneration raises a number of intriguing questions about its author, its contents and aims, the timings and venues of its different editions, its intended audiences, and its reception. This book, then, is not a biography of Vasilii Florinskii, but rather a “biography” of his treatise.
12 With and Without Galton