History of Science: When Eugenics Became Law

February 25, 2016

(Nature) – Adam Cohen’s Imbeciles relates a key chapter in this story, the 1927 US Supreme Court case known as Buck v. Bell. The case began in September 1924, when Albert Priddy, head of the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded, an asylum near Lynchburg, asserted that Carrie Buck, a teenage mother who had entered the asylum that June, was an “imbecile” — a term used at the time to signify intellectual disability. Priddy petitioned the asylum’s board of directors to sterilize Buck.