Eugenic Rubicon

Turning People into Paperwork

This collection makes evident the remarkable level of record-keeping in 20th century health institutions. Doctors, nurses, and other health care professionals completed detailed forms about their patients. The sterilization recommendations themselves demonstrate a desire to keep good records, even if not taking good care of their patients in a modern sense. Recommendations also give us a sense of the pre-established categories included in mental health evaluation and enable us to trace the physicians and institutions involved in sterilization programs.

In addition to the sterilization forms, we also have records of patient protests of sterilization recommendations. These together with the forms themselves offer us a window into how consent procedures operated at the time. 

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