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>> Francis Galton was connected
to University College London
because he left his collection here, he left his archive
of letters, of everything you could think of to do
with Francis Galton to this college.
This is partly because towards the end of his life he established
from something known as an anthropometric lab,
which is essentially a lab for measuring people
and detailing people's heredity and it's this legacy
that we're investigating in two exhibitions at the library
and in the Petrie Museum and a public programme
which I've been working on.
And Francis Galton is probably one
of these massive polymath Victorian scientists
but today he's probably best known for his work on the area
of eugenics, a word and term which he in fact coined
from two Greek words one for well, 'eu' and one
for blood or stock, 'genes', where we get our word genetics from or gene.
He put these two words together to describe a movement
that would encourage there to be better human stock, as he saw it,
by the breeding of eugenically better
or perfect people together
and therefore you would eradicate things
like even alcoholism, TB, you would establish a kind
of better health
of certain people, you would establish a better intellectual
level, those kinds of ideas.
By the end of his life, by 1911, there's a sort of build
up in the 1900s of interest and acceptance of eugenic ideas,
there's a Eugenics Education Society established, which are kind
of a lobbying group, and most people of upper-middle class,
upper class background would accept to some extent sort
of social and culture eugenics,
more positive eugenics which is encouraging the breeding
of eugenically perfect people rather than negative
which is kind of discouraging or even stopping, enforcing,
people who were not deemed to be fit to have children.
And in Britain it's very much a sort of social
and political movement rather than an area
that actually made laws and stops people doing things
or encourages people to do things.
But of course eugenics had international
impact in Canada, America, South Africa, across the empire
as it was in the British Empire then, but also in Europe,
in Scandinavian countries, in mainland Europe,
in Germany for example.
And it's this international legacy
that obviously has come back to haunt eugenics,
really since the Second World War because of Nazism
and because of the horrendous atrocities practiced
by the Nazis through their eugenic programme against people
with disabilities, against Jews, against people
who were just considered feeble minded or unfit to breed
for whatever reason they determined.
And also then of course massive sterilisation programmes
in some areas of the United States and elsewhere.
And it's this kind of negative eugenics
that has really haunted eugenics
and I think that's been a real problem,
which is an understatement, but it's been a real problem
in terms of analysing the impact of eugenics in Britain
and the legacy of it today because we tend
to establish ourselves as the good guys against the bad Nazi guys
or against the bad racists in America who sterilised lots
of black men and that, you know,
in Britain we didn't really do very much
around eugenics, we just kind of a had a social movement
but it wasn't that wide ranging.
And in some ways that's kind of true but in other ways its meant
that we've not really interrogated some of our social assumptions
about some of the areas the Eugenics Society campaigned on,
and just to pick out a few examples areas such as
who should have children, about how we screen people
for having children, our assumptions about parenting
for example; or, watching the royal wedding and the marriage
of Kate Middleton, a so called commoner, to a member
of the royal family and next king,
the next in line, if you like.
And it was interesting hearing the commentary
when she's marrying William
about how she was bringing different stock
and how her breeding was different to William's
and these were the kind of words that commentators were using.
And in the newspapers there was Kate's family tree
and an investigation into her heredity
in a way that's actually far more about class than anything
to do with birth and far more about eugenic ideas
about what constitutes breeding and I was quite shocked
by the use of some of these words like stock and breeding
to sort of bring new blood into the royal family.
And I think that shows that these ideas,
these assumptions, haven't gone away
and really what we should be doing,
I think, in this
centenary year of Francis Galton is
on the one hand celebrating all his great work,
on the other hand commemorating the legacy for the people
that his work also affected but also interrogating ourselves
and our history and also our own assumptions as academics
and what that presents to non-academics
and wider society about whether those,
how many of those assumptions are still with us today
and how much we should be thinking
about things differently around medicine
around representation and around class.