The Latin American Republics: A History

Doyle, Henry Grattan

doi:10.2307/334241

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“…To write it clear again, I feel a second finger lie Above mine on the pen. 54 The invisible hand, it appears, has paused from wielding the shears and reached out to guide his prophetic pen. It was an impressive endorsement of his views.…”

Section: So Read I Thisand As I Trymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…49 As a doctor he has observed that the invisible hand has its own eugenic armoury: 'Struma, tubercle, nervous disease, have all lent a hand towards the pruning off of that rotten branch, and the average of the race is thereby improved'. 50 This Panglossian confidence seems to be Stark Munro's answer to Galton. There is no need for human intervention; a higher biopolitical power is already on the case.…”

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“…She was bounded by insanity upon the north and upon the south'. 43 They quarrel, and Stark Munro is fired. There could be material in this situation for either a tragedy or a farce of heredity, but it remains undeveloped.…”

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“…And if they crack, He throws them back, And fashions them once more. 52 It is not explained why it is an act of benign providence to strew microbes in people's lungs, and Galton might well comment that this shows why you should not leave it to nature to improve the race; in his view evolution by natural selection was 'moulded by blind and wasteful processes', 53 whereas the programme he called for was rational and scientific. By the end of the poem Stark Munro himself seems for a Tennysonian moment to lose confidence in his reading of the divine pruning process:…”

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Arthur Conan Doyle, Eugenics, and the Hand of God

Kerr

2023

Literature & History

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The lifetime of Arthur Conan Doyle coincided with the development of eugenics and its establishment as a powerful presence in some of the leading institutions, and minds, of the time. The discourse of eugenics was an important part of both the literary and scientific culture to which he belonged and contributed. His involvement with it, throughout his working life, shows the attraction of eugenics to a man of letters with a lifelong interest in medicine and science, but also his reasons for not endorsing its programme of action. Many of Conan Doyle's most interesting writings, in fiction and non-fiction, deal with themes that obsessed the eugenicists – race, empire, health, inheritance, and the future. But although he inhabited the same intellectual environment as figures like Francis Galton and Karl Pearson, and often expressed himself in language similar to theirs, Conan Doyle was never tempted to the kind of biopolitical proposals for which eugenics became notorious. This essay shows why not.

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