CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2019
| Author | Szamosi, Barna |
|---|---|
| Title | The Legacy of Eugenic Discourses in the History of Hungarian Medicine |
| Summary | In my dissertation I explore the legacy of eugenics in the history of Hungarian medicine. In this project I analyze how gender, race/ethnicity, and class play role in shaping medical concerns. And how do medical sciences contribute to empowerment in different historical periods. I was initially interested in how geneticists are producing knowledge about Roma people within Europe and more specifically in Hungary. I started my work with one very narrow question in mind: whether these works contribute to the geneticization of race/ethnicity as Troy Duster, Jonathan Kahn, Dorothy Roberts, Carolyn M. Rouse and many other scholars claim, and if yes, in what ways they do. I was interested in contemporary medical genetic discussions but I was aware that this discourse has continuities with the medical genetic discussions of the socialist period. In order to explore the commonalities and differences between these two, I did 35 interviews with medical geneticists and biologists who take part in research, teaching, or genetic counseling. These were in-depth semi-structured interviews in which I asked about their specific fields, about the continuities that they see with socialist medical aims regarding reproduction, how they see the role of race/ethnicity, gender, and class in shaping genetic concerns, and how would they describe the social relevance of their work. In the interviews I inquired how they view their work in relation to eugenics and their replies pointed towards connections between their work and the eugenic arguments of the early twentieth century. Thus, I became interested in the comparative analysis of eugenic thinking in the Hungarian medical discourse in two historically distant periods. Specifically, the early 1900s and 1910s when eugenics entered the Hungarian medical discourse with the present medical genetic concerns closely connected with the socialist medical practice. Medical genetics as a discipline emerged in the 1960s as a result of biotechnological developments. In the Hungarian literature medical genetic studies were first published around the end of the 60s. Institutions, that incorporated medical genetic knowledge to aid reproductive decision making such as genetic counseling institutes, were established in the 70s. Among the early concerns the degeneration of the population appeared similarly to the early eugenic discourse thus I think it is possible to establish connections between these two. In the early medical genetic publications of the 1970s the main concern was the possible transmission of ’bad’ genes for the future generations and the role that medical genetics could play to avoid that outcome. Their focus was on the female body but explicitly racial or ethnic concerns were not present in genetic argumentation until the early 1980s, although ethnicity based medical studies have appeared in the 1960s and 70s. The aim of population genetic works is to compare the genetic structure of Roma and non-Roma Hungarians in order to design screening panels that would improve the management of their healthcare. I think regarding these medical efforts one of the question to look at is how genetic knowledge empowers people at the intersection of the social categories of gender, class, race/ethnicity? In what ways do geneticists molecularize these social categories? And what are the possible ethical consequences of this practice? |
| Supervisor | Pető, Andrea and Sándor, Judit |
| Department | Gender Studies PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2019/szamosi_barna.pdf |
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