Building the New Man: Eugenics, Racial Science and Genetics in Twentieth-Century Italy (CEU Press Studies in the History of Medicine)

Contents: Introduction Chapter 1. Between Lombroso and Pareto: the Italian way to eugenics Chapter 2. Eugenics and dysgenics of war Chapter 3. Regenerating Italy (19191924) Chapter 4. Quality through quantity: eugenics in fascist Italy Chapter 5. Eugenics and racism (19381943) Chapter 6. Toward a new eugenics Chapter 7. Against UNESCO: Italian eugenics and American scientific racism Conclusions Bibliography The volume investigates the registers of fifteenth-century supplications to the Apostolic Penitentiary of the Holy See and presents an analysis of a multiplicity of issues in which a context of the local needs of Western Christians and the central power of the Pope occurred. The contributions make it clear that local and individual factors and the Christian faith and religion in practice must not be seen as separate from the global power of the Roman curia. The latter's influence could become directly important for any individual in any local space, even ... et usque ad ultimum terrae (Acts 1:8), in the utmost peripheries of the Christian world. It is shown that the assistance of the Apostolic Penitentiary was indispensable in a large variety of cases. Such cases were dealt with both in the local, regional space and in the globalized centre of the Holy See Based on previously unexplored archival documentation, this book offers the first general overview of the history of Italian eugenics, not limited to the decades of Fascist regime, but instead ranging from the beginning of the 1900s to the first half of the 1970s. The Author discusses several fundamental themes of the comparative history of eugenics: the importance of the Latin eugenic model; the relationship between eugenics and fascism; the influence of Catholicism on the eugenic discourse Analyzes the Italian case study with the intention of discussing several fundamental themes of the comparative history of eugenics: the importance of the Latin eugenic model; the relationship between eugenics and fascism; the influence of Catholicism on the eugenic discourse and the complex links between genetics and eugenics.