Title: Bad Blood: Diabetes and the Eugenics Movement

Name: Hope Eggett
Mentor: Dr. James Sanders

When insulin was invented in 1921, it allowed type 1 diabetics to survive past childhood for the first time, and along with that, marry and have children. However, this was also the height of the eugenics movement in the United States. While the eugenics movement has typically been studied by focusing on race, intellectual disabilities, and morality, my research answers the key question of how the eugenics movement dealt with the reproduction of diabetics. This is a case study on diabetes that sheds light on how eugenicists saw people with chronic illnesses as a whole. Theoretically, eugenicists’ goals focused on the health of future children. By analyzing their discussions of diabetes, it exposes to what degree race and intellectual disability were the focus of the eugenics movement as compared to illness and disease. Key to understanding the eugenics movement is the idea that it is doctors, not eugenicists, that cared for diabetics. This research uses textbooks and eugenicist publications between 1920 and 1940 to analyze to what extent doctors and eugenicists influenced the thinking of each field through the promotion of birth control, marriage choices, and sterilization to diabetic patients. The impacts of the eugenics movement over the last century have important implications in healthcare decisions today.