An all too brisk and too narrow history of eugenics: Radio 4’s Bad Blood reviewed

Like so many of history’s great catastrophes, the story begins with an eccentric Victorian Englishman. Francis Galton was a maker of maps and compiler of tables; ‘Whenever you can, count,’ was his mantra. Galton was the first man to plot a weather map and the grandfather of forensic fingerprinting. His quixotic mania for quantification would lead him to try and draw up a ‘beauty atlas’ of the United Kingdom based on his own observations. In a footnote to one of his books, he expressed the need for a new term for the ‘science’ that obsessed him most: ‘We greatly want a brief word to express the science of improving stock.’ That is, improving, by breeding (and by other means), the genetic quality of the human race. He coined a new term: ‘eugenics’.

Bad Blood is the story of eugenics, from Victorian England to the Jim Crow south and beyond. Our host is a geneticist, Adam Rutherford.