The unfit : a history of a bad idea / Elof Axel Carlson.

Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y. : Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, [2001], ©2001.

xiv, 451 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Includes index and bibliography: p. 409-426.

Ch. 1. Who are the unfit? -- Ch. 2. The unfit in Biblical times -- Ch. 3. Self-pollution and declining health -- Ch. 4. Degeneracy theory: identifying the innately depraved and the victims of vicious upbringing -- Ch. 5. Dangerous classes and social degeneracy -- Ch. 6. Poor laws and the descent to degeneracy -- Ch. 7. The perfectibility of man confronts vice and misery -- Ch. 8. Evolutionary ethics before darwin -- Ch. 9. Hereditary units and the pessimism of the germ plasm -- Ch. 10. The Jukes and the tribe of Ishmael -- Ch. 11. A minor prophet of democracy -- Ch. 12. Isolating the unfit through compulsory sterilization -- Ch. 13. The emergence of two wings of the eugenics movement -- Ch. 14. Europe's undesirables replace the domestic unfit -- Ch. 15. Eugenics becomes an international movement -- Ch. 16. Racism and human inequality -- Ch. 17. Jews as people, race, culture, religion, and victims -- Ch. 18. The smoke of Auschwitz -- Ch. 19. The abandonment of eugenics by genetics -- Ch. 20. The future of eugenics -- Ch. 21. Dealing with life's imperfections.