A System of Complete Medical Police

Between 1890 and 1920, the percentage of our population adjudged "feeble-minded" and condemned to institutional confinement more than doubled.¹ The long-contemplated hygienic form of social control formulated by eighteenth-century German social thinker Johann Frank, "complete medical policing," was launched with a vengeance. Few intimidations are more effective than the threat of a stay in an insane asylum. Did the population of crazies really double in those three decades? The answer given by one contemporary was elliptically Darwinian: "Marriage of these inferiors is a veritable manufactory of degenerates." It could no longer go unchecked.