“Be skeptical of everything you hear, including this sentence.” That was the central message of the 48 semester-long classes I taught to medical professionals—doctors, nurses, therapists, administrators, etc. over 19 years. Officially, my courses were on the economics of healthcare, but they also encompassed ethics and a much broader look at epistemology and the philosophy of science.
While my students’ knowledge of science and medicine was vastly greater than my own, it was my point to teach them how dangerous their knowledge could be when when unleashed with inadequate skepticism and introspection. My greatest tool in this effort was to devote a couple of weeks of our course to the history of eugenics—the now-discredited but once-transcendent science of being well-born. The logo of the Second International Eugenics Congress in 1921, pictured above, declared that “Eugenics is the self direction of human evolution,” with the goal being “an harmonious entity.” Self-direction was essential, they thought because, as Alexander Graham Bell had written in 1883, “natural selection no longer influences mankind to any great extent.” (Bell was honorary president of the 1921 conference. More on him in an essay coming soon.)
