Full resolution (JPEG) - On this page / på denna sida - V. Social Movements - 4. Other Social Movements - Swedish National Anti-Tuberculosis Association. By B. Buhre - Eugenics. By V. Hultkrantz
<< prev. page << föreg. sida << >> nästa sida >> next page >>
Below is the raw OCR text
from the above scanned image.
Do you see an error? Proofread the page now!
Här nedan syns maskintolkade texten från faksimilbilden ovan.
Ser du något fel? Korrekturläs sidan nu!
This page has never been proofread. / Denna sida har aldrig korrekturlästs.
74 (i
v. social movements.
It was from the National Association that originated the proposal to appoint
the Royal Committee that set on foot an investigation into the entire
tuberculosis question, and whose proposals eventually elicited a generous subsidy from
the Riksdag towards the organization of the care of consumptives. The
Association itself owns a few sanatoria, a country colony for able-bodied
consumptives, dispensaries and a home for children. It maintains a dwelling-house in
Stockholm for working people whose lungs are affected, but who have healthy
children. By erecting Hälsan, an establishment in Neder-Luleå parish, for
experiments in social hygiene, the Association endeavours to diminish the
spread of the disease in that parish and to study the best methods for an
effective warfare against the complaint when it appears in country districts.
Healthy children menaced with hereditary tuberculosis are taken in hand and
boarded out in many provinces at the Association’s expense.
Exhaustive investigations have been set on foot into the occurrence of the
complaint in certain parts of the country and among workers in certain trades.
As a sub-section of the International Anti-Tuberculosis Association the
Swedish society keaps up the connection between the interests of foreign countries
and those of Sweden in the warfare against tuberculosis.
Eugenics.
Interest for eugenic problems has been steadily increasing in Sweden during
recent years: they are debated warmly in print and on the platform, and people
begin to consider a number of social questions first and foremost from this
point of view. No small degree of the credit for this must be attributed to
the temperance movement, which, though at times somewhat one-sidedly, has.
emphasised our responsibility to the coming generation, and the necessity for
strong measures to avert the danger of the degeneration of the race. These
points of view have begun to have weight even in legislation, e. g., in the
Acts relating to the employment of children and women in industrial labour
(1900 and 1911), and in the preliminaries now in progress for the reform of
the marriage laws, authoritative experts have been referred to for expressions of
opinion based upon medical and eugenic considerations which ought to carry
weight in the matter.1
The more attention is directed to the necessity of effective safeguards for public
hygienics, the clearer becomes the need for a deeper examination of the laws of
biology, which affect heredity and variation, etc. Swedish scientists have taken
an active part, too, in the diligent investigations now being pursued by all
civilized nations in this department. We will merely mention here the great
work published in 1913 at the public expense by Dr H. Lundborg, docent at
Uppsala University, "Medizinisch-biologische Familienforschungen innerhalb eines
2 232 köpfigen Bauerngeschlechtes in Schweden (Provinz Blekinge)". Sweden
offers especially favourable conditions to investigators of race biology of that
kind, since it possesses better parish registers than any other country in the
world; its official statistics are good, and its people is a comparatively pure
race, with one speech and one religion, its population is not particularly dense,
and syphilis is comparatively uncommon in rural parts, by which one of the
sources of false conclusions is removed. With the aim of promoting research
in this department, distributing information on allied questions, and "supporting
1 It will be of interest to point out here that, in 1757, a prohibition had already
been promulgated in Sweden against mairrage for "such as suffer from true or idiopathic
epilepsy". The law is still in force, but its efficacy seems not to be remarkably great on
account of the difficulty of administering it.
<< prev. page << föreg. sida << >> nästa sida >> next page >>
