Eugenics, Puériculture and Child Welfare in Interwar Greece

1. Eugenics, Puériculture and Child Welfare in Interwar Greece Despina Karakatsani University of Peloponnese Oxford 20.4.2012

2. Political-Social Problems/National Demands • Balkan Wars (1912-1913), the First World War and the Asia Minor military campaign (1920-1922): • Territorial responsibilities --Sevres Treaty (August 1920) • Continuous waves of dislocated migrants, exacerbating public health problems • Healthy nation • National efficiency • Race (biological connotations)

3. Earliest references to child health in improving the overall quality of the race date back to 1921 • Parliamentary discussion commended over the parameters establishing the Ministry of Public Health and Social Welfare-1921

4. Measures to Protect Child Health1911- 1930 • Constantinos Savvas (1861-1929) Professor of Hygiene University of Athens • Emmanuel Lambadarios (1885-1942) Head of the School Medical Service of the Ministry of Education

5. The First Steps toward Hygiene Care for Children • Establishment of the first Ministry of Health 1923: lay the foundations so that child health problems could be dealt with effectively • Policies adopted to that point had been fragmentary. • The most substantial step taken before a decade of intervening warfare was to establish the School Hygiene Service in the Ministry of Education in 1911 • Against the spread of transmissible and childhood diseases.

6. 1914: first school doctors were appointed • Health of primary school students began to be monitored more systematically. • Measures included the vaccination of schoolchildren • Introduction of a personal health card (a form of a health identity card for each child, where developmental indices and potential health problems were recorded) • Compilation of statistics for rates of student morbidity.

7. Measurements of students’ bodies, conducted by school doctors in the early 1920s. • Special tools such as cephalometers, thoracometers, stadiometers and ergographs: record the physical development of students. • Lambadarios attempted to promote auxology studies related to the development of a child’s body • great emphasis laid upon the combinational measurement of weight, height and circumference of each student’s thorax • Coefficient of robustness

8. Criteria to distinguish health children (eugenics) from those affected by diseases or physical deformities (dysgenics) • Anthropological measurements conducted by the School Hygiene Service and the Pedological Institute (1920) • Record the body development of a Greek child classifying measurements depending on sex, race, nationality and age.

9. Student poly-clinics • Children’s summer camps • Open-air school • Early social relief projects funded by voluntary societies-organisations • strengthen the constitution of sickly children especially from the lower social classes • Patriotic Union of Greek Women (1914): child care centers, spread hygienic habits (lectures-pamphlets), run social hygiene institutions

10. The Intensification of the Efforts after the Refugees’ Arrival, 1922-1935 • Refugees’ settlement revealed the inadequacies of the public health system • Death tools due to malaria, typhus, dysentery, tuberculosis in refugee camps • Pressing need for public health reform • After 1923 infant mortality on the increase • Infant mortality rates doubled • Increase in infant abandonment • Future of the race-falling fertility rates made birth protection of prime national importance

11. Robustness of the Nation: indispensable to Greece’s hostile geopolitical environments • Protection of mothers: prerequisite for ensuring racially robust descendants. • Th. Pangalos (1925-6) following the example set by Mussolini’s dictatorship: adopted the first measures for protection of motherhood • Restrict the abortion and infanticide • 1926: Legislation for the protection of nursing infants

12. Increase-control births placing infants up to the age of two along with their indigent mothers under its protection • Law: popularize knowledge of infant care • Create a Model Child Care Centre-Museum of Eugenics and Child Care • These plans did not materialize during this period • K. Charitakis (Director of Social Hygiene Service of the Ministry of Health): attempts since 1925 to organize state institutions for protection of motherhood

13. National School of Public Health

14. Liberal Government 1928-1932 • Strengthen the constitution of weak children from the lower classes • Placing the protection of childhood under state’s jurisdiction • Ongoing modernization process (school meals, open-air schools, summer camps): confront TB within the framework of a sociological orientation of medicine • Living conditions of families with children attending school • Social orientation of childhood protection

15. Laws for the protection of motherhood and children • Command agency: provide scientific supervision to the institutions involved in the care of infants and expectant mothers • 1929: Patriotic Union of Greek Women turned into a semi-state organization. Child health care • Child care centers (advice and health care, distribute food and milk, monitor infant health, soup kitchens, camps)

16. Aims of the Foundation: decrease infant mortality, disseminate new hygiene measures among poverty-stricken women • Home visits from visiting nurses • Educating mothers on their maternal duties crucial in spreading eugenic ideas • Dispel superstitions about hygiene during pregnancy and infant rearing • A. Doxiadis-Chairman of the Foundation published special books and popular pamphlets with advice for young mothers. • Biological duty. Weekly health festivals for children. Prizes for the best-reared babies

17. Doxiadis introduced the term ‘biological capital’ in Greece (1920): importance of health and child rearing knowledge for mothers • Improve environmental conditions • Institution of eugenic measures: increase viability and decrease mortality • Reinforcing of Greek race

18. Members of National School of Public Health 1930

19. Children infected with malaria, North Greece 1930

20. Linking Eugenics to Puericulture • Transplant international eugenic theories to Greece • Establish social hygiene institutions for children • Link eugenics to pedology • Articles in Pedology • Lambadarios: hold in check the reproduction of individuals who gave birth to children that were delicate, degenerate and harmful to society

21. Establish puericulture centers, improve pregnancy, provision for training scientific staff • Institute of Infant Care -University of Paris • A. Pinard • French Eugenics Society

22. The Influence of French Eugenics and the Quality of Biological Capital • Doxiadis: hereditary predisposition a factor for the incidence of pathological tendencies in children • Sicard de Plauzoles • Progenitor diseases responsible for the deterioration in Greek youth • Greeks need to pay closer attention to moral depravity • Individual’s biological duty-Health card for the production of healthy offspring

23. Charitakis: puericultural policy, prenatal puericulture, pregnancy hygiene • Care for infant hygiene before conception • Investigation of parent’s hygienic condition before marriage • Couple’s ages • Provision for family allowances, pregnancy leave for working mothers • Medical care during labor • Education for mothers • Establishment of puericulture centers

24. Prenuptial certificate • He did not advocate the establishment of health certificate • Eugenics: form of acculturation for the productive drive • Not imposing mandatory medical checks on would-be parents • Voluntary medical examination • Cultivate a sense of responsibility • A sense of duty to the collective biological capital • Instruction not enforcement. A new ideal would be cultivated

36. Discourse on eugenics in Greece, primarily advanced by physicians, focused on the quality of ‘biological capital’ adopting mild eugenic measures