Claudius F. Mayer: From Plato to Pope Paul / Orvostörténeti Közlemények – Supplementum 17. (Budapest, 1989)
VIII. HUMAN BREEDING EXPERIMENTS SLAVES, AND SECTARIANS, VANISHING PEOPLES Laboratory attempts at creating single human beings date back to the early medieval periods. 44 3 They were described in esoteric and hermetic writings, 44 4 and tradition passed them to us also in the form of various customs, myths, and legends. 44 5 Many old superstitions adhere also to questionable individual practices by which activities at the nuptial bed could produce the qualitatively most favorable progeny. 44 6 Mass selective breeding of people was practiced in certain states of Antiquity, 447 for improvement of the native stock, and it was projected in numerous state Utopias as a desirable method of race improvement. 44 8 Selective breeding was often restricted to special castes. 44 9 A typical example of such a selective caste breeding is slave breeding in Antiquity, 450 and in modern times. 45 1 in the Roman Empire, slaves were encouraged by their masters to propagate, and the practice of breeding from slaves was common, 452 since, as with all commodities, it was more advantageous to raise them up than to buy them. 45 3 In the 3th cent. A.D. defective or impotent slaves could be returned to the seller as unfit for (breeding) work. 45 4 After the discovery of the New World, already the first negroes who were imported to America were used for breeding just as domestic animals. 45 5 A physiologist, visiting the West Indies before the abolition of slavery, well remembered the efforts of planters to form the negroes into families, since promiscuity produced infertility, and fertile slaves became important to the owner after the prohibition of slave trade. 45 6 In Maryland and Virginia, called the "breeding states ", a thriving domestic business developed in slave breeding for southern plantations. 45 7 The immoralities of this were exposed by a few, 45 8 but the future dangers of the situation could be hardly foreseen by any. 45 9 Selective human breeding for race improvement was tried out in the U.S. by some white sectarians in the 19th cent. Most of these religious or social sects, 460 following the plans of Utopian dreamers, also attempted a reformation of marriage, of sexual and family life, some advocated celibacy. 46 1 It was the group of " perfectionists " at Oneida, N.Y., whose founder preached free love or "complex marriage ", a combination of polygyny and polyandry, male continence (1844), and aimed at "scientific propagation or stirpiculture " (1875), by pairing off those for sexual intercourse who were most advanced in health and perfection. 46 2 This matching plan was inaugurated in 1869, and 58 experimental children were produced under the stirpicultural regime. Soon, the movement was attacked, called an organized concubinage, and was crushed in 1880 by public indignation, inside dissatisfactions, and legal prosecution. 46 3 Just about the same time, an antipolygamy crusade started in the U.S., directed mainly against the Mormons who made the system of polygyny a part of their social life, and considered polygamy a necessity "for the redemption of the human family from the low state of corruption into which it sank in monogamy 1'. 46 4 Toward the end of the I9th cent, other interesting experiments started in the U.S. under the influence of eugenic awakening. 46 5 22
