Naslov
Prostitutes and Criminals : Beginnings of Eugenics in Croatia in the Works of Fran Gundrum from Oriovac (1856 - 1919)

Autori
Kuhar, Martin ; Fatović-Ferenčić, Stella

Izvornik
Croatian medical journal (0353-9504) 53 (2012), 2; 185-197

Vrsta, podvrsta i kategorija rada
Radovi u časopisima, esej, znanstveni

Ključne riječi
Fran Gundrum; eugenics – history; prostitution – history; criminals – history; sexual hygiene; sexuality – history; venereal diseases – eradication; history of medicine; 19th/20th century; Croatia

Sažetak
Fran Gundrum (1856-1919) was a Croatian physician and encyclopedist, described in historiography of medicine as primarily an advocate of medical enlightenment and healthy lifestyle. For the purpose of this paper we have analyzed all of Gundrum’s published books, booklets and articles in the period between 1905 and 1914 in order to identify and analyze his ideas about the problems of prostitution and criminality. We showed that Gundrum’s theories of heredity, morality and sexual hygiene incorporated many of the important discussions of his time, especially from a viewpoint of the Darwinian paradigm. Gundrum’s statistical analysis of the problem of prostitution and the impossibility of its eradication was the first such study performed and published on our territory. Although he rejected the notions of born prostitutes and born criminals, which were defended by Italian criminal anthropologist Cesare Lombroso, he still regarded eugenics as a convenient method of dealing with the ills of the society. His conception of criminals as degenerated individuals representing a violent threat to the society served the purpose of legitimizing several radical means of dealing with this problem, such as sterilization and deportation. Organicistic view of the society prevented Gundrum from seeing individual rights as important as the right of the society to protect itself. Nevertheless, this view was also responsible for many humanistic ideas, such as in the case of prostitution, where the binomial illness/poverty marked the beginnings of the ideas that would later on become more prominent in the works of representatives of social medicine movement.

Izvorni jezik
Engleski

Znanstvena područja
Javno zdravstvo i zdravstvena zaštita

POVEZANOST RADA