Eugenics and the Afterlife: Lombroso, Doyle, and the Spiritualist Purification of the Race

Ferguson, Christine

doi:10.3366/jvc.2006.12.1.64

Cited by 13 publications

(5 citation statements)

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“…She writes, “The eugenic ideal of an impending society in which sickness and suffering had been eliminated, in which handsome and fit bodies replaced old and diseased ones, and in which each race of type preserved only its best specimens, is identical with the spiritualist conception of the afterlife. Indeed, so close are their idealized representations of the future state that one might well define eugenics as spiritualism pursued through a different quarry” (Ferguson, 2007: 67). 7 Ferguson’s work focuses on the bodily future of racialized spirits and serves to balance the tenor of the majority of scholarship on Spiritualism that delights in the progressive politics of the movement.…”

Section: Birth Rates and Desirable Populationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Unnatural Selection

Gutierrez

2018

Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses

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The religious movement of Spiritualism embraced progress as the hallmark of all existence on earth and in heaven. With the publication of On the Origin of Species, this devotion to improvement fell on difficult moral ground. Many Spiritualists sought to hasten the march of humanity through the intervention of eugenics. Understood as an ethical imperative that would improve the lots of both women and children, the alliance between the eugenics platform and Spiritualists betrayed the unwitting consequences of the politics of progress.

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Section: Birth Rates and Desirable Populationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Unnatural Selection

Gutierrez

2018

Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses

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“…It is difficult to find a prestigious scientist of the era who did not attend a séance with the medium . The alleged conversion to spiritism of Cesare Lombroso (1835–), who met Palladino in 1891, is attributed to her phenomena (see, e.g., Blondel, ; Ferguson, ; Sommer, ). According to Alvarado (), this fact gave rise to the first systematic investigation of Palladino's phenomena: the legendary séances in Milan in 1892.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…I refer to the conversion of Lombroso in italics because, as highlighted by Ystehede (), this was not evident until the end of his life, in 1909, and was not strictly a conversion to Kardecian spiritism—the dominant kind in Italy—but spiritualist: he accepted the existence of the spirit but not other characteristics of the spiritist doctrine, such as reincarnation or the plurality of inhabited worlds in the universe. See also Ferguson (), Lombroso (), and Rock ().…”

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Discovering Palladino's Mediumship. Otero Acevedo, Lombroso and the Quest for Authority.

Graus¹

2016

J. Hist. Behav. Sci.

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In 1888, the spiritist Ercole Chiaia challenged Cesare Lombroso to go to Naples and study a brilliant though still unknown medium: Eusapia Palladino. At that time Lombroso turned down the challenge. However, in 1891 he became fascinated by the medium's phenomena. Despite the abundant literature on Palladino, there is still an episode that needs to be explored: in 1888, the Spanish doctor Manuel Otero Acevedo accepted the challenge rejected by Lombroso, spent three months in Naples studying the medium and invited the Italian psychiatrist to join his investigations. This unexplored episode serves to examine the role of scientific authority, testimony, and material evidence in the legitimization of mediumistic phenomena. The use Otero Acevedo made of the evidence he obtained in Naples reveals his desire to proclaim himself an authority on psychical research before other experts, such as Lombroso, Richet, and Aksakof.

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“…12 12 An early version of this research appears in my 2007 Journal of Victorian Culture article, “Eugenics and the Afterlife: Lombroso, Doyle, and the Spiritualist Purification of the Race.” …”

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Recent Studies in Nineteenth‐Century Spiritualism

Ferguson

2012

Literature Compass

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Inaugurated some thirty years ago, the massive resurgence of scholarly interest in nineteenth‐century Spiritualism – a once‐derided heterodox movement which offered believers the opportunity to speak with the dead – continues to gain momentum as we reach the second decade of the twenty‐first century. This article examines how twenty‐first century feminist, cultural studies, post‐structuralist, and periodical studies approaches to the movement develop and differ from those of both its nineteen‐eighties recoverers and indeed its nineteenth‐century practitioners and adherents. What is at stake, intellectually, politically, and ethically, in the ways in which contemporary critics now interrogate and align transatlantic practices of mediumship and séance communication? In particular, I trace the growing challenge to the long‐ubiquitous and near‐exclusive emphasis on the movement’s feminist and proleptically radical dimensions, one which, however laudable in its progressive ambitions, has nonetheless tended to over‐homogenize Spiritualism’s chaotically diverse political and philosophical identifications and to sometimes skew our understanding of its constituency. Recent moves to republish and digitize rare works from the transatlantic Spiritualist archive have the potential to remedy this situation, not by installing an univocal Ur‐meaning for the movement, but by revealing new areas of dynamic tension and cross‐fertilization within it.

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Eugenics and the Afterlife: Lombroso, Doyle, and the Spiritualist Purification of the Race

Cited by 13 publications

References 9 publications

Unnatural Selection

Unnatural Selection

Discovering Palladino's Mediumship. Otero Acevedo, Lombroso and the Quest for Authority.

Recent Studies in Nineteenth‐Century Spiritualism

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