The Kallikak Family
The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness was a 1912 book by the American psychologist and eugenicist Henry H. Goddard, dedicated to his patron Samuel Simeon Fels. Supposedly an extended case study of Goddard's for the inheritance of "feeble-mindedness", a general category referring to a variety of mental disabilities including intellectual disability, learning disabilities, and mental illness, the book is noted for factual inaccuracies that render its conclusions invalid. Goddard believed that a variety of mental traits were hereditary and that society should limit reproduction by people possessing these traits.
Nazi propagandists incorporated The Kallikak Family narrative into their efforts to legitimize forced sterilization in the early 1930s, eventually leading to the mass execution of tens of thousands of disabled German children and adults from 1939-1941; thus the book played a significant role in Nazi Germany’s eugenics movement under Adolf Hitler.
The name Kallikak is a pseudonym used as a family name throughout the book. Goddard coined the name from the Greek words καλός (kalos, good) and κακός (kakos, bad).
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