ANN ARBOR—Jack Kevorkian isn’t the first American physician to galvanize the conscience of the nation by publicly disclosing his role in patients’ deaths. During the early decades of this century, prominent Chicago physician Harry J. Haiselden stirred just as much public and professional furor as Kevorkian is doing today, according to University of Michigan medical historian Martin S. Pernick.

“Like Kevorkian, Haiselden wasn’t content to act in private,” says Pernick. “He forced people to talk about what he was doing: allowing the deaths of infants he decided were

Pernick is the author of “The Black Stork: Eugenics and the Death of ‘Defective’ Babies in American Medicine and Motion Pictures Since 1915,” just published by Oxford University Press.

In fact, Pernick points out in the book, Haiselden went much further than Kevorkian in soliciting publicity for his efforts to eliminate “the unfit.” He displayed dying infants to reporters, encouraged still-hospitalized new mothers to be photographed and interviewed, and wrote articles about the families he was “helping” for the Hearst newspapers.

The Chicago Medical Society expelled Haiselden, not for his refusal to treat the infants, but for starring in a feature film based on his cases. This fictionalized drama, “The Black Stork” theaters around the nation from 1916 through 1942.

Pernick found the only surviving print of this film in the cluttered New Jersey garage of a septuagenarian film collector. His book, detailing the story behind the film, is the first to rediscover the fact that eugenic euthanasia took place in America with widespread public support.

“Today’s debates about ‘assisted suicide,’ human genetics and the treatment of impaired infants are not sufficiently informed by awareness of America’s history as a leader in organized eugenics,” says Pernick. “It’s important to understand how and why past efforts to improve human heredity became linked with euthanasia, and with the race, class, gender and ethnic hatreds that led to genocide in Nazi Germany.”

U-M News and Information ServicesUniversity of Michigan