Our own master race: eugenics in Canada, 1885–1945

Among the things that make In search of a cure stand out from similar histories is the author's steady attention to background research that supported discovery of pharmaceuticals, sometimes in distant fields. His chapters on the physiological basis of medicine and cancer bear this out well. Another noteworthy character of this book is Weatherall's refusal to rest on the introduction of a pharmaceutical and its assimilation into the therapeutic armamentarium. He often reminds the reader of the problems with a particular drug, and why the search for a better pharmaceutical continued. In a work of this breadth one would expect to find more errors of fact or omissions than I was able to detect; none seriously detract from the book. For example, he does not list Philip Hench among the winners of the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1950 (even though he cites Hench's Nobel lecture in the endnotes, p. 95). The chapter on deficiency diseases gives short shrift to the contributions to vitamin work by researchers at the University of Wisconsin in the early twentieth century (chapter 7). John Sheehan is not given the credit he deserves for the semisynthetic penicillins (p. 177). And Weatherall's lamentation about industry's low priority for the development of drugs for rare diseases (p. 278) does not mention the 1983 Orphan Drug Act in the U.S. The author implies that a drug history written by a person with scientific training should be preferred over one by a person without such training (p. 168). One could easily substitute "historical" for "scientific" and make as plausible a claim. In search ofa cure should stand out for some time to come as one of the better single-volume histories of drugs. It is reliable (the above points notwithstanding), well-documented, thoughtfully argued, and organized in a reasonable way. Historians should make it their book of choice for the subject. In a review in this journal Roy Porter suggested that the history of eugenics had in recent years been comprehensively surveyed and to prevent "overpopulation" recommended that responsible scholars exercise voluntary restraint. While he was specifically referring to Great Britain he might well have had in mind also the numerous studies of the subject in the United States, France, Germany, and the Soviet Union. Angus McLaren's modest introduction to the eugenics movement in Canada indicates that Porter's admonition has not halted the proliferation of books any more than …