Abstract

The article focuses on the ways in which the nascent Italian eugenics interpreted and used the idea of degeneration in the period between 1889, the year of publication of Human Degenerations by the anthropologist and psychologist Giuseppe Sergi, and 1911, when the psychiatrist Pietro Petrazzani published a book with the same title. This debate on degeneration was influenced by Herbert Spencer’s theory of evolution and by European psychiatric and sexological thought and was characterized by a continuous oscillation between the importance attributed to the environment and that of inheritance without a clear choice in favor of one or the other aspect. The analysis allows to affirm that in early Italian eugenics the push for social reform was accompanied by the request for repressive measures and that the concept of Latin eugenics is not entirely appropriate for understanding the complexity of the Italian experience