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was also the director of the nearby Western State Hospital (the sanitorium was a private unit for middle-income patients that operated separately from the government-supported state hospital). DeJarnette was a respected doctor among the white Virginia elite at the time, but his career would ultimately be defined by his strong support for eugenics, specifically the forced sterilization of the mentally ill and others he deemed “defective.” DeJarnette drew fresh inspiration from Nazi Germany’s 1933 Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring, Hitler’s opening bid to purge the Reich of its genetically and racially “inferior” stock. In 1934 DeJarnette calculated that 56,244 defectives had already been sterilized under the new regime. |
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