Dean Winternitz: Yale Medical School’s Passionate Eugenicist

Explores how Yale School of Medicine’s history is intertwined with that of eugenics. Challenges the institution’s memory of the school’s dean in the 1920s, Milton Winternitz, who served on the New Haven Committee representing the American Eugenics Society, alongside Yale’s President and professors like Arnold L. Gesell, Robert Yerkes, and Ellsworth Huntington. Describes the “Yale System” of medical education that encouraged students to concern themselves with “man’s entire social and economic environment” and attempted to measure students’ brilliance. Highlights how criticism of Winternitz remains limited to his anti-Semitism and how Yale affiliates have remembered his leadership with nostalgia and have denied that his public and private involvement with eugenics merits more than one sentence in a 2012 Yale Alumni Magazine article.