Coreen McGuire, Co-Lead of The Measurement Lab, writes:
Institutional records are contentious sources in history because of the way that they tend to present a partial picture of decision-making, are confined to a particular institution, tend to occlude marginalised historical actors, and obscure the behind-the-scenes aspects of historical causation. The records of an institution like The Eugenics Society would seem to be an especially unpromising source base for a disability historian. However, sometimes historical actors manage to find their way into even the bleakest archives, and make their voices audible and perspectives visible. This truth found myself and my co-author, historian of science Alex Aylward, when we began working on an article on how disabled people had engaged with the Eugenics Society in the interwar years. I had come across some letters from people who defined themselves as disabled and written to the society to procure sterilizations. With Alex’s expertise in history of biology and eugenics, we teamed up to reveal in Medical History that sterilizations had been done ‘on the quiet’ to a considerable extent during the 1920s and 30’s.
This was a historiographical innovation because, as my recent encyclopaedia entry on the intersection of eugenics and disability history explains, ‘the historiography around disability and eugenics has developed separately, creating two vast sub-fields that rarely cross paths.’
However, while chatting post-conference in an Oxford pub in January, we both felt that this article and these events should be known more broadly. In other words, that we had generated historical news as well as historiographical breakthroughs. We reached out to the publication Aeon, to write a piece for the public that would highlight these primary sources and analyse them in greater depth. The resulting piece tackled the issue of historical agency and explored how we use history to tell stories—concluding that when it comes to disability history and eugenics, there remain other stories to be told.
Our article in Aeon is available to read freely at the link below:
Coreen McGuire and Alex Aylward, ‘The Sterilisation Seekers’, Aeon, 13 April 2026
Explore related articles:
Aylward, A., & McGuire, C. (2025). Defective data: statistics, disability, and eugenic sterilisation in interwar Britain. Medical History, 1–16. (Available open access).
McGuire, C. (2026). History of Disability and Eugenics in Britain. In D. Bolt (Ed.), Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Disability Studies. Oxford University Press. (Available to subscribing institutions only).
