Bernard’s fate was all too common among early research chemists, who often made a practice of smelling, tasting, and otherwise coming into close contact with the gases they were studying. Such a premature death had also befallen another great explorer of deadly gases, Carl Wilhelm Scheele, the Swedish chemist and pharmacist who had perished after tasting too much of his hydrogen cyanide in mercury.2
Both Scheele and Bernard had focused their attention on the effect of gases on the blood—work that later would become central to understanding the lethal power of the gas chamber. Following in their footsteps, other scientists explored the effects of still more gases, conducting various experiments on small animals to test each gas’s peculiar lethality.
By the mid-nineteenth century, several scientists were seriously exploring the lethal effects of all kinds of substances. As Bernard was conducting his initial experiments with carbon monoxide, others were discovering the properties of carbon dioxide—CO2—a heavy, odorless, colorless gas formed during respiration and during the decomposition of organic substances. In 1874 CO2 was pumped into a chamber in the London pound to asphyxiate dogs, though not with very neat results, until the method was improved by inserting the animal into a chamber that had already been filled with the gas, at which time the killing was achieved with commendable humanity, according to the newspapers.3
In 1884 Sir Benjamin Ward Richardson, a British pioneer in anesthesiology, delivered a lecture to London’s Society of Arts entitled “On the Painless Extinction of Life in the Lower Animals,” in which he traced the history of gases and vapors that could be used to carry out the humane slaughter of dogs and cats. Richardson designed a wood-and-glass container, large enough to hold a Saint Bernard or several smaller animals, which was connected to a slender tank full of carbonic acid gas and a heating apparatus. At the time, unwanted horses, dogs, and other animals were a pressing social problem, seen as contributing to disease and other maladies, and animal euthanasia seemed to offer many benefits. Gases were already on everyone’s mind, particularly in London, the world’s largest city at the time and known for its filthy fog and foul vapors that belched forth from hundreds of thousands of coal-burning chimneys and steam engines. In one four-month stretch alone, the winter of 1879 to 1880, an estimated three thousand people perished from aggravated lung conditions, as the daytime air became so dark that pedestrians stumbled to their death in the Thames.4 Residents coughed and choked in a sulfurous haze. It was precisely then and there, amid such foul pollution, that notions of a lethal gas chamber assumed greater currency, and “humane societies” throughout Europe adopted Richardson’s lethal chamber to remove unwanted animals.5 Scientists tested carbon dioxide as a possible cure to the animal overpopulation problem, oblivious to the fact that its use would only make the air worse for everyone.
At first such use was reserved for small animals, who were “put to sleep” behind closed doors, away from inquiring eyes, but soon many prominent eugenicists openly remarked about what others had only privately imagined: why not try it out on humans?6 Writing at the dawn of the twentieth century, H. G. Wells often mentioned “lethal chambers for the insane” and mused that the “swarms of black, brown, and dirtywhite, and yellow people… have to go.”7 Another British eugenicist of that time, Robert Rentoul, called for “degenerates” convicted of murder to be executed in a “lethal chamber.”8 The novelist D. H. Lawrence gave “three cheers for the inventors of poison gas,” saying, “If I had my way, I would build a lethal chamber as big as the Crystal Palace, with a military band playing softly, and a Cinematograph working brightly, and then I’d go out in back streets and main streets and bring them all in, all the sick… the maimed; I would lead them gently, and they would smile me a weary thanks.”9 The dramatist George Bernard Shaw also favored mass use of the lethal chamber.10 Such talk became so prevalent that some commentators even began using the noun as a verb, saying so-and-so ought to be “lethal chambered.”
Yet although eugenics (“good birth”) and euthanasia (“good death”) were closely interrelated in language and thought, not all eugenics advocates supported euthanasia. Debates about the morality of eliminating mental defectives and other types of the “unfit” widened some major schisms within the eugenics movement. In the meantime, however, notions of using a lethal chamber for large-scale euthanasia nevertheless had become part of the public discourse.11
Another significant development in the discussion that would turn into the eugenics movement was set in motion in July 1874, when a frail and chronically ill gentleman from New York City, Richard Louis Dugdale, visited a dingy local jail in New York’s Hudson Valley as a volunteer inspector for the New York Prison Association. Dugdale was shocked to learn that six persons under four family names, all of them blood relatives to some degree, were incarcerated in the same Ulster County institution, and that of twenty-nine males who were their “immediate blood relations,” seventeen had been arrested and fifteen were convicted of various crimes. He decided to examine the family in order to determine how they had come to be so criminal. The sheriff directed Dugdale to two longtime residents of the area, one of them an eighty-four-year-old former town physician who obligingly provided detailed personal information about the prisoners’ kin, most of whom were his former patients. The researcher also culled data from local poorhouse records, court and prison files, and interviews with local residents, which he wrote up in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal and in a little book on the subject, The Jukes: A Study in Crime, Pauperism, Disease, and Heredity, which was published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons in 1877.
In his book he claimed that the six prisoners “belonged to a long lineage, reaching back to the early colonists, and had intermarried so slightly with the emigrant population of the old world that they may be called a strictly American family. They had lived in the same locality for generations, and were so despised by the reputable community that their family name had come to be used generically as a term of reproach.” Dugdale said he had traced the family’s Hudson Valley roots back seven generations to a colonial frontiersman named Max, a descendant of the early Dutch settlers who lived in the backwoods as a “hunter and fisher, a hard drinker, jolly and companionable, averse to steady toil.” His genealogical research indicated that different branches of the family had experienced characteristic types of failure. One branch that appeared to have produced an inordinate number of criminals was traced back to a woman “founder,” Margaret, whom Dugdale called the “Mother of Criminals,” who had married one of Max’s sons. Presenting large genealogical charts and descriptions of each family member, each listed only by first name or code, Dugdale concluded that of 709 Jukes or persons married to Jukes, more than 200 had been on relief and 64 ended up in the poorhouse, indicating a tendency that was several times greater than that of other New Yorkers. Eighteen had kept brothels, 128 had been prostitutes, and more than 76 were convicted criminals. The author estimated their social problems had cost the public, through relief, medical care, police arrests, and imprisonment, a total of $1,308,000 (about $20.9 million in today’s dollars)—a figure that astounded and appalled many taxpayers.