This thesis attempts to study the onset, development, and reception of eugenics as a scientific discipline and as a world view in the 19th and early 20th century. The goal of the thesis is to demonstrate that the eugenics movement was a multifaceted and vivid one. It attracted people from all ends of the ideological field. Ideas that marked the movement trickled down every nook and cranny of society and for a time received ample institutional support. I aim to describe, with the help of the theories of Ludwig Fleck, the process of how something becomes an established fact within the scientific community. At the same time, I wish to emphasize the societal nature of science, focusing on its entanglement with its historical and social surroundings within which it arises. All the while, I will present some of the more important figures in the eugenics movement that enabled its reception within the scientific community and in the wider society of the early 20th century.
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