November 14, 2003

Dean Apologizes for Medical School's Role in Sterilization Program

By ALICE GOMSTYN

The dean of Wake Forest University's medical school has apologized for the school's support of a state-sponsored program that sterilized mentally ill and mentally retarded people in the 1940s and 1950s. The program was based on eugenics, a now-discredited philosophy advocating the use of sterilization to prevent individuals considered less desirable by society from reproducing. Those included people believed to have inherited diseases, as well as people with behaviors then thought to have

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