The Czechoslovak physician Karel Weigner was an important representative of scientific, academic and social life of the interwar period. The authors of the text focus above all on his long-term activities among the freemasons and interconnect them with Weigner’s work for the Czech Academy of Art and Sciences. In this scientific institution, Weigner helped to publish an anthology on equality of European races and therefore stood alongside (although only temporarily) scientists engaged in the eugenics movement. Weigner influenced the life of this private (crypto)intellectual movement, as well as the life of the scientific institution by his concept of the role and task of elites in the society. He understood this role as a support of the young democratic state. The researchers also point to places in Weigner’s texts where he repeatedly gives priority to the benefit of the society over the rights of an individual and therefore understands a human in an instrumental way as an object of care and scientific supervision. The paternalism and collectivism of the period, typical for the medical and eugenic environment, influences through Weigner also the Czech freemasons.
Karel Weigner; freemasonry; eugenics; antiracism; interwar Czechoslovakia
ISSN 0300-4414 (print)
ISSN 2788-3485 (online)
founded 1968
Published by Society for the History of Sciences and Technology http://www.sdvt.cz
Pavel Mervart Publishing http://www.pavelmervart.cz/
