The very first requirement in a hospital is that it should do the sick no harm. —Florence Nightingale The appearance of Edwin Black’s War against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race a decade ago was a milestone in modern publishing. Informed by historical evidence gleaned by a team of researchers, the book drew the curtain on a dark period of US history while also revealing Transatlantic links to the systematised brutality of totalitarian regimes in early twentieth-century Europe. While an appreciation of the past is valuable, a more critical question is whether the prejudices that…