The vigorous implementation of Virginia's eugenic sterilization statute (Virginia trailed only California in the total number of people sterilized) did not satisfy DeJarnette. DeJarnette performed many of the 1,200 operations that occurred at Western State during his tenure. Supreme Court upheld Virginia's sterilization statute, a ruling that authorized the sterilizations of about 8,300 Virginians and 60,000 other Americans before 1980 in the more than thirty states that enacted similar laws. DeJarnette testified in support of the state's involuntary sterilization of Carrie Buck, an allegedly feebleminded eighteen-year-old Charlottesville woman. He then took part in arranging a court case to test the statute's constitutionality. He relentlessly demanded that the state pass a sterilization statute, and building on the eugenic theories of the country's most prominent scientists he gained recognition as a leading authority.Īfter sixteen years of lobbying, during which DeJarnette spoke before medical societies, social workers, university students, and reformers, the General Assembly authorized eugenic sterilization in 1924. DeJarnette argued that mentally disabled people should be sterilized because it amounted to a crime and a burden on society to allow them to procreate. In his 1908 annual report he recommended that the state prohibit marriage among the insane, alcoholics, epileptics, syphilitics, people with tuberculosis, and the feebleminded. In 1932 adjacent to Western State he opened a self-supporting, semiprivate mental hospital for middle-income patients, which two years later the General Assembly renamed the DeJarnette State Sanatorium.ĭeJarnette was in the vanguard of Virginia's eugenic sterilization movement. During his administration the hospital expanded in size, including a number of buildings and additions DeJarnette designed himself and one of which bore his name. Reflecting the reform ethos of the Progressive period, he revamped the hospital's therapeutic standards, banned physical restraints, unlocked many patients' rooms, and instituted more sympathetic treatment. She discontinued practicing medicine after their marriage and died on December 7, 1947.ĭeJarnette became the first president of the Augusta County Medical Society in 1904, and in 1906 he was appointed superintendent of Western State Hospital. On February 14, 1906, he married a colleague and fellow physician, Chertsey Hopkins. Lee Camp Confederate Soldiers' Home for a year before joining the staff of Western Lunatic Asylum (after 1894 Western State Hospital) in Staunton. He considered himself the genetically gifted descendant of colonial Virginians and practiced at Richmond's R. She educated DeJarnette and prepared him to enter the Medical College of Virginia, from which he graduated in 1888. After the American Civil War (1861–1865), his mother wrote stories, many in the then-popular Negro dialect genre, for national periodicals, including Century Illustrated Magazine and Frank Leslie's Popular Monthly. DeJarnette, served in both the United States and Confederate States House of Representatives. He was the son of Elliott Hawes DeJarnette, formerly a captain in the Confederate States Army, and Evelyn May Magruder DeJarnette. Joseph Spencer DeJarnette was born on September 29, 1866, in Spotsylvania County.

In 2001 the General Assembly denounced and expressed regret over Virginia's eugenics program. DeJarnette defended sterilization and racial segregation until his death in 1957. He took pride in the state's aggressive approach to sterilization, but felt the state was not acting fast enough and publicly admired Nazi Germany's more ambitious plan. Supreme Court upheld Virginia's sterilization statute. DeJarnette testified in the landmark case Buck v. He also began to advocate for forced sterilizations, which he believed would improve society. DeJarnette's early career fit the reform ethos of the Progressive period and he modernized treatment of patients as superintendent of the hospital.

DeJarnette was a physician and eugenicist who performed hundreds of involuntary sterilizations at Western State Hospital in Staunton.

Dejarnette sanitarium deaths