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Charles Fremont Dight (1856 – 1938) was medical professor and promoter of the human eugenics movement in the U.S. state of Minnesota.

Biography

Dight was born in Pennsylvania and graduated from the University of Michigan Medical School in 1879. He later worked at the university under professor Alonzo B. Palmer. Dight, who became a staunch socialist, also taught at the American University of Beirut and the medical school at Hamline University which became part of the University of Minnesota in 1907. He founded the Dight Institute for the Promotion of Human Genetics which actively pursued the same type of eugenics as Nazi medicine as well as the Minnesota Eugenics Society in 1923. In 1933, Dight wrote a letter to Adolf Hitler praising his efforts to "stamp out mental inferiority."[1] The institute was a part of the university until the late 1960s.

Publications

• History of the Early Stages of the Organized Eugenics Movement for Human Betterment in Minnesota, 1935
• Call for a New Social Order, 1936

External links

• Minnesota Historical Society Biographical Information
• Personal Papers of Charles F. Dight, Minnesota Historical Society
• University of Minnesota Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies