Person

Dight, Charles Fremont, 1856-1938

1856-1938

Charles Fremont Dight was born in July 1856, in Mercer, Pennsylvania.

He was a physician, professor, and promoter of the human eugenics movement in Minnesota. He graduated with a medical degree from the University of Michigan in 1879. From 1883 to 1889 he was a professor of anatomy and physiology at the American University of Beirut, Syria (now Lebanon). From about 1890 to 1892 Dight served as resident physician and teacher of physiology and hygiene at Shattuck School, Faribault, Minnesota and later at Hamline University which became part of the University of Minnesota in 1907. He was also a professor at the medical school of New Orleans University. From 1914 to 1918, he served as an alderman from the 12th district of Minneapolis and was instrumental in passing an ordinance requiring the pasteurization of milk. Dight became a proponent of eugenics during the 1920s. He founded the Minnesota Eugenics Society in 1923 and persuaded the Minnesota legislature to pass a sterilization law in 1925. He actively pursued the same type of eugenics as Nazi medicine. In 1933, Dight wrote a letter to Adolf Hitler praising his efforts to "stamp out mental inferiority." He was the author of "History of the Early Stages of the Organized Eugenics Movement in Minnesota for Human Betterment" (1935), and "Call for a New Social Order" (1936).

In 1892, he married Mary Alice Glidden Crawford (1860–1923) and divorced in 1899. He died on June 20, 1938, in Minneapolis, Minnesota.