DeJarnette testified against Carrie Buck as an expert witness in the important eugenics case Buck v. Virginia's “Eugenical Sterilization Act,” was signed into law by Trinkle on March 20, 1924. Trinkle added that legalizing sterilization for the insane, epileptic, and feeble-minded persons would allow these patients to leave the institutions and not propagate their own kind. Trinkle advocated the compulsory sterilization law as a cost-saving strategy for public institutions that had experienced growth in the incarceration of what he referred to as feeble-minded and defective populations. Within the report, Trinkle reported that one of the largest contributions to Virginia’s dire financial state was the increased spending on institutionalizing what he called 'defectives'.

Governor Trinkle released a report on the critical financial condition of the Commonwealth. In order for the bill to pass the legislature, the men focused on changing public sentiment by broadening the public’s knowledge of eugenic science and the laws of hereditary defect. Lee Trinkle, a longtime political colleague of Strode and supporter of the eugenics movement, was elected Governor of Virginia in 1922, DeJarnette achieved an influential political supporter for his campaign. He became so frustrated with his opponents in the Virginia assembly that he said 'When they voted against it, I really felt they ought to have been sterilized as unfit.' When E. In the early 1920s, DeJarnette, began lobbying intensively for the Commonwealth of Virginia to pass a compulsory sterilization law. “If proper steps be taken, the unfit can be made to grow annually smaller, and finally disappear entirely from our registers.” “To this class of the unfit belong the insane, the epileptic, the alcoholic, hereditary criminal, the syphilitic, the imbecile and the idiot, and none of these should reproduce,” DeJarnette wrote. He believed that sterilizing people with certain traits that he believed to be hereditary would prevent these traits from being passed on to future generations. Ī devout Presbyterian, DeJarnette supported the temperance movement. In 1906, DeJarnette worked with Aubrey Strode and Albert Priddy to establish the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded in Lynchburg. She continued to practice medicine following the marriage and the couple had no children. Chertsey Hopkins, a physician at Western State Hospital, as he was advised that being a married man was necessary for career advancement. On February 14, 1906, he married a colleague, Dr. The asylum was renamed Western State Hospital in 1894. Lee Camp Confederate Soldiers' Home in Richmond for a year before joining the staff of the Western Lunatic Asylum in Staunton. His uncle Daniel Coleman DeJarnette was a prominent Virginia politician who served in the Virginia House of Delegates, United States Congress and the Confederate Congress during the Civil War.Īfter graduating from the Medical College of Virginia in 1888, DeJarnette practiced at the R. His maternal grandfather Benjamin Henry Magruder was a prominent Virginia lawyer and legislator, and in 1864, was elected to the US House of Representatives. The DeJarnettes were descended from French Huguenot immigrants who settled in Virginia during the colonial period and had been prominent in Virginia planter class society for generations. Joseph DeJarnette was born on his family's plantation, Pine Forest, in Spotsylvania County, Virginia to parents Elliott Hawes DeJarnette, formerly a Captain in the Confederate Army and Evelyn Magruder DeJarnette. He was a vocal proponent of racial segregation and eugenics, specifically, the compulsory sterilization of the mentally ill. Joseph Spencer DeJarnette (Septem– September 3, 1957) was the director of Western State Hospital (located in Staunton, Virginia) from 1905 to November 15, 1943.

Dejarnette sanitarium deaths