C. W. Saleeby

Caleb Williams Saleeby (1878 – 9 December 1940) was an English physician, writer, and journalist known for his support of eugenics. During World War I, he was an adviser to the Minister of Food and advocated the establishment of a Ministry of Health.

Life

Saleeby was born in Sussex to a Lebanese Christian father and an English mother. His father, Elias G. Saleeby, was a founder and head of schools in Mount Lebanon. From his mother's side he was the grandson of the famous psychiatrist Caleb Williams of York. His father died whilst he was young and his mother moved to 3 Malta Terrace in Stockbridge, Edinburgh. He was educated by his mother and at the Royal High School in Edinburgh.

At Edinburgh University, he took First Class Honours and was an Ettles Scholar and Scott Scholar in Obstetrics. In 1904, he received his Doctor of Medicine degree. He was a resident at the Maternity Hospital and the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh, and briefly at the York City Dispensary.

In 1906 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. His proposers were Sir Alexander Russell Simpson, Sir Thomas Clouston, Sir William Turner and Daniel John Cunningham.

He became a prolific freelance writer and journalist, with strong views on many subjects. He became known in particular as an advocate of eugenics: in 1907 he was influential in launching the Eugenics Education Society, and in 1909 he published (in New York) Parenthood and Race Culture.

He was a contributor to the first edition of Arthur Mee's The Children's Encyclopædia. Like Mee, he was a keen temperance reformer. Saleeby's contributions to the Encyclopedia were explicitly racialist: he saw mankind as the pinnacle of evolution, and white men as superior to other men, based on "craniometry".