Carrie Buck Detamore

On October 19, 1927, following the U.S. Supreme Court decision earlier that year, Dr. John H. Bell of the Virginia Colony sterilized Carrie Buck. Between 1927 and 1972, doctors at Virginia's state hospitals sterilized another 8,300 Virginians. Although compulsory sterilization is now seen as an abuse of human rights and eugenics is a discredited science, Buck v. Bell was never overturned, and Virginia did not repeal its sterilization law until 1974. Historians have since found evidence that neither Carrie Buck nor her daughter was mentally retarded and that Bell's sterilization relied on a false diagnosis. Vivian Dobbs, Carrie Buck's daughter, was placed on the honor roll at her elementary school in 1931, a year before she died at the age of eight. Carrie Buck died in a nursing home in Waynesboro on January 28, 1983, and was buried in Oakwood Cemetery in Charlottesville.