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The Coimbra University professor, Eusébio Tamagnini, for example, addressed the Royal Anthropological Institute in Oxford in April 1946 in order to speak about the progress made in Portuguese anthropology; he had been the principal inspiration behind the Portuguese Eugenics Society, formally established in 1937.
Any international linkages Tamagnini had fostered over the years with Nazi ‘racial science’ did not appear to harm his career at Coimbra or internationally; indeed, both flourished.
Visits such as that by Tamagnini to England, the extensive research secondments undertaken by Portuguese and Spanish scientists in Germany during the late 1930s and 1940s under the Estado Novo, and, the multiple contributions by German and Italian scholars that appeared in Iberian scientific milieus show how the transnational circuits of certain brands of science operated and how they excluded or displaced other scientific discourses.
[…]
In terms of the most cited in these years, by far the most numerous were references to K. Koffka and his research on Gestalt. E. Jaensch, F. Baumgarten Tramer and Kretschmer were also cited.
Dantín, for his part, followed the work of the geneticist Von Verschuer in his work on the constitutional traits of those involved in workplace accidents. Mallart was in favour of introducing programmes along the lines of the Kraft durch Freude (Joy at Work) initiative introduced by the [Fascists] in Germany.
Similar patterns were followed in Portugal. Portuguese specialists followed the work of Kretschmer and the biotypologists and notions of ‘robustness’ percolated diverse fields ranging from the military academy through to models of workplace efficiency.
What appeared to be largely absent from the Portuguese interest in these areas, however, was much overlap or communication with their Spanish counterparts. Once again, the knowledge flows were routed directly to Germany and Italy and did not stop for pause in Spain.
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Despite the fact that in both Spain and Portugal eugenic legislation was in fact sparse, two main conclusions on the characteristics of eugenics in the two countries can be signalled.
First, the differences between Spanish and Portuguese eugenics in the 1930s and 1940s under their respective dictatorships responded to the different relative weight of positivist science in Portugal and that of the Catholic Church in Spain.
Second, the dictatorships of the two countries, although connected in many ways, operated differently and harboured scientific communities that drew on each other surprisingly little as the history of biotypology, eugenics and racial hygiene in the two countries shows.
In Spain, society and science were very tightly controlled by National Catholicism; in Portugal, Catholicism was prominent but independent scientific endeavour was favoured.
In the event, eugenics in both countries in the 1930s and 1940s boiled down to little more than extravagant declarations on the history of the ‘race’, some blood group analysis and a broad swathe of measures devoted to maternity care, pronatalism and child-centred puericulture.