This book was completed during the "era of emerging new epidemics," "herd immunity," and "biodystopia." Eugenics, degeneration, and biopolitics constitute its conceptual framework. The motivation of Professor Giorgos Kokkinos for writing it was the bridging, on the one hand, of certain aspects of social history, which are relatively silenced or unknown in Greek historiography, and, on the other hand, of intellectual history. Specifically, in the field of this research, intellectual history and, more specifically, this component dealing with medical perceptions regarding "life worth living and reproducing," encounters the epistemological examples that prevailed in the bio-medical sciences from the mid-19th century to the late 20th.

In the late 20th century and in the first decades of the 21st, the bio-medical sciences have been challenged by the absolute genetic determinism and have entered the so-called "post-genomic age." The characteristic of this era is the awareness that there are multiple factors influencing heredity: both biological and socio-cultural. The formation of each individual depends on their inherited genetic code, as well as the specific markers of their life, which arise from the historical period, lifestyle, and even epigenetic imprints due to the traumatic past of ancestors.

The protagonists of the stories narrated here are rather the diverse "healers," those who identify with the discursive practices of denunciation and regulatory sovereignty, shaping the "problem" and establishing the dominant perspective. In other words, they impose on others the condition of pariah, exception, or even "bare life" in the liminal zone where the right to life itself is at stake: eugenic intellectuals, doctors (hygienists, psychiatrists, sexologists, gynecologists, pediatricians, dermatologists, aphrodisiologists, epidemiologists), criminologists, forensic doctors, politicians, philosophers, health experts, educators, writers, artists, architects.

We hope that this study does not lack the perspective of the stigmatized, the outcasts, their bodily pain, and their psychological distress. Nevertheless, the available sources for attempting the leap into a "bottom-up" history are certainly insufficient and, above all, not representative of the traumatic experience and the complex biosphere of all targeted groups. After all, how could this happen in a monograph?