High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Racial hygiene (often labeled a form of "scientific racism") is the selection, by a government, of the putatively most physically, intellectually and morally superior persons to raise the next generation (selective breeding) and a close alignment of public health with eugenics. Racial hygiene was historically tied to traditional notions of public health, but usually with an enhanced emphasis on heredity. The use of social measures to attempt to preserve or enhance biological characteristics was first proposed by Francis Galton in his early work, starting in 1869, on what would later be called eugenics.