Ruth Darwin

Ruth Frances Darwin CBE (20 August 1883 – 15 October 1972) was Commissioner of the Board of Control for Lunacy and Mental Deficiency and an advocate of eugenics. Career Darwin was appointed to the Board of Control, as an unpaid member, in 1921, replacing Ellen Pinsent. She retired from the Board of Control in 1949. In 1929, with money from the estate of her father who had died in 1928, she founded the Darwin Trust to foster research into "mental defect, disease or disorder". In 1932 she was appointed to the Brock Committee (a Parliamentary committee chaired by Sir Laurence Brock) that produced the Brock Report that called for the forced sterilisation of "mental defectives".