or her progeny or involved the risk of mental injury either to such a person or his or her progeny. J.M MacEachran of Edmonton (U of A, Chairman), E.L. Pope of Edmonton (U of A, Professor of Medicine), E.G. Mason of Calgary, and Mrs J.H Field of Spurfield (Secretary) were the original four members of the board whose job was to approve or reject patients for sterilization with respect to the guidelines of the Sexual Sterilization Act. Five years after the first meeting of the Alberta Eugenics Board in 1929, at the annual meeting of the Canadian Medical Association (CMA) in 1934, it was noted that 288 cases had been approved by the Eugenics Board for sterilization, and that 60% of these cases involved serious mental or nervous disease in the patients family record. Two classes of individuals were sterilized - those with low mental IQ's and those who had suffered serious mental breakdowns, and therefore could not be recommended for parenthood by any physician. It was also noted that any operations to be completed on the patients first required personal consent, or consent from family. If no one was eligible to provide consent and the patient was not capable of signing personal consent due to physical or mental barriers, the Minister of Health could do so. In 1933, the Eugenics Board consented that the Chairman, Dr. MacEachran, would have the authority to dictate when an operation for sterilization would take place. Members of the CMA, agreed: Evidence [had] shown overwhelmingly that sterilization [was] a sound, humane and effective procedure, and [was] one of the chief means of coping with the grave problem of the increasingly large number of mentally sick and mentally deficient persons that each province [was] being called upon to care for. In 1937, the Social Credit government passed an amendment that strongly restricted the need for the Eugenics Board to obtain the consent of the patients to be sterilized. This increased the efficiency of the sterilization process, as more patients could be approved for sterilization by the Eugenics board. In the 44 years that the board was empowered by the government of Alberta, 2822 sterilizations were processed. MacEachran resigned from Chairman of the Alberta Eugenics Board on June 30, 1965, serving for 38 consecutive years. During his term as Chairman, MacEachran signed over 3200 applications approving for sterilization of adults and children (~60% of approvals resulted