Early Historical Snapshots

LSJ/CHID 332

15 October 2009

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Please keep in mind…

That disability history “is everywhere but just not in the histories we write.”

That this overview is a selective glance at the history we know about the western world.

That the models can be “found” in the material presented.

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Greek and Roman Times

A time that can be characterized in part by: Infanticide

Exposed “deformed” infants Variations from species “norm” Not universal practice

Fear of the gods Birth defects as omen

Gods are displeased with some wrongdoing Sacrificed as appeasement

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Greece

Aristotle’s Politics (350 BCE) Utopian, ideal leaders, beauty “Deformed shall not be reared” Impossible ideals

Aristotle, Generation of Animals Female as “mutilated male” (less perfectly formed) “Monstrous” births (inhuman form) explained by natural

causes

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Greece and Rome…

Roman laws denied rights to individuals who were deaf and/or mentally disabled because they were seen as irrational.

However, military medicine and support provided for wounded veterans.

Hippocratic medicine (450 BCE-1600 CE) Imbalance of body is the natural cause of

epilepsy, melancholy, etc.

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Judeo-Christian Traditions

Old Testament: Leviticus List of disabled people who must be excluded

from rituals; don’t defile the divine with impurity

Bear the burden of sin Although what about role of prophets? Holy

fool? New Testament

Jesus encounters (and cures?) the sick, blind Disability becomes a target of charity

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Medieval Europe

One large category of “misfortune” individuals Poverty, illness, and disabilities All seen as inevitable

Part of God’s diverse creation (Saint Augustine 400 CE) Disabilities = God’s power over the natural world

Salvation of the rich through gifts to poor Small “hospices”

Hotel-Dieu (651 CE in Paris) 19,000 leprosariums; leprosy shunned.

Begging as occupation License, guilds, competition Children deliberately maimed for profit or taught to fake

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Middle Ages 4th – 16th Centuries

Family—Center of activities Monasteries – Refuge for blind 1330 – Bethlehem – Oldest Mental

Institution in Europe Poverty Widespread—Begging

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Middle Ages

1348 Black Death Social disorder & fear Scapegoat was the poor

Medieval & Renaissance royal court amusement Jester/dwarf, fool/idiot,

epileptic, conjoined twins as objects of ridicule; bought as gifts, pets.

Royalty display their “curiosity” collections.

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Monsters as “unnatural”: stories, wonders, moral symbols through the ages

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Middle Ages

1388  The Statute of Cambridge ("Poor Law") distinguished between

"sturdy beggars” capable of work "impotent beggars“ (not able) incapacitated by

age or infirmity No special provision for maintaining the sick

poor. For the next two centuries the aged and infirm

depended upon charity for survival.

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Religion (Protestant & Catholic)

Disability as sin Demonic seizures. Birth defects tied to

witchcraft. Martin Luther 1517

mentally disabled have no soul & should be killed.

Faith healing 1495 Miracle of

Cosmas and Damian (saints transplant leg)

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Middle Ages

1484 Pope Innocent VIII proclaimed a war against witches 

next 300 years=100,000 witch trials.  mental illness was treated by tying up

people in churches; other disabilities had the sign of the cross shaved into their heads. 

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Early modern Europe (16-17 Centuries):

State and Poverty 1601 English Poor Law

Divides the poor into deserving (disabled) and undeserving (able to work).

Poverty became suspect Begging Outlawed

Paris 1657

Renaissance art

Ideal body glorified again.

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Early Modern – continued

Renaissance New Advances in Human Understanding

(experience & reason) Reformation

Calvin / Luther – Preached that People with Mental Illness Possessed or Created by Satan

Start of Biological Origin/Treatment Understanding Difference - Intellectual Disability/

Mental Illness Philosophers promote REASON over authority.

rational, universal “man” as liberal democratic ideal. “natural” inferiority based on gender, race.

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Education: Sensory

Denis Diderot’s 1749 “Letter on the Blind” Rejects spiritual/sin as cause of blindness. Blind people have skills & intelligence & should be

educated. 1784 Paris, first school for the blind. Early 1800’s - US: Moral Treatment by Institutions 1820 Louis Braille, blind student & teacher. 1831 Boston, Perkins school (H. Keller ~1900).

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Education: Developmental Disabilities

1840s, Paris then US Edouard Seguin, “apostle to the idiots.” Teach sensory-motor “control.” 1848 Boston, School for Idiotic and Feebleminded Youth. Goal to train in job skills (if jobs available).

1870s, England and US residential schools. Universal education and those who don’t fit. By 1875, claims that “mental deficiency” was increasing, and

need to build larger custodial institutions, hidden away, permanent care, protect society.

Inmates as unpaid workers; self-sufficient colonies. 1894 Rome State Asylum for Unteachable Idiots.

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“Idiots” diagnoses and degeneration theory

1848 Samuel G. Howe, ON THE CAUSES OF IDIOCY

“E. G., aged 8 years. This poor creature may be taken as a type of the lowest kind of idiocy.

The probable causes are hereditary ones. The grand-parents were very scrofulous and unhealthy.

The parents were apparently healthy, but gave themselves up to excessive sensual indulgence.”

1866 J. Langdon Down, OBSERVATIONS ON AN ETHNIC CLASSIFICATION OF IDIOCY

“We have examples of retrogression…or departure from one type and the assumption of the characteristics of another.”

Down coined term “mongolism” to characterize people with intellectual impairment as equivalent to people of different races.

Evolutionary “throwbacks” to a “lower” ancestral race.

Also criminals were explained as throwbacks to animal type, lacking human moral sense.

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History of institutions for mentally impaired people 1403 London’s

Bethlehem asylum (“Bedlam”)

By 1700, France had 100 “general hospitals,” mixed poor, sick, disabled, mental disorders.

Until late 1800s, most lived in family, community Able to contribute in pre-

industrial economy; work in home, fields; unpaid labor still valued.

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Abuses in “Madhouses” (1700-1850)

Bedlam hospital provided Sunday afternoon entertainment. The chained patients were placed in cells and galleries. The asylum received large sums of money from the visitors

until 1770 when it was decided that they tended to disturb the tranquility of the patients by making sport and diversion of the miserable inhabitants and that admission should be by ticket only.

1848 Dorothea Dix (Mass.): "More than 9000 idiots, epileptics, and insane in these

United States, destitute of appropriate care and protection. Bound with galling chains, bowed beneath fetters and heavy iron balls, attached to drag-chains, lacerated with ropes, scourged with rods, and terrified beneath storms of profane execrations and cruel blows; now subject to jibes, and scorn, and torturing tricks, now abandoned to the most loathsome necessities or subject to the vilest and most outrageous violations."

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The Rise of the American Institution: Moral Treatment

1841- 1870s Dorothea Dix 30 state public institutions for people with

mental impairments built 1870s Poor funding, growing size of

institutions Overcrowded, dirty institutions Segregation of middle class / poor Husbands could commit wives.

Severe Economic depressions 1870 and 1880

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The Rise Of The American Institution

By 1850, 55 asylums - ~ 45,000 ''known insane persons'‘

1870 -1880 Census: PWMD= 97 to 183 / 100,000 PWID= 64 to 153 / 100,000

By 1900, 328 institutions - ~ 200,000 patients The peaked in 1955 at ~ 560,000

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1835 Lunatic Asylum, Columbus Ohio

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The asylum: from moral to “medical”

Initial benevolent goals of reformed asylums. “Moral treatment” (self-control)

Calm environment, social activities, baths/diet. Small private retreats for the wealthy. US run by Quakers.

By 1870s, US and England public institutions Huge size, poorly funded. No real therapy, but premised on science of heredity

and idea of brain lesions as cause. Growth of psychiatric profession, interests.

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Statistical bell curve (1835) invented in the era of efficiency, progress, eugenics

Statistics created “the tyranny of the norm,” really the ideal. The disabled fall short.

Statistician Francis Galton founded the eugenics program of eliminating deviations from the norm (in one direction only).

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American Schools 1880-1920

Learning was perceived in terms of productivity—i.e., schools should be like factories.

Referring to the teachers as the factory workers and the students as the raw material to be turned into the product.

The children who could not be processed to completion were considered as scraps. …. they were considered to be dropped out of the production line ="drop outs."

http://www.nd.edu/~rbarger/www7/impbusin.html

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IQ testing 1905 invented by Alfred Binet.

“abnormal” children can be educated.

1910s US psychologists corrupt this goal. Mental testing industry. Person’s intelligence is unchangeable. Hereditary. Measure and label and institutionalize.

“Menace” to society. Moron – imbecile – idiot scale. By 1900, 328 institutions, with 200,000 people labeled

mentally impaired.

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Popular Culture Freak Show

Captain Ahab, bitter and deformed, in Moby Dick Classic children's tales – disabled people are evil:

The deformed, cannibalistic witch in Hansel and Gretel, 1845

Captain Hook, the "limb-missing”, patched-eye pirates of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, 1885

"the queen in Snow White, who becomes a "wart-nosed, hunched-over witch" to poison Snow White, and other disabled characters are wicked. 1845

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Social construction of “freaks”

1840s-1940s Circus sideshows, performers Display, entertain, skills “Real” and not-real disabilities, identities. Make a living (how exploitative?) Replaced by medicalized power over disability:

bodies displayed at medical museum, presentations at scientific meetings, today’s documentaries.

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Chang Bunker and Eng Bunker(May 11, 1811–January 17, 1874)

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Eugenics

Sir Francis Galton 1883:

"Eugenics is the study of the agencies under social control that seek to improve or impair the racial qualities of future generations either physically or mentally."

Francis Galton, Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development (London: Macmillan, 1883).

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From segregation to prevention of “unfit” births = the eugenics movement 1900-1940

Social costs, burden of supporting the “feebleminded” and their offspring. vs. desirable traits = white, middle-class norms…

US sterilizes 60,000 people in institutions.

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Time Line

1920 “The Permission to Destroy Life Unworthy of Life,” Karl Binding, a lawyer, & Alfred Hoche, a psychiatrist (German).

1927 Buck v. Bell United States Supreme Court upheld the concept of eugenic

sterilization for people considered genetically "unfit." Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., stated: "Three generations of

imbeciles are enough.“ Upheld Virginia's sterilization statute which provided for

similar laws in 30 states, under which an estimated 65,000 Americans were sterilized without their own consent

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Time Line

1933 Nazi Germany -between1933-1939, 375,000 people in Germany sterilized

1939 T4 program – Start of Germany’s Euthanasia program ~275,000 PWD murdered.

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ICE PICK

LOBOTOMY

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•In 1936, Walter Freeman performed his first lobotomy operation.

•Inserting an ordinary ice pick above each eye of a patient with only local anesthetic

•drive it through the thin bone with a light tap of a mallet

•swish the pick back and forth like a windshield wiper and

•a formerly difficult patient is now passive.

•Used it for everything –

•psychosis to depression to neurosis to criminality.

•He developed assembly line lobotomies, going from one patient to the next with his gold-plated ice pick.

Ice Pick Lobotomy

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Between 1939 and 1951, over 18,000 lobotomies were performed in the US, and many more in other countries. It was often used on convicts, and in Japan, it was recommended for

use on “difficult” children. The old USSR banned it back in the 1940s on moral grounds!

In the 1950s protests began. The general statistics = ~ a third of lobotomy patients improved, a third

stayed the same, and the last third actually got worse! Rosemary Kennedy,

sister to John, Robert, and Edward Kennedy, was given a lobotomy when her father complained about the mildly

retarded girl’s embarrassing new interest in boys. Her father never informed the rest of the family about what he had

done. She lived out her life in a Wisconsin institution and died January 7,

2005, at the age of 86. Her sister, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, founded the Special Olympics in

her honor in 1968.

Ice Pick Lobotomy

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Life Magazine   "Bedlam 1946"                                      

Philadelphia State Hospital, known as Byberry, originally built in 1912. Byberry has been investigated so many times that in 1987, an 18-member task force decided to close the hospital in the interest of the patients. The hospital officially closed its doors in 1990. http://www.abandonedasylum.com/psh1.html

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