The Problem of the Feeble-minded PDF Download

Author: Mrs. Walter Slater
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : People with mental disabilities
Languages : en
Pages : 132

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Author: Steven Noll
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 9780807845318
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Steven Noll traces the history and development of institutions for the mentally handicapped in the South between 1900 and 1940. He examines the influences of gender, race, and class in the institutionalization process and relates policies in the South to those in the North and Midwest, regions that had established similar institutions much earlier. In addition, Noll creates a vivid portrait of life and work within institutions and the impact of institutionalization on patients and their families. At the center of the story is the debate between the humanitarians, who advocated institutionalization as a way of protecting and ministering to the mentally deficient, and public policy adherents, who were primarily interested in controlling and isolating perceived deviants. According to Noll, these conflicting ideologies meant that most southern institutions were founded without a clear mission or an understanding of their relationship to southern society at large.

Author: James Trent
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199396205
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 393

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Pity, disgust, fear, cure, and prevention--all are words that Americans have used to make sense of what today we call intellectual disability. Inventing the Feeble Mind explores the history of this disability from its several identifications over the past 200 years: idiocy, imbecility, feeblemindedness, mental defect, mental deficiency, mental retardation, and most recently intellectual disability. Using institutional records, private correspondence, personal memories, and rare photographs, James Trent argues that the economic vulnerability of intellectually disabled people (and often their families), more than the claims made for their intellectual and social limitations, has shaped meaning, services, and policies in United States history.

Author: Henry Herbert Goddard
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Heredity
Languages : en
Pages : 168

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Author: Henry Herbert Goddard
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 712

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"Report on work done at the Vineland research laboratory during the past five years."-Pref.

Author: Henry Herbert Goddard
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Heredity
Languages : en
Pages : 168

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Author: Adam Cohen
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101980834
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 418

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Longlisted for the 2016 National Book Award for Nonfiction One of America’s great miscarriages of justice, the Supreme Court’s infamous 1927 Buck v. Bell ruling made government sterilization of “undesirable” citizens the law of the land In 1927, the Supreme Court handed down a ruling so disturbing, ignorant, and cruel that it stands as one of the great injustices in American history. In Imbeciles, bestselling author Adam Cohen exposes the court’s decision to allow the sterilization of a young woman it wrongly thought to be “feebleminded” and to champion the mass eugenic sterilization of undesirable citizens for the greater good of the country. The 8–1 ruling was signed by some of the most revered figures in American law—including Chief Justice William Howard Taft, a former U.S. president; and Louis Brandeis, a progressive icon. Oliver Wendell Holmes, considered by many the greatest Supreme Court justice in history, wrote the majority opinion, including the court’s famous declaration “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” Imbeciles is the shocking story of Buck v. Bell, a legal case that challenges our faith in American justice. A gripping courtroom drama, it pits a helpless young woman against powerful scientists, lawyers, and judges who believed that eugenic measures were necessary to save the nation from being “swamped with incompetence.” At the center was Carrie Buck, who was born into a poor family in Charlottesville, Virginia, and taken in by a foster family, until she became pregnant out of wedlock. She was then declared “feebleminded” and shipped off to the Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-Minded. Buck v. Bell unfolded against the backdrop of a nation in the thrall of eugenics, which many Americans thought would uplift the human race. Congress embraced this fervor, enacting the first laws designed to prevent immigration by Italians, Jews, and other groups charged with being genetically inferior. Cohen shows how Buck arrived at the colony at just the wrong time, when influential scientists and politicians were looking for a “test case” to determine whether Virginia’s new eugenic sterilization law could withstand a legal challenge. A cabal of powerful men lined up against her, and no one stood up for her—not even her lawyer, who, it is now clear, was in collusion with the men who wanted her sterilized. In the end, Buck’s case was heard by the Supreme Court, the institution established by the founders to ensure that justice would prevail. The court could have seen through the false claim that Buck was a threat to the gene pool, or it could have found that forced sterilization was a violation of her rights. Instead, Holmes, a scion of several prominent Boston Brahmin families, who was raised to believe in the superiority of his own bloodlines, wrote a vicious, haunting decision upholding Buck’s sterilization and imploring the nation to sterilize many more. Holmes got his wish, and before the madness ended some sixty to seventy thousand Americans were sterilized. Cohen overturns cherished myths and demolishes lauded figures in relentless pursuit of the truth. With the intellectual force of a legal brief and the passion of a front-page exposé, Imbeciles is an ardent indictment of our champions of justice and our optimistic faith in progress, as well as a triumph of American legal and social history.

Author: Stephen T. Murphy
Publisher: IAP
ISBN: 1617354163
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Voices of Pineland: Eugenics, Social Reform, and the Legacy of “Feeblemindedness” in Maine by Stephen Murphy tells the story of the Maine School for the Feebleminded, later known as Pineland Hospital and Training Center. Based on an in depth analysis of annual institutional reports, newspaper clippings, legal documents, and other archival sources as well as interviews with former residents, their family members, and staff, Murphy traces the history of the Maine institution from its founding in 1908 to its eventual closure in 1996. Prior to 1908, Maine sent many of its citizens with intellectual and developmental disabilities to Massachusetts. When the state established the Maine School for the Feebleminded, it modeled it after an institution in Massachusetts that had been the first asylum for socalled “idiots” in the United States. Murphy shows the influences of both social forces and the personalities of superintendents, elected officials, and eventually lawyers, advocates, and court officials on Pineland’s history. Voices of Pineland is more than the story of Maine’s institution for the feebleminded, though. It provides a lens through which to view the history of people with intellectual disabilities in twentieth century America. The founding of the Maine School for the Feebleminded was a product of the eugenics fervor that swept the country around the turn of the century and continued for several decades. The feebleminded were seen as a cause of a broad range of social problems and a threat to the social order. Like other states, Maine turned to the institution and later involuntary sterilization to prevent the feebleminded from spreading their alleged defective genes. The population of the Maine school steadily grew, and the institution soon became overcrowded and understaffed. As early as 1938, charges of abuse and neglect at the institution were reported in the press. This predated the flurry of exposes on state schools and mental hospitals in the national media, including Life magazine and Reader’s Digest, in the post-World War II era.

Author: R. C. Scheerenberger
Publisher: Brookes Publishing Company
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Author: George William Hunter
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Biology
Languages : en
Pages : 442

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