Earlier this week several newspapers, and the BBC, carried this story about an old woman who was detained in a mental hospital, aged 15, in 1937, after being wrongly accused of stealing a sum of money worth less than £5 in today's money. She was pronounced "feeble-minded" and certified, and there was no appeal then. Recently she was reunited with her two brothers, who had not even been born then but whom she had seen a couple of times before losing touch with her entire family. This almost didn't happen; the brothers received a questionnaire from the care home she was living in, and they almost threw it out, thinking it marketing junk mail, when they saw their sister's name on it. They had presumed that she was dead.
It's a story it's difficult to react to, other than to say "what a terrible waste of an innocent life", as others have said on the comments boxes. She cannot even be compensated now; she is 85 and suffered a stroke shortly after her meeting with her two brothers, and is unlikely to live to see the benefit of it. The question is, how many other old people - particularly old women, as they were the usual victims, sometimes for the same reasons that prompt "honour killings" in some places, sometimes because they had post-natal depression or other genuine illness - are still in institutions as a result of wrongful certifications, or when they ceased to be ill? One imagines that they are now living in care homes, as many of the long-stay institutions were closed down in the 1990s, the positive result of the much-derided "care in the community" campaign. However, surely some of them have brothers and sisters, or even nephews and nieces they knew when they were young. Perhaps a campaign should be launched to bring about family reunions.
I noticed one or two comments calling for the doctor responsible to be named and shamed, the authors having forgotten that the doctor was in all probability nobody of great note and can be safely be assumed to have died a long time ago - assuming that this doctor is solely responsible for her ordeal. I've also seen people using this case as an excuse for a bit of Brit-bashing, as if similar things didn't happen in Europe or the USA. I'm sure similar things happened there as people's attitudes weren't that different.
I worked in one of the old "asylum" psychiatric hospitals from 1981-1984, just leaving as Thatcher began closing them all. At one time, they were like villages. And nearby was a learning disabled unit - one of the residents, aged about 60, cleaned on a ward I worked on. Same kind of tale - she'd got pregnant out of wedlock aged 18. And we knew such stories were indeed common place and a normative aspect of psychiatry before Laing and Szasz and Foucault and patient advocacy helped bring human rights into mental health care. Roy Porter's "Madness" is a short history of psychiatry from one of the great history of medicine academic. David Wright and Anne Digby's
From Idiocy to Mental Deficiency:
Historical Perspectives on People with Learning Disabilities
(London: Routledge, 1996)covers the history of learning disability.
It's worth considering that the doctor may have been trying to be humane- a mental hospital may well have been less cruel than the girl's home or a prison at that time and he probably didn't expect her to remain there for seventy years. It happened alarmingly often in quite a few countries. Having an illegitimate child was another reason. Eugenicists also encouraged sterilisation of the "feeble-minded"- most notably in parts of the USA and Sweden. The Nazis began their career of murder by firat sterilising and then killing those they defined as mentally or racially inferior.
See- among others- The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould. It's as well if we consider which of our own contemporary certainties are as soundly based as this.
Perhaps there is more to that story than is being reported, although usually a mental hospital isn't a better place for anyone than their home (if that's what you mean by the girl's home, as opposed to "a home"). However, it's true that the USA and at least one country in Europe, but not the UK, sterilised people on account of supposed feeble-mindedness, but I'm not sure if that's any better or worse than shutting them in a mental hospital for life, or at least until they were elderly.
"it's true that the USA and at least one country in Europe, but not the UK, sterilised people on account of supposed feeble-mindedness"
True, but hospital wards - both psychiatric and learning disabled - were gender segregated in accordance with the eugenics discourse that informed early 20th century asylum law, pseudo-science which wanted to breed out "degenerates" from the population. Note the similarities between eugenics discourse and the racial discourses informing colonialism, and later Nazism.
Psychiatric wards were not "gender segregated in accordance with the eugenics discourse", actually. They were gender segregated partly because of the prevailing morality, partly for the protection of women patients/prisoners after revelations about what happened to women in prisons and bedlams in the eighteenth century.
There were several aspects to eugenics, and there was "soft" eugenics- encouraging those considered more able to breed more often and discouraging those considered less fit from breeding, rather than forcibly sterilising them- as well as "hard" eugenics. The Marxist and eugenicist J. B. S. Haldane discussed it in several essays. Given the longevity of humans and the consequent likelihood of genetic abnormalities getting fixed in the population it's worth looking at the effects of nearly all humans growing to adulthood and possibly having children, especially with the human population of the earth at its present excessive size.
Thersites, could you suggest those of "the human population of the earth at its present excessive size" you think we should get rid of, and how? Who do you really dislike, and how do you want them to die? Should we not read Malthusian implications into your statement, or do you have a Darwinist view on the 'lower races' that should expunge themselves to allow whatever you understand as the 'higher breed' to dominate?
I would say though that I echo your recommendation of 'the Mismeasure of Man' by Stephen Jay Gould - at a time when people were awed by the pseudo-science of 'the Bell Curve' a scientific take on those statistics and the not-too-hidden racist and social Darwinist attitudes behind that were sorely needed.
It isn't a matter of dislike, Dawud: people with Down's syndrome, for example, have engaging and entertaining personalities and are very likeable. That doesn't alter the fact that they are more dependent on other people for their survival and depend on a medically and socially advanced society to live.
The ideal way to reduce the human population would be by death from old age with a considerable reduction in rate of reproduction for a few decades to slow down the rate of increase and then bring about a slow and steady decline. The alternative, I fear, is an eventual catastrophic population crash. Historical studies and animal observation shows that that is not at all pleasant.
How do you decide just who are "lower races" anyway, Dawud? Unlike Mohammed, I do not claim to know who is the best of mankind. From a strictly eugenist point of view, in fact, it is Europe and the Americas which have the highest percentage of people with potential genetic flaws because it is there that the medical resources that helped nearly every child to survive to adulthood have existed for longest. For example, haemophiliacs in Europe now live long enough to have children with a fifty percent chance of their being haemophiliac in their turn and so increasing the percentage of the population with such tendencies. At the moment that is economically practical in Europe, but it is impossible throughout the world and may not be so for ever in Europe. I am not saying haemophiliacs should be left to die; I do say that they should be discouraged from having children themselves. That is leaving aside the question of possible gene therapy- an interesting- and possibly terrfiying- prospect.
A sad story, and not uncommon for its time. Even sadder, it may well be, as Thersites says, that the doctor thought he was doing the right thing.
Women were even put in these institutions for getting pregnant through rape.
Whenever people bang on about the good old days they should think of cases like this. There is a lot wrong with our society and our attitudes. But things could be - and were - worse.