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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2018
This article examines late nineteenth-century preadmission records taken at the Pennsylvania Training School in order to better understand the biographical and medical characteristics of persons seeking admission to this prominent school for the “feeble-minded.” It draws on those records to then explore how guardians and the superintendent assessed the likelihood and nature of educational improvement. A pioneering institution for the education of people with intellectual disability, the Training School, generally known as “Elwyn,” kept extensive biographical and etiological records that contain a previously untapped wealth of data. These records offer valuable insight into parents’ understanding of their children's disability, their hopes for improvement, and opinions of what would constitute a successful, productive life. The authors use the records to develop a statistical profile of the characteristics of applicants that superintendent Dr. Martin Barr would deem most likely to improve from instruction, and a similar profile for those deemed incapable of improvement. We situate our analysis of the records within the Gilded Age context of anxieties surrounding the state of public education and worker productivity in an industrial economy. In the field of disability studies, the article adds to our understanding of how superintendents constructed and applied the “medical model” of disability and its tension with the lived social experience of disability.
Brent Ruswick is an Assistant Professor of History at West Chester University of Pennsylvania. He is grateful for the WCU history department’s ongoing support of his work. Elliott W. Simon is the Executive Director of Research and Quality Improvement at Elwyn. He is very appreciative of Elwyn’s support of this overall research effort and their continuing commitment to maintaining the Elwyn Historical Archives and Museum as a resource for historical investigation. Both Ruswick and Simon would like to acknowledge the archival work undertaken at Elwyn by Andrea Kuhn, Derek Duquette, Kelly McGuire, Amanda Tuttle and the WCU history department internship program. This research effort would not have been possible without the financial support of The Pennsylvania Developmental Disabilities Council and the Pennsylvania History Coalition Honoring People with Disability. The authors also especially thank Candy DeMarco from Elwyn for her overall administrative assistance to this project and Dana Olsen from the Pennsylvania History Coalition Honoring People with Disability for his untiring dedication to historical preservation in support of people with disability. Chelsea Chamberlain and the University of Pennsylvania Disabilities Studies Group offered spirited and insightful commentary on an advanced draft of this manuscript and Janet E. Simon at Ohio University provided assistance with statistical analyses. The authors also would like to thank the reviewers for the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era for their substantive, useful feedback in the preparation of this article.
1 Case File ID # 2812, Idiocy Descriptions Etiology: 2801–2900. Elwyn archives. All names of Pennsylvania Training School applicants and residents, and their parents, are pseudonyms.
2 Trent, James W. Jr., Inventing the Feeble Mind: A History of Mental Retardation in the United States (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 154–5, 193–6Google Scholar.
3 Case File ID # 2812.
4 Most similar to our work, Annemieke van Drenth published a qualitative analysis of the admission records of a Dutch “School for Idiots.” See van Drenth, , “Mental Boundaries and Medico-Pedagogical Selection: Girls and Boys in the Dutch ‘School for Idiots’, The Hague 1857–1873,” Paedagogica Historica 43:1 (Feb. 2007): 99–117 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Also, Martin A. Elks used the photographic archives at Elwyn to make a qualitative assessment of how observable characteristics may have influenced Barr's classification of “feeble-minded” persons. Elks, , “Believing Is Seeing: Visual Conventions in Barr's Classification of the ‘Feeble-Minded,’” Mental Retardation 42:5 (Oct. 2004): 371–82Google Scholar.
5 Burch, Susan and Sutherland, Ian, “Who's Not Yet Here? American Disability History,” Radical History Review 94 (Winter 2006): 129–30Google Scholar.
6 Johnson, Russell L., “Clara Bow in Free to Love (1925): Feature Films and Eugenics in the 1920s,” Australasian Journal of American Studies 27:2 (July 2008): 2 Google Scholar.
7 Winzer, Margaret A., From Integration to Inclusion: A History of Special Education in the 20th Century (Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 2009),15 Google Scholar.
8 Ferguson, Philip M., “Creating the Back Ward: The Triumph of Custodialism and the Uses of Therapeutic Failure in Nineteenth-Century Idiot Asylums” in Disability Incarcerated: Imprisonment and Disability in the United States and Canada, eds. Ben-Moshe, Liat, Chapman, Chris, and Carey, Allison C. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 48 Google Scholar.
9 Tyor, Peter L. and Bell, Leland V., Caring for the Retarded in America: A History (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984), 39–40 Google Scholar.
10 This was long before intellectual disability came to be defined in its present form as deficits in performance on mental measurement and adaptive behavior scales that occur during the developmental period. From 1880, it would be another three decades until Goddard would use mental testing to assess people with Intellectual Disability and more than fifty years before Doll would measure social competence. Both of these psychologists completed this work while at the Vineland Training School. See American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th ed. (Arlington, VA: American Psychiatric Publishing, 2013), 33–41 Google Scholar; Zenderland, Leila, Measuring Minds: Henry Herbert Goddard and the Origins of American Intelligence Testing (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 2 Google Scholar; Doll, Edgar A., “A Genetic Scale of Social Maturity,” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 5 (1935): 180–90Google Scholar.
11 Ferguson, “Creating the Back Ward,” 48.
12 Ferguson, “Creating the Back Ward,” 57.
13 Noll, Steven and Trent, James W. Jr., “Introduction” in Mental Retardation in America: A Historical Reader, ed. Noll, Steven a Ferguson, Abandoned to Their Fate: Social Policy and Practice toward Severely Retarded People in America, 1820–1920 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994)Google Scholar; Rose, Sarah F., No Right to Be Idle: The Invention of Disability, 1840s–1930s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
14 Rafter, Creating Born Criminals, 67. See also Noll, Steven, Feebleminded in Our Midst: Institutions for the Mentally Retarded in the South, 1900–40 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995)Google Scholar.
15 Osgood, Robert L., The History of Special Education: A Struggle for Equality in American Public Schools (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2008), 6 Google Scholar.
16 Osgood, The History of Special Education, 6.
17 Osgood, The History of Special Education, 7; also Winzer, From Integration to Inclusion, 21.
18 Osgood, The History of Special Education, 11–12.
19 Allison C. Carey and Lucy Gu, “Walking the Line between the Past and the Future: Parents’ Resistance and Commitment to Institutionalization” in Disability Incarcerated, 101. See also Abel, Emily K., “Appealing for Children's Health Care: Conflicts between Mothers and Officials in the 1930s,” Social Service Review 70:2 (June 1996): 282–304 Google Scholar.
20 Ruswick, Brent, Almost Worthy: The Poor, Paupers, and the Science of Charity in America, 1877–1917 (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2012)Google Scholar; Waugh, Joan, Unsentimental Reformer: The Life of Josephine Shaw Lowell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997)Google Scholar; and “‘Give This Man Work!’ Josephine Shaw Lowell, The Charity Organization Society of the City of New York, and the Depression of 1893,” Social Science History 25:2 (Summer 2000): 217–46Google Scholar; Agnew, Elizabeth, From Charity to Social Work: Mary E. Richmond and the Creation of an American Profession (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004)Google Scholar
21 Rafter, Nicole Hahn, Creating Born Criminals (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 57–58 Google Scholar; Philip M. Ferguson, “Creating the Back Ward,” 53–57; Trent, Inventing the Feeble Mind, 30–34.
22 Kerlin, Isaac, “‘To the Superintendents … ’ June 25, 1891 memo,” Manual of Elwyn: 1864–1891. (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1891), 86 Google Scholar.
23 Nielsen, Kim E., A Disability History of the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 2012), 86 Google Scholar.
24 Trent, Inventing the Feeble Mind, 185–6.
25 For instance, “November 3, 1898 letter,” Chief Physician Admission & Discharge v. 8, p. 124, Elwyn Archives.
26 Trent, Inventing the Feeble Mind, 179.
27 Tyor, Peter. L., “‘Denied the Power to Choose the Good’: Sexuality and Mental Defect in American Mental Practice, 1850–1920,” Journal of Social History 10:4, (Summer 1977): 472–89Google Scholar; Tyor, and Bell, Leland V., Caring for the Retarded in America: A History (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984), 60–61 Google Scholar; Winzer, From Integration to Inclusion, 40–41.
28 Barr, Martin W., “Some Diseases Common to the Feeble-Minded,” The Journal of the American Medical Association 31 (1898): 1011 Google Scholar; reprinted in Journal of Psycho-Asthenics 3:2 (Dec. 1898): 89–92. Barr's assistant superintendent, Dr. A. W. Wilmarth, briefly referenced the Elwyn preadmission data in an address to the Forty-seventh Annual Meeting of the American Medical Association. Wilmarth, , “Heredity as a Social Burden,” Journal of the American Medical Association 27:7 (Aug. 15, 1896): 341–4Google Scholar.
29 Barr, Martin W. and Whitney, E. A., “Preventive Medicine and Mental Deficiency,” New England Journal of Medicine 203:18 (Oct. 30, 1930): 872 Google Scholar.
30 Adams, Mark B., Allen, Garland E., and Weiss, Sheila Faith, “Human Heredity and Politics: A Comparative Institutional Study of the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor (United States), the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics (Germany), and the Maxim Gorky Medical Genetics Institute (USSR),” Osiris 2nd series 20 (2005), 232–62Google Scholar; Wizner, From Integration to Inclusion, 39; Gormley, Melinda, “Scientific Discrimination and the Activist Scientist: L. C. Dunn and the Professionalization of Genetics and Human Genetics in the United States,” Journal of the History of Biology 42:1 (Spring 2009): 33–72 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dorr, Gregory Michael, “Defective or Disabled?” Race, Medicine, and Eugenics in Progressive Era Virginia and Alabama,” The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 5:4 (Oct. 2006), 359–92Google Scholar.
31 Case File ID #s 1, 60.
32 Case File ID #s 4, 28, 62.
33 Kerlin, Isaac N., “Status of the Work,” Proceedings of the Association of Medical Officers of American Institutions for Idiotic and Feeble-Minded Persons 9 (1885): 369–72Google Scholar.
34 Ruswick, Almost Worthy, 162–3.
35 Trent, Inventing the Feeble Mind, 24, 37.
36 Trent, Inventing the Feeble Mind, 82. Alexander Johnson, “Discussion on the Care of the Feeble-Minded.” Proceedings of the National Conference of Charities and Correction 1889, 318–29.
37 Case File ID #s 2873, 2899, 2837.
38 Case File ID # 2817.
39 Case File ID # 2822.
40 Case File ID # 2849.
41 Case File ID # 2802
42 Case File ID # 2887.
43 Case File ID # 2887.
44 Case File ID #s 9, 19, 2822, 2893, 2896.
45 Most but not all of the admissions forms filed by someone other than a parent or grandparent were filed by a physician or charity worker based on interviews with a parent. Although we are aware of the risk that a non-custodial filer might misstate or misrepresent the views of a child's legal guardian, there are only very few case records where it is possible to distinguish between a filer who is reporting the parent's perspective and a filer who is substituting their own, independent assessment.
46 Case File ID #s 13, 50, Idiocy Descriptions Etiology: 1–100 Elwyn archives; Case File ID # 2816, Idiocy Descriptions Etiology: 2801–2900.
47 Osgood, The History of Special Education, 8, 13, 25.
48 Osgood, The History of Special Education, 31; Winzer, From Integration to Inclusion, 40.
49 Winzer, From Integration to Inclusion, 16.
50 Case File ID #s 2808, 2802.
51 Case File ID # 2805.
52 Case File ID #s 2809, 63.
53 Case File ID #s 2807, 2816.
54 Case File ID # 2824.
55 Case File ID #s 2819, 2825. See also case file ID #s 26, 30, 50.
56 Case File ID # 2817.
57 Case File ID # 2822.
58 Case File ID # 2818.
59 Case File ID # 64.
60 Case File ID # 9.
61 Case File ID # 11.
62 Case File ID # 5.
63 Case File ID #s 37, 39, 48, 54.
64 Case File ID # 2812.
65 “Register No. 2807,” Medical Record v. 8, p. 124, Elwyn Archives.
66 “Register No. 2807,” School Progress v. unmarked, likely “N,” p. 695, Elwyn Archives.
67 “Register No. 2807,” School Progress v. unmarked, likely “N,” p. 695, Elwyn Archives.
68 “Jan. 23, 1899 letter,” Chief Physician Admission & Discharge v. 8, p. 323, Elwyn Archives.
69 “Jan. 23, 1899 letter,” Chief Physician Admission & Discharge v. 8, p. 324, Elwyn archives.
70 Whitney, E. Arthur and Shick, Mary McD., “Some Results of Selective Sterilization,” Journal of Psycho-Asthenics 36 (1931): 330–8Google Scholar. Because HIPAA rights remain in effect for Bill, we cannot more specifically identify the URL sources by which we found information about Bill's life after Elwyn, without compromising Bill's actual identity. We first used genealogical sites including FamilySearch.org, Findagrave.com, and Ancestry.com to investigate if there was any record of his post-Elwyn life. From them, we were able to identify our Bill in the censuses of 1900, 1910, 1920, 1930, and 1940. This led to a search of chroniclingamerica.loc.gov, through which we found the newspaper reports of Bill's involvement in the yacht club and Christmas displays.