Disability. A Parallel History
02 — Two Steps Forward. One Step Back.
In the 1517, Martin Luther and his followers thought the catholic church was getting too big for its boots, too powerful. They thought the church was taking advantage of people, that it was corrupt and that a single man — The Pope, had too much influence.
The story I’m telling you, isn’t about this rift in religions belief or organisation, so I’m not going to go into the details of the Protestant Reformation but the very popular writings of Martin Luther started to influence how people with disabilities were viewed.
Luther declared that people with disabilities were filled with Satan. They were to be drowned, he said.
So we were back to the drowning again.
Luther thought people with disabilities were possessed.
“The devil sits where the soul should have been”
He completely dehumanised people with disabilities, calling them Changelings.
This kind of thinking goes back a lot further than Luther, to old folk tales but it was made more widespread by an extremely popular book first published in 1480- called Malleus Maleficarum.
Here’s a brief intro to the book by Beth Lander, Head librarian from the college of physicians of Philadelphia…
“… offer new born babies to demons.”
It also suggested a child born with a deformity was not human at all, but was left by fairies, who had stolen the actual child.
This morphed into the belief that a child with a disability was divine retribution for some evil doing the parents had committed.
It was an effective way to keep people in line.
Imagine if you were told, sure, you might get away with not following our rules or customs now but you’ll be forsaking your future children.
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When the Counter Reformation happened, AKA Catholicism Strikes Back, the most vulnerable in society were once again targeted in these battles for who could be the most religious or pious.
Inquisitions into heresy and Prosecutions for the crime of witchcraft reached a highpoint from 1580 to 1630 during the counter reformation. An estimated 50,000 people in Europe were killed, most burned at the stake, of which 80% were women.
Some of the women’s alleged crimes being — they were possessed themselves, or that they had given birth to possessed children or that they were cursed because they were unable to give birth at all.
During this time of religious challenge and upheaval, more and more religions splintered or spun off into new organisations with varying flavours of belief.
Calvin — the founder of the Calvinist religion — which still exists today.
Calvin preached that “Life is predestined’ with God having already chosen those who will be saved. Implying that people with impairments were not among the ‘chosen’ and so should be shunned.
But this might have had more to do with removing any perceived weakness or burden on their community for economic reasons. People with disabilities were likely among the poorest citizens, with few alternatives to begging for survival.
The strong link between poverty and disability was becoming obvious. A link that’s never been broken.
The Elizabethans of England came to the conclusion that it was the role of the government to combat poverty in their society. Or as they saw it, the problem of ‘growing numbers of beggars and unfortunates on the streets’.
Between 1563 and 1601, Queen Elizabeth prompted Parliament to pass a series of laws to take care of the “poor and disadvantaged.” These Elizabethan ‘Poor Laws’, as they were called, shifted more responsibility to the government for the care of the poor, which included most persons with disabilities.
Here’s an old recording of Professor Gunner Dybwad, an advocate for the rights of people with disabilities, describing the Elizabethan poor houses…
“..no clear concept of a retarded personality.”
People with disabilities were also put to work in these poor houses. They were basically contracted out by the government, to privately owned factories. Conditions in all these facilities, were grim.
It was this kind of thinking that ushered in the era of big institutions, In western Europe anyway — for the most part run by the state.
In France, between 1650 and 1700 two massive institutions were purpose built –
Salpetriere, specialised in the treatment of women and Children, housing around 1400.
And Bicetre, it held 1600 men.
The most famous or should I say infamous, of all these types of institutions was established in London England.
The Bethlehem Hospital, better known by the name the Bethlem Asylum — Which came to be pronounced as Bedlam.
Like many old hospitals, Bethlehem Hospital began as a religious order; it was founded in the 13th Century as a priory dedicated to St Mary of Bethlehem.
By 1400, it had become a medieval “hospital” — which then didn’t imply medical care, but simply meant “a refuge for strangers in need”. Those with nowhere else to go turned up at the priory’s doors.
The original hospital was built on the site that’s now covered by Liverpool Street station.
Over time, Bethlem began to specialise in caring for those who weren’t simply poor, but also incapable of caring for themselves — particularly those considered ‘mad’.
In 1547, influenced by Queen Elizabeth’s poor laws and financial issues, its control passed to the Corporation of London and its first medically qualified superintendent was employed.
The hospital suffered financial abuse and neglect for many years, but attitudes were changing and mental illness was increasingly seen as a matter for medical treatment.
In 1681, City governors noted “the great quantity of persons that come daily to see the said Lunatickes”.
Bethlem was becoming a popular entertainment attraction.
Here’s Bethlem’s archivist Colin Gale taking about the first mention of visitors to Bethlam in their own archives…
“…from visitors to the hospital.”
Visits by the public were encouraged by the hospital administration, which benefited from visitors’ donations but the fact that they had to discourage staff members from hitting up visitors for cash for themselves only hints at the corruption and mis management of the hospital.
Here’s Colin Gale recounting a contemporary account of one of these visitors to the Bethem…
“… all and all a wonderful day.”
In those days there was nothing odd about permitting or encouraging such a spectacle: visiting Bethlem was regarded as edifying for the same reasons as attending hangings.”
When Bethem hospital administrators were planning their move to a new purpose built facility in the 1600s, their main design concerns were not patient centred at all but were far more concerned with the visitor experience.
Here’s architectural historian Christine Stevenson…
“… no house could possibly be this big.”
References to Bethlam are everywhere in today’s culture.
It’s what people think of when you say “Asylum”.
And It’s often used as a metaphor for neglect, abuse, class structure or exploitation…
Here’s Colin Gale again…
“…making asses of themselves.”
Bethlem specialised in ‘madness’, although we know that its patients also included people with learning disabilities, ‘falling sickness’ (epilepsy), physical disabilities and dementia.
The shock of corporal punishment was believed to cure some conditions, while isolation was thought to help a person ‘come to their senses’.
These so-called medical treatments are not like anything we would practice today,
We’d recognise them as torture techniques now but it showed people were beginning to think about disability as something that could be treated or even cured.
The Enlightenment
A scientific revolution in Europe was followed by the age of Enlightenment — Philosophers and intellectuals wanted to understand human nature and what makes us who we are.
Some date the beginning of the Enlightenment to René Descartes’ 1637 philosophy of Cogito, where he said, ergo sum (“I think, therefore I Am”).
We experience the world around us within our physical bodies.
How much does this influence our understanding? What is consciousnesses? What is the mind? We have to understand ourselves before we can understand anything else don’t we?
These are some of the questions Philosophers were grappling with.
And what about people with so-called defective minds? If we could understand the mind itself, then we could understand and perhaps even cure those with sicknesses of the mind.
The ideas of John Locke and English philosopher had an enormous influence on the treatment of people with mental and intellectual disabilities.
Locke believed that our understanding and learning comes through association or as he put it “ideas derive from experience”. He said all minds are tabula rasas, blank slates upon which to write.
It’s this thinking that would have a great influence on later approaches to mental disability.
If ideas derive from experience, from the senses and through reflection, then there is hope of developing these capacities in people with intellectual disabilities.
Prior to this time, it was assumed that people born with any type of mental disability were unable to learn. But by locke’s logic, if we were all blank slates, we can always learn and develop more.
Of course, not everyone shared Locke’s view, but it did play a significant role in the development of psychology.
John Locke’s ideas struck a chord with another philosopher, a Frenchman, Jean Jacques Rousseau.
Like John Locke, Rousseau believed in the tabula rasa concept. Rousseau asserted, “Man is born free, but is everywhere in chains.
Dr. Jordan Peterson
The “noble savage” was Rousseau’s romantic idea of man enjoying a natural, noble or a pure existence until civilization corrupts him and makes him a slave to unnatural wants.
Rousseau believed that only the “uncorrupted savage” is in possession of real virtue.
In applying his romantic ideas to education, Rousseau believed in instructing children in physical and sensory methods until age 12, developing their intellectual skills from age 12 to 15, and their moral capacity from age 15 upward.
Although Rouseau didn’t apply his education methods on his own children, He didn’t even care for them, as Peterson explains…
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The writings of Locke and Rousseau Influenced the French Revolution (in the late 1700s)
At the heart of the revolution was the belief that a person is worthy of dignity, not because of wealth or status, but simply because one is a human being.
The French revolution brought down the monarchy, established a republic and eventually resulted in a dictatorship under Napoleon.
We may be veering off our parallel history here for a moment but we’ll get back to it…
The storming of the Bastille in 1798 was one of the major flashpoints of the revolution.
It’s the image everyone thinks of when they imagine the French Revolution.
The medieval fortress was notorious as a political prison. It represented royal authority in the centre of Paris. But the prison contained only seven inmates at the time of its storming, even so, it was seen by the revolutionaries as a symbol of the monarchy’s abuse of power; its fall is still celebrated to this day as a national holiday in France.
But nobody stormed the massive mental asylums that I mentioned earlier — the Bictre Asylum or Salpatrere. Even though thousands of vulnerable French citizens were being held there too, many against their will, in terrible conditions.
The revolution hadn’t extended to these people yet.
But some of the ideas of the revolution eventually found their way into those two institutions.
4 years after the storming of the Bastille, in 1793, Philip Pinel, the leading French psychiatrist of his day, was the first to say that the “mentally deranged” were diseased rather than sinful or immoral.
He removed the chains and restraints from the inmates at the Bicetre asylum, and later from those at Salpetriere.
This decision has developed into a romantic legend — told here by Dr Fernando Espi Forcen…
“…kissing his hands.”
Along with the English reformer William Turk, Pinel originated the method of “moral management”, which prescribed the use of gentle treatment and patience rather than physical abuse and chains on hospital patients. Dr Fernando Espi Forcen again…
“…everybody was living in community”
Hospitals with a more humane focus replaced the prison-like treatment of people with disabilities. Pinel also classified types of mental illness — he pioneered individual case histories and systematic record keeping, and emphasized vocational and work experience.
So things were starting to move in a positive direction…
The physician, Jean-Marc Gaspard Itard was a student of Pinel.
Itard also supported Rousseau’s “noble savage” belief and the view that all knowledge comes through the senses.
In 1799, Itard heard reports of a boy abandoned in the woods of Avey-ron, France, who had apparently been raised by wolves. The child was dubbed “Victor, the Wild Boy”.
Itard offered to take the boy in, as an experimental subject, to prove the validity of the “blank slate” concept: that a person could become, or be made into, whatever one wants.
Itard intended to transform the savage boy into a normal fully functional member of society.
And present him in a before and after, ‘my fair lady’ style to the world.
The story of Itard and the Wild boy has been dramatized numerous times throughout the years.
François Truffaut’s 1970 film L’Enfant sauvage or ‘The Wild Child’ in English, is one of the better depictions of the events as it was based heavily on Itard’s original notes and journals. Truffaut himself played the part of Itard.
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Itard had the child brought to Paris and entrusted to the care of his housekeeper, Madame Guérin.
Victor was probably in his early teens, a child with severe mental disability who was likely abandoned by his parents.
Itard saw Victor as his ideal ‘noble savage’, someone who had never been tainted by civilization, and who could, with the proper teaching, become ‘super’ normal. The “blank slate” would be filled with carefully selected information.
From a child who could not speak, would not sleep in a bed, wear clothes or eat cooked food, Victor made tremendous strides, learning to use simple communication, and interacting with others, mostly with Madame Guérin, who spent a great deal of time with him.
As a scientific study, this was all very optimistic.
Victor showed significant early progress in understanding language and reading simple words, but failed to progress beyond a rudimentary level.
Itard grew tired and impatient, not seeing the great gains he hoped for. He gave up his hope of Victor becoming somehow perfect. He never got his big reveal or his proof of the Tabuas rasa or the noble savage.
Living outside of society had not necessarily protected Victor from unnatural wants and corruption, as Rousseau’s philosophy suggested; it had only deprived him of language, education and basic social skills.
Even with his limited success, Itard did prove that children with mental development issues could improve. This would have a positive influence on many of the educators of the following century..
You know when I said there are multiple dramatizations of this story?
Well there’s even been a Musical version…
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But that’s enough of that…
I’ve watched Truffaut’s film, which is fantastic.
Most of the film unfolds like a training montage, with Itard and Madame Guérin attepting over and over again to get Victor to perform civilised actions like putting on shoes, eating with a knife and fork and taking a bath.
There’s also a recurring scene of Itard teaching Victor how to walk upright.
In the wild Victor walked on all fours, according to the film anyway.
Itard stands in front of the boy and grabs hold of one of the child’s legs and pulls it forward, then he repeats the process with the boy’s other leg and so on. One leg at a time, slowly and meticulously propelling Victor forward in an attempt to force the process into victor’s muscle memory.
It reminded me of when I was about 10 years old, when I relearned how to walk.
My Cerebral Palsy affects the left side of my body.
The muscles in my arm and leg spasm and contort uncontrollably.
When I was a kid my left leg was particularly troublesome.
My left foot would go up it its toes. Getting the heal flat on the ground was almost impossible. Not only was my left foot up on its toes but my left hip had to hitch up when I walked because my leg also refused to bend at the knee. This resulting in an extreme lopsided way of walking. I guess you could call that a pretty heavy limp.
I used to do exercises to try and flatten my foot down on its heal by putting all my weight on it. One of my Physiotherapists used to say
” Tippy toes are great if you want to be a ballerina but not if you want to walk”
The problem is that Cerebral Palsy is a neurological condition — a issue with the brain and the breakdown of the messages sent to the muscles through the central nervous system.
Getting the brain to change is pretty hard, you can’t fix this type of brain damage exactly.
But my new physiotherapist thought we could improve my walking.
So just like in the Wild Child film, she slowly taught me to walk, pretty much from scratch.
She would sit in front of me, on a small wheeled stool, with her hands on my hips and as I slowly inched forward she would roll backward on her stool.
I would concentrate intensely on every movement my left leg would make.
She would ensure my hip didn’t hitch up while I willed my knee to bend. I let my leg swing froward, then planted my foot on the floor and put all my weight down on it, forcing it to lie flat. Then I’d take one instant step forward with my right leg and start the process all over again.
It would take several minutes and unbroken concentration just to walk a few steps.
We repeated this process for weeks and months, walking up and down the same hallway.
It was mind numbing for me so it must have been even more frustrating for my physio.
But eventually after, I don’t know how many miles of going up and down that hall, I started to get faster and finally, I didn’t have to concentrate as hard. It was becoming muscle memory.
I remember going for my annual check in with my doctors and they couldn’t believe what they saw.
I was walking at normal pace with my foot flat on the ground.
It was amazing.
Anyone who’s gone through psychical rehab will understand the incredible feeling of achievement you get after doing something like this. And the sense of purpose your life has will never be as focused as it is when you have a singular goal in your mind like that.
So in a roundabout way I might be able to relate to Itard, Madame Guérin and Victor.
Unfortunately, I can also relate to Itard’s eventual disappointment.
As I grew older, into my early teens, and growth spurts started to stretch my bones, its as if my body lost its stability with all this change going on.
My foot started to revert back to its old ways and I couldn’t stop it.
Doctors had to intervene later with more invasive techniques and that eventually resulted in positive effect but it wasn’t the same as the time my physio I and, seemed to mentally will my leg into submission.
Getting back to our parallel history…
After Rouseau, Pinel and Itard…
By the middle of the 19th century, society was much more aware of people with disabilities.
The Romantic poets Wordsworth, Keats, Byron and Shelly, were influenced strongly by Rousseau’s call to return to nature and celebrate the worth of the individual.
The poets praised the restorative potential of living a simple rural life. (clean air, fresh water, open spaces) This rationale may have later justified locating institutions in the countryside.
Although institutions were still far from ideal. As Gunnar Dywbad describes..
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Remember Pinel? The guy who decided to stop beating and chaining up the residents in his institutions. He had another famous student — Jean-Etienne Dominique Esquirol.
Esquirol went on to become the most well-known psychiatrist in France.
Some regard him as the first person to formally teach psychiatry in France.
“… paul of Pinel.”
As well as advocating Pinel’s moral management techniques Esquirol expanded on Pinels medical definitions.
Esquirol divided intellectual deficiency into two levels: idiocy and imbecility. He defined “imbeciles” as “generally well formed, and their organization is nearly normal.
They enjoy the use of the intellectual and affective faculties, but in less degree than the perfect man, and they can be developed only to a certain extent.”
Esquirol defined “idiots” as persons with little or no intellectual functioning: “Incapable of attention, idiots cannot control their senses. They hear, but do not understand; they see, but do not regard. Having no ideas, and thinking not, they have nothing to desire; therefore have no need of signs, nor of speech.”
Esquirol’s concept, though limiting and insulting, provided some consistency to the terminology used to describe people with disabilities.
Schools
In the 1800s training schools for people with disabilities were beginning to be established throughout Europe. Itard had convinced society that people with disabilities could be given some level of tuition rather than just sending them to asylums to live out their lives in obscurity.
The focus of these schools was to teach children with disabilities practical skills rather than a full education.
Edouard Seguin, who studied under Itard and Esquirol is considered the first great teacher in the field of disabilities.
He developed Itard’s method of sensory training.
Here’s Dr. Bob Jackson describing the focus of Seguin’s curriculums…
“…a few life skills.”
Seguin’s methods served as a foundation for similar efforts throughout Europe and America. Among those later influenced by his teaching methods was the Italian, Maria Montessori , a pioneer in teaching children with and without disabilities.
And we also see remnants of Seguins ideas in what we call occupational therapy today.
In 1850, Seguin left France for the United States, and worked with Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, Dr. Hervey Wilbur, and others in developing American training schools.
Wilbur and Howe established several of their own schools modelled on Seguin’s ideas.
Howe was the director of the Perkins School for the deaf and blind. He established his own school called ‘The Massachusetts School for Idiotic and Feeble-Minded Youth’ and Wilbur established a number of schools for the ‘feeble minded’ in Pennsylvania, New York and Ohio.
(Feeble-minded was a generic term for people with intellectual disabilities commonly used at the time)
Both Wilbur and Howe firmly believed in the importance of family and community, and wanted their schools to prepare children with disabilities to live with the rest of society.
Training schools were considered an educational success, offering hope to many families with children with disabilities. During this time, and before the training schools became large institutions, school superintendents had a strong educational focus. Following Seguin’s teaching methods, pupils would receive physical training to improve their motor and sensory skills, basic academic training, and instruction in social and self-help skills.
Like Esquirol, in 1852 Wilbur developed his own classification of so called ‘idiots’.
He divided his students into four categories in descending order of ability-
At the top there was the Simulative student — these were merely ‘retarded’,
Next was Higher-grade — those who could eventually enter a normal school,
Then came Lower-grade — who could be educated to simple tasks and possibly live in community
And finally, at the bottom, was the Incurables — Idiots for whom education was only a goal.
Most of these schools were private so they were only available to parents who could afford it. Here’s a letter written to Howe on behalf of the author’s employee, who is asking if there was a place for his son at Howe’s school..
Dear Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe,
I left an application at your office in Bromfield Street yesterday on behalf of James [Doe] who desires to have his son admitted into the Institution for Feeble-minded Youth. James is an industrious man who has been employed as a gardener by my father and myself, more or less, for the last four years. His boy has grown to be exceedingly troublesome, escaping from home as often as possible and causing his parents much anxiety. Of late they have felt obliged to confine him in the cellar during the father’s enforced daily absence. I beg you will give the case your kind consideration, assured that it is a worthy one and deserving prompt treatment.
Very respectfully yours,
William [Doe] July 7, 1841
As the number of copy-cat ‘training schools’ increased, not all of them were as committed to training as the original establishments and none were regulated or standardised. To cut costs, schools were became bigger and bigger, with less staff. Schools were reverting back to Asylums in all but name. Pupils became inmates again.
The state was coming under pressure to provide care for the severely disabled. By 1875 most community-based teaching for disabled young people was replaced by custodial care of all ages and all disabilities. State run institutions dominated America.
In the early 1800s, sign language was a widely used and a valued language among teachers at schools for deaf people. But from the 1860s onwards, there was a concerted campaign to banish sign language from classrooms and replace it with lip reading and speech only.
This kind of thinking is called Oralism.
No doubt you’ve heard of the most famous Oralist…
“…graham bell.”
In case you didn’t catch that. That was the voice of Alexander Graham Bells. Recorded in 1887.
Most know Alexander Graham Bell as the inventor of the telephone, but few are aware that for the majority of his life he worked in deaf education.
Bell’s father and grandfather were both distinguished speech therapists, and from a young age the future inventor joined in the family business.
Bell became a voice teacher and worked with his father.
In 1873 Bell became a professor of vocal physiology at Boston University where he met his future wife, Mabel Hubbard, a student 10 years his junior who had completely lost her hearing from a bout of scarlet fever.
Bell’s mother also had a severe hearing impairment due to a childhood illness. She was reliant on an ear trumpet to hear anything.
Bell was an all out Oralist, totally opposed to sign language. He combined this with his distain for immigrants.
He described sign language as “essentially a foreign language” and argued that “in an English speaking country like the United States, the English language, and the English language alone, should be used as the means of communication and instruction.
For years Oralists condemned sign language, claiming it encouraged deaf people to associate only with each other and to avoid the hard work of learning to communicate with people who spoke English. By the start of the 20th century 40% of American deaf students were being taught without the use of sign language.
This rose to 80% by the end of World War I. Despite the fact that most deaf people rejected oralist philosophy, oralism remained the norm in American schools for deaf people until the 1970s.
There are deaf adults how still remember those days with anger and resentment
This is Jack Gannon, interviewed in 1994
“…anger.”
We’re not finished with Alexander Graham Bell yet. He’ll pop up again in the next episode.
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Jumping back to the 1800s, At that time many leading physicians and school superintendents and educators, including Samuel Gridley Howe, believed in phrenology.
Phrenologists believed that intelligence, personality, and morality were determined by the shape of the skull.
“…used as a means to devalue groups. ”
According to phrenology people were naturally considered unequal. So called ‘scientists’ said it proved that some people were superior to others.
Phrenologists concerned themselves with same issues that were later to be addressed by social Darwinists and eugenicists.
You could say that Phrenology was a gateway to Eugenics and one of the darkest periods in our history of Disability. We’ll get to that and a lot more in episode 3.
In the next episode of Disability, a parallel history.
Darkest before the dawn…
