| HISTORY of how we treated people with disabilities . . . and let me tell you, aren't we ashamed? Well we should be. At least we are somewhat enlightened now, but a long way to go, yes? |
| Choirokoitia, 7000 BC Over 150 graves, 47% of children. Died of genetic disease of bone and thalassaemia. www.charite.de/.../ chirokitia-sized.png |
| 2500 BCE Hammurabi's Code Diseases and mental disorders were viewed as a punishment by God or a possession by evil spirits or the devil. Diseases, both mental and physical, were considered impure or taboo. |
| 500 BCE Early Roman Republic The father's power is absolute to kill, mutilate, or sell his children. |
| 460 -- 370 BCE Hippocrates Writings began to show concern for children and a separation of their illnesses from those of adults. A person's health involved the relationship of four humors: blood (heart), phlegm (liver), yellow bile (spleen) and black bile (brain). Believed that epilepsy had a 'natural cause'; this and his belief that nature was the great healer moved medicine into humans' hands instead of the gods. |
| Hammurabi's Code. Can you read this? I can't either. www.tomgpalmer.com/ images/The%20Code%20of%20H... |
| 384 -- 322 BCE Aristotle "Let there be a law that no deformed child shall live." |
| Aristotle, twa, with Plato, twa twa. www.seanet.com/ ~realistic/aristotle.jpg |
| 3rd Century BCE Athens Infanticide was a common practice. Most baby girls were automatically destroyed. Children were legally sold as slaves. |
| Hippocrates (pre-"Turn your head and cough" days) www.mimsvzm.org/ images/hippocrates.jpg |
| Augustus, a humanitarian "at one time, over 50% of the population was receiving some form of government assistance, usually food." |
| 138 -- 201 Claudius Galen The Father of Experimental Neurology. The brain is the seat of many intellectual functions; accurately described cranial bones, ascertained that damage to one side of the brain manifests in disorders on the opposite side. |
| "Slow thinking is due to the brain's heaviness. Its firmness and stability produce the faculty of memory. Imbecility results from the rarefaction and diminution in quality of the animal spirits and from the coldness and humidity of the brain." |
| 110 -- 130 Soranus Hospital providing humane treatment for people with mental illness, and possibly mental retardation. Rest, sympathy, reading, and participation in dramatic performances. |
| Augustus, www.wright.edu/. ../augustus.jpg |
| Claudius Galen, www.quinessence.com/ images/Galen.jpg |
| 2nd Century CE Any kind of defective person became a popular source of household amusement: there was a special market where one might purchase legless, armless, or 3-eyed men, giants, dwarfs, or hermaphrodites. |
| 1135 -- 1204 CE Maimonides Mental retardation thought to have been caused by the brain of a phlegmatic man. A person with mental retardation can, with excellent teaching, make intellectual progress, but it is very difficult. |
| 1493 -- 1541 Paracelsus Feeble minded persons behave in the way of a healthy animal, but the psychopathic in the manner of an irrational animal. |
| "Now we see many (foolish or simple from the beginning) who even in infancy showed signs of simplicity in their movements and laughter, who did not pay attention easily, or who were docile and yet they do not learn. If anyone asks them to do any kind of task, they laugh and joke, they cajole, and they make mischief. They take great delight and seem satisfied in the habit of these simple actions, and so they are taught in their homes. "We have known others who are less foolish, who correctly attend to many tasks of life, who are able to perform certain skills, yet they show their dullness, in that they long to be praised and at the same time they say and do foolish things. "Some people have dullness from before birth. Such persons have deformed heads, or they spoke with a large tongue and at the same time with a humorous throat, or they were deformed in their general appearance." (Felix Platter) (?) |
| 1573 Ambrose Pare -- "Monstres et Prodiges" 13 Reasons for such conditions as 2-headed girls, goat-boys, and hairy girls: 1. God's glory 2. God's wrath 3. Too much semen 4. Too little semen 5. Imagination 6. Narrowness or smallness of the womb 7. Unbecoming position of the mother, who, while pregnant remains seated too long with her thighs crossed or pressed against her stomach 8. A fall or blows struck against the stomach of the mother during pregnancy 9. The rotting or corruption of the semen 10. Heredity or accidental illness 11. Mingling or mixture of seed 12. Artifice of wandering beggars 13. ????? |
| A lady and her baby at a workhouse. www.vauxhallsociety.org.uk/ crawlers.jpg next, www.films.com/Common/ FMGimages/32651_Full.jpg and then, www.gothhouse.org/ gh_img/straitjacket.JPG middle, bottom, www.seeingisbelieving.ca |
| Where did most people with mental retardation live? monasteries, hospitals, charitable facilities, prisons, almshouses, pesthouses, workhouses, warehouses, and other buildings most of which had lost their original usefulness. ONE EXCEPTION: the family-care approach used by the citizens of Gheel, Belgium. Gheel became a refuge and haven for "the mental afflicted" beginning in the 7th century |
| 19th century commentator: The patients were treated as members of the families in whose homes they had lived. They had their own bedrooms, ate meals with the family, and engaged in all family activities. Many were given responsibilities, such as babysitting and other family chores. Many were employed in town and on farms. They could use all the community facilities. Painting, drawing, and gardening were encouraged. A change of scene was viewed as beneficial, so picnics and other outings were organized. This approach was not adopted by other European nations until the late 19th century, and in the US not until Charles Vaux during the 1930s. |
| Bethlem Hospital in 1815. www.ideal-homes.org.uk/ images/southwark/borou...; a scene of Bethlem, William Hogarth, Wikipedia |
| 1606 The Hotel Dieu ordered by King to tend to all mentally ill and idiot people. The patients were herded together in rooms crowded with miserable beds in which they were put without distinction of disease; there were two, four, six, even twelve people bedded together in various positions. 1660 First Almshouse opens in Boston 1727 First house of corrections -- all rogues, vagabonds, and idle persons going about town or country begging, or common pipers, fiddlers, runaways, drunkards, wanton and lascivious persons, railers or brawlers, also persons under distraction and unfit to go at large, whose friends do not take care for their safe confinement 1751 First hospital in Philadelphia separates a section for people with mental retardation and people with mental illness. By 1756, it's in the cellar -- puts people on display for a slight fee. 1771 First workhouse in Philadelphia 1773 Virginia -- first hospital solely for "those miserable Objects who cannot help themselves"; 1769 law "to make provision for the support and maintenance of idiots, lunatics, and other people of unsound mind." Next one is 50 years later, 1824 in Lexington, KY. First poorhouse opens this year. |
| "Bedlam" in England, museum-psyk.dk/.../ billeder/Bedlam-manden.jpg; |
| 1787 Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, physician, said, "Here are both men and women, between twenty and thirty in number. Some of them have beds, most of them clean straw. Some of them were extremely fierce and raving, nearly or quite naked; some singing and dancing; some in despair; some were dumb and would not open their mouths, others incessantly talking . . . Everything about them, notwithstanding the labor and trouble it must have required, was neat and clean." 1818 American Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb opens in Hartford CT. Began to provide the first recognized residential service intended specifically for people with mental retardation in the US. After 1820, "all but the smallest of communities placed a greater reliance on the almshouse and its derivatives, as well as the mental hospital." "Bidding out" -- the pauper and the person with mental retardation were sold to someone who would provide cheaply for their care and maintenance. "Warning out" -- informing a newcomer that the town would not be responsible for his misfortune. "Passing on" -- loading people with mental retardation or mental illness into a cart, transporting them to another town, and leaving them there. Alms houses intended for the poor became general holding pens for all sorts of children, aged, and infirm adults, sick people, etc. |
| 1536 -- 1614 Felix Platter Voluptuous Felix Platter called mental illness and mental retardation "mental alienation." This terminology persisted into the early 20th century, when psychiatrists were called "alienists." |
| above, Moses Maimonides. people.bu.edu/.../ theologians/Maimonides_01. jpg to the side, Felix Platter, in one of his more flattering and form-fitting leotards. www.felixplatterspital.ch/ gif/fps_1_2_img1.gif Ambrose Pare; www.pathguy.com/ lectures/ambrose_pare.jpg (below) Way over there, Paracelsus from Wikipedia, |
| 7000 BCE treatment for mental and physical ills: empirical practitioner: massages, baths, extractions, blood-lettings, herbs, trephination (removal of small sections of cranial bones then worn as amulets to expel demons). shamans: fetishes, amulets, talismans |
| 427 -- 347 BCE Plato The best of either sex should be united with the best as often, and the inferior with the inferior, as seldom as possible; and that they should rear the offspring of the one sort of union but not of the other, if the flock is to be maintained in first rate condition. . . the offspring of the inferior, or of the better when they chance to be deformed, shall be put away. |
| 1st Century CE Slavery and massive poverty resulted in children being viewed as liabilities instead of assets. Mutilation to increase value as beggars. |
| 1497 Frankfurt-am-Main. Idiots were not only to be kept, but confined by their friends, and when means failed them, then only did municipal authorities intervene, though they occasionally assisted the families with sums of money. |
| 1247 Sheriff of London gave estate and land to the Bishop and Church of Bethlem for the purpose of building a hospital. Now believed to be the oldest providing continuous service in Europe, was converted to a mental asylum in 1377. The first patients (both mentally ill and mentally retarded) transferred from an old storehouse located much too close to the king's palace. Bethlem soon earned the title "Bedlum". 1398 inventory: 4 pairs of manacles, 11 chains of iron, 6 locks and keys, 2 stocks, for 20 patients. Dark cells were common and sexes mixed. Few staff and low quality. Tuke: "Patients are ordered to be bled about the latter end of May, according to the weather, and after they have been bled, they take vomits, once a week for a certain number of weeks, after that we purge all the patients." Until 1770, Bethlem was one of London's favorite touring spots. Sir Thomas More: "For thou shalt in Bedlum see one laugh at the knocking of his own head against a post, and yet there is little pleasure therein." |
| all pictures above, www.keystonehumanservices.org/ images/inst/ins... |
| Soranus, www.neonatology.org/ classics/mj1980/fig27-01.gif |
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| Sparta 800 BCE Ancient Spartan society involved rule of the state in deciding whether weak children were to be reared or left to die. The child was brought before a council of the elders and, through Apgar-style tests, the council determined whether the child would live or die. Only the strongest and brightest were to have children; lending of wives; infanticide |
| (some material from http://www.dartmouth.edu/~cbbc/courses/bio4/bio4-1996/DealingWithMentalRetard.html) |