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Images of deviance: visual representations of mental defectives in early twentieth-century medical texts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2009

Mark Jackson
Mark Jackson
Affiliation:
Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, Mathematics Tower, The University, Manchester M13 9PL.
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Extract

In his Feeblemindedness in Children of School-Age, first published in 1911, Charles Paget Lapage, physician to the Manchester Children's Hospital, wrote that one ‘only has to watch a group of feebleminded children to see that most of them have some peculiarity’. These words appear towards the end of an extensive discussion of the physical characteristics that could be found in feeble-minded children and are accompanied by a plate comprising four photographs of ‘Feebleminded Children showing Defective Expression’ (Figure 1).

Type
Research Article
Information
The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 28 , Issue 3 , September 1995 , pp. 319 - 337
Copyright
Copyright © British Society for the History of Science 1995

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References

1 Lapage, C. Paget, Feeblemindedness in Children of School-Age, Manchester, 1911, 60.Google Scholar

2 The term ‘mental defective’ was used in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to describe all types or degrees of educational and social ineptitude. Mental defectives were usually further categorized (from more to less severe) as idiotic, imbecille, or feeble-minded, or as moral defectives.

3 Quoted in Tagg, John, The Burden of Representation, Macmillan, 1988, 78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 See Tagg, , op. cit. (3), 1–5.Google Scholar For a discussion of the ideas and assumptions that invested artistic representations of human form with meaning in the Victorian period, see Cowling, Mary, The Artist as Anthropologist. The Representation of Type and Character in Victorian Art, Cambridge, 1989.Google Scholar

5 Tagg, , op. cit. (3), 5.Google Scholar

6 Tagg, , op. cit. (3), 20.Google Scholar

7 Tagg, , op. cit. (3), 3.Google Scholar See also Gilman, Sander L. (ed.), The Face of Madness: Hugh W. Diamond and the Origin of Psychiatric Photography, New York, 1976Google Scholar; idem, Seeing the Insane, New York, 1982Google Scholar, and Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race and Madness, Ithaca, NY, 1985Google Scholar; Fox, Daniel M. and Lawrence, Christopher, Photographing Medicine: Images and Power in Britain and America since 1840, New York, 1988Google Scholar; and Jordanova, Ludmilla, Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science and Medicine between the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, London, 1989.Google Scholar

8 Tredgold, Alfred, Mental Deficiency (Amentia), London, 1908Google Scholar; Lapage, , op. cit. (1)Google Scholar; Shuttleworth, G. E. and Potts, W. A., Mentally Deficient Children Their Treatment and Training, London, 1916.Google Scholar A collection of Shuttleworth's photographs is held by the Iconographic Department of the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, London (Ref. ICV 30486–30542). This collection can also be consulted on the Department's Video-disc Project.

9 Lapage, for example, who refers to his photographer only as Mr Quinn, used photographs of inmates from the Sandlebridge Boarding Schools, which he regularly visited.

10 Gilman, Sander L., Disease and Representation: Images of Illness from Madness to AIDS, New York, 1988, 26.Google Scholar

11 Gilman, , op. cit. (10), 26.Google Scholar

12 Gilman, , op. cit. (10), 27–9.Google Scholar

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14 Tagg, , op. cit. (3), 78–9.Google Scholar

15 Gilman, , op. cit. (10), 41–3.Google Scholar

16 Duncan, P. Martin and Millard, William, A Manual for the Classification, Training, and Education of the Feeble-Minded, Imbecile, & Idiotic, London, 1866, 5.Google Scholar

17 Duncan, and Miliard, , op. cit. (16), 6.Google Scholar

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19 See ‘Abstract of the Milroy Lectures on an inquiry as to the physical and mental condition of school children’, Lancet (1892), 567–8, 623–4, 680–2, 738–9.Google Scholar

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21 Dendy, Mary, The Problem of the feeble-Minded, Manchester, 1910, 19.Google Scholar See also Tredgold, , op. cit. (8), 4.Google Scholar

22 Pick, Daniel, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c. 1848–1918, Cambridge, 1989CrossRefGoogle Scholar, passim. See also Nye, R. A., ‘Heredity or milieu: the foundation of modern European criminological theory’, Isis (1976), 67, 335–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For a general and detailed discussion of physiognomical approaches to character and behaviour, and of the application of these approaches to criminology, in the Victorian period, see Cowling, Mary, op. cit. (4).Google Scholar

23 On the significant developments in photographic technology, see Tagg, , op. cit. (3), 34–59.Google Scholar

24 Tredgold, , op. cit. (8), 14–50Google Scholar; Lapage, , op. cit. (1), 46Google Scholar; Shuttleworth, and Potts, , op. cit. (8), 52.Google Scholar

25 Tredgold, , op. cit. (8), 242.Google Scholar

26 Tredgold, , op. cit. (8), 247Google Scholar, and plate 20, fig. 49, facing 246.

27 Tredgold, , op. cit. (8), 251–61Google Scholar and plate 21, facing 254; Lapage, , op. cit. (1), 101–3Google Scholar and plate 7, facing 102; Shuttleworth, and Potts, , op. cit. (8), 77–9Google Scholar and plate 11, facing 79.

28 Tredgold, , op. cit. (8), 181–90Google Scholar, including plates 12 (facing 184), 13 (facing 186) and 14 (facing 188); Lapage, , op. cit. (1), 103–11Google Scholar and plate 8, facing 107; Shuttleworth, and Potts, , op. cit. (8), 119–22Google Scholar, including plates 14 (facing 119) and 15 (facing 120).

29 Lapage, , op. cit. (1), 103.Google Scholar

30 Tredgold, , op. cit. (8), 166.Google Scholar

31 Tredgold, , op. cit. (8), 166.Google Scholar

32 See Lapage, , op. cit. (1), ch. 2Google Scholar (Physical characteristics) and ch. 3 (Mental characteristics); Tredgold, , op. cit. (8), ch. 6Google Scholar (Physical characteristics of amentia) and ch. 7 (Mental and nervous characteristics); and Shuttleworth, and Potts, , op. cit. (8), 105–11 and 111–14.Google Scholar

33 Tredgold, , op. cit. (8), 78.Google Scholar

34 Tredgold, , op. cit. (8), 78–89Google Scholar; Lapage, , op. cit. (1), 49–57.Google Scholar

35 Tredgold, , op. cit. (8), 89–97Google Scholar; Lapage, , op. cit. (1), 57–60.Google Scholar

36 See Tredgold, , op. cit. (8), 89–97Google Scholar, particularly his comments on mortality, 91, and Clifford Allbutt's comments, quoted by Dendy, Mary in ‘The feeble-minded’, The Medical Magazine (1911), 20, 690.Google Scholar

37 Lapage, , op. cit. (1), 52.Google Scholar

38 Lapage, , op. cit. (1), 54.Google Scholar

39 Lapage, , op. cit. (1), 196–7.Google Scholar

40 See Cowling, , op. cit. (4).Google Scholar

41 This technique of discovering identity through meticulous examination of minor anatomical details was expounded in an altogether different setting by the art historian ‘Morelli’, in the late nineteenth century. See Ginzburg, Carlo, ‘Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes: clues and the scientific method’, History Workshop Journal (1980), 9, 5–36.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

42 See, for example, Lapage, , op. cit. (1), 49.Google Scholar

43 Tredgold, , op. cit. (8), 130.Google Scholar

44 Tredgold, , op. cit. (8), 130–1.Google Scholar

45 Shuttleworth, and Potts, , op. cit. (8), 109.Google Scholar

46 Potts, Patricia, ‘Medicine, morals and mental deficiency: the contribution of doctors to the development of special education in England’, Oxford Review of Education (1983), 9, 182CrossRefGoogle Scholar

47 Lapage, , op. cit. (1), 60.Google Scholar

48 Tredgold, , op. cit. (8), 130Google Scholar; Lapage, , op. cit. (1), 60.Google Scholar

49 Butterworth, J. J., ‘The diagnosis of feeble-minded school children’, The Medical Magazine (1911), 20, 700.Google Scholar

50 See Tagg, , op. cit. (3), 36–7.Google Scholar

51 See, for example, Lapage's frontal and profile photographs of a ‘microcephalic’ in Lapage, , op. cit. (1), plate 9, facing 113.Google Scholar

52 Tredgold, , op. cit. (8), plates 26 (facing 296) and 28 (facing 314).Google Scholar

53 See the discussion in Tagg, , op. cit. (3), 76–80.Google Scholar

54 Tredgold, , op. cit. (8)Google Scholar, plates 10 (facing 168), 6 (facing 160), 4 (facing 150) and 5 (facing 154).

55 See Tredgold's caustic comments on mentally deficient women in Tredgold, A. F., ‘The feeble-minded’, The Contemporary Review (1910), 97, 717–27.Google Scholar

56 For a discussion of this, see Simmons, Harvey G., ‘Explaining social policy: the English Mental Deficiency Act of 1913’, Journal of Social History (1978), 11, 387–403.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

57 Simmons, , op. cit. (56).Google Scholar

58 See Dendy, Mary's comments on this in Feeble-Minded Children, Manchester, 1902, 8.Google Scholar

59 Mary Dendy insisted on this at the Sandlebridge Boarding Schools and Colony. See her comments at the Manchester and Salford Sanitary Association's Proceedings at a Conference on the Care of the feeble-minded, Manchester, 1911, 48.Google Scholar

60 Tredgold, , op. cit. (8)Google Scholar, plates 4 (facing 150), and 5 (facing 154).

61 For a discussion of this, see Pick, , op. cit. (22), 176–221.Google Scholar

62 For comments on this, see: Tredgold, , op. cit. (8), 298–304Google Scholar; Tredgold, , op. cit. (55), 719Google Scholar; SirRuggles-Brise, Evelyn, The English Prison System, London, 1921, 207–15.Google Scholar

63 On the shared anatomical and physiological anomalies of mental defectives and criminals, see the discussion in Tredgold, , op. cit. (8), 80–91.Google Scholar According to Tredgold, ‘the moral perversions, seen in prostitution, inebriety and other antisocial and criminal tendencies’ could, like mental deficiency, ‘be considered as an imperfection of physiological function due to neuronic changes’ (90).

64 Tagg, , op. cit. (3), 81–4.Google Scholar

65 See the Sandlebridge Special Schools Album in the Cheshire Record Office, classmark NHM 11/3837/43.

66 Mary Dendy's evidence to the Royal Commission on the Care and Control of the Feeble-Minded, vol. 1, Cd.4125, 1908, 45.Google Scholar Her comments were not universally accepted; see Lapage, , op. cit. (1), 41.Google Scholar Photographs of individuals or groups of defectives were not restricted to medical texts. They also appeared in publicity material from mental deficiency institutions, for example, in the Annual Reports of the Lancashire and Cheshire Society for the Permanent Care of the Feeble-Minded. The use of such photographs to advertise an institution's facilities is discussed in Tagg, , op. cit. (3), 81–5.Google Scholar

67 Report of the Departmental Committee on Defective and Epileptic Children, vol. II, Cd.8747, 1898, 1–6.Google Scholar

68 Pick, , op. cit. (22), 23.Google Scholar

69 Lapage, , op. cit. (1), 192.Google Scholar

70 Tredgold, , op. cit. (8), 1.Google Scholar

71 Lapage, , op. cit. (1), 61.Google Scholar

72 John M. was described as looking ‘worse than he is’, while Arthur A. was referred to as looking ‘much better than he is’– Sandlebridge Special Schools Album, op. cit. (65), 7, 48.