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Chapter 5 / Physicians, Pedagogues, and Pupils 165 in the nineteenth century, moral disability was carefully separated from intellectual disability, for mental capacity and moral capacity were held to be quite separate faculties of the mind (Gelb, 1989). The concept of moral imbecility can be traced to eighteenth-century ideas. Benjamin Rush, who held that humans possess an innate moral sense that guides them in distinguishing right from wrong, laid the groundwork for the field of mental deficiency to incorporate morality as part of its focus (Gelb, 1989). For Rush, the moral sense is an inner organ comparable to the eye or the ear, one that is wholly separable from other faculties of the mind (Gelb, 1989). When used as an adjective accompanying idiot or imbecile, the term moral was used to refer to all the nonphysical aspects of human life. At other times it referred more specifically to the emotions, and it was also used in the modern sense of ethical (Gelb, 1989). According to Walton (1979), the term moral insanity was first used in England during the 1850s. Samuel Gridley Howe understood the difficulties of separating emotionally disturbed children from mentally retarded children. Howe, citing Rush, spoke of "moral idiocy," a condition in which "the sentiments, the conscience, the religious feeling, the love of neighbor, the sense of beauty" are defective, even though intellectual capacities are normal (Howe, [1848a] 1972, p. 21). He used the term "simulative idiocy" (Howe, 1852) to describe the appearance of mental retardation in a nonretarded person. It was not until the 1880s, however, that the narrowing bounds of conduct acceptable to society in late nineteenth-century America wrought a moral revolution that conditioned attitudes toward moral imbecility, which became a well-defined construct. The primness of the era, evangelical religion, and the pseudo-science of phrenology widened the boundaries of mental retardation to include a moral dimension. Moral imbecility was made real in the 1880s by Dr. Isaac N. Kerlin, superintendent of the Elwyn Institution for the Feeble-Minded. Kerlin found young moral imbeciles to be those displaying a perverted moral nature that frequently manifests itself in juvenile crime (Kerlin, 1879). He then identified four classes or moral imbecile-alcoholic inebriates, tramps, prostitutes, and habitual criminals (Kerlin, 1887). Although workers found that moral perversions were difficult to separate from merely evil and vicious tendencies (see Carlson and Dain, 1962), they held that moral imbeciles suffer an irreparable defect of the moral faculties that compares to the intellectual damage suffered by the truly retarded. The moral imbecile was viewed as bad and practically incurable: "an instinctive liar and thief, cunning and skillful in mischief making" (Vineland, 1894, p. 41). This is the youngster who "lights a bon-fire on the carpet of the living-room of his home and accuses his younger brother or, perhaps, the cat for overturning a lamp. He has only two interests-one, to see a good big blaze with the resulting confusion and terror on the part of the family, and the other, to escape the personal consequences of discovery" (Pratt, 1920, p. 263). At the outset the diagnosis of moral imbecility relied on the impressions of observers, an unscientific project given the broadness of the concept of moral imbecility. Numerous unsavory traits were heaped on the unsuspecting heads of moral imbeciles. They were variously described as childish in adult life; boast- 166 Part 2 / Into the Light of a More Modern World ful, ungenerous and ungrateful, cowardly, morally insensible, and lacking remorse ; cunning and cruel, showing little sympathy for suffering or distress; troublemakers and tattle-tales; indifferent to cleanliness; egotistical, selfish, covetous; liars and thieves; and possibly obsessed with some form of religion (after Rosen, Clark, and Kivitz, 1976). By the closing decades of the nineteenth century mental and moral incapacity merged, as moral imbecility was wedded to the doctrines of criminal anthropology . Anthrometrics, the measurement of physical characteristics and speculation about their effects on an individual's psychology, was essentially the creation of Cesare Lombroso in Italy. Arthur MacDonald led an American movement that equated specific physical traits-such as the shape of ear lobes or cranial protrusions-with a criminal type (MacDonald, 1902). MacDonald, never as adamant as Lombroso, preached that traits such as genius, insanity, pauperism , and criminality seem to be associated with specific physical stigmata (Gilbert, 1977). Closely allied to the whole concept of moral perversity or amoral behavior was the vaguely emerging taxonomy that would lead, in the next century, to a precise classification...

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