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NEW
FACTS  AND   REMARKS
CONCERNING
IDIOCY,
BEING A LECTURE DELIVERED BEFORE THE NEW YORK MEDICAL
               JOURNAL ASSOCIATION,
October 15, 1869.
\
-BY
     EDWARD £EGIM, M. D.




            NEW YORK:
WM. WOOD & CO., PUBLISHERS, 61 WALKER STREET.
               18T0. 
WA1
S-+35 n
      T. HOLMAN, PRINTER,
Corner of Centre and White Streets, N. Y. 
DEDICATION
  The drift of this lecture took  shape last  summer, during



a visit to  some schools for idiots :   to  see  is  to think.



After its reading, it was dismembered to suit  several publica-



tions, namely, The  Quarterly Journal of Psychological Medicine



and  Medical  Jurisprudence,  The Medical Record,  Appleton's



Illustrated Journal,  The World; and  it was  also reproduced,



with considerable  mutilations, in numerous   country papers.



Parent-authors Iiave seldom the Medea's taste for. scattering



the  limbs  of their  progeny.   I, personally, confess to the



opposite  tendency  ; and thought of re-uniting these ideas as



parts of  one of the documents that will  hereafter serve to



write the  history of the efforts made in this Republic to



improve  idiots and  to  eradicate idiocy.  But  to  be accept-



able, this light contribution to the bibliography of nervous



diseases  needs the patronage  of a  name indissolubly con- 
IV
DEDICATION.
nected with the American• schools  for  idiots;  and I  beg

leave, in  view of giving  these few pages a borrowed value,

as well  as  of  paying a  personal tribute  of gratitude, to

inscribe them to the  best friend of the children of the State

of New York, who suffer under the disabilities of idiocy,
|m   $™.   |
»m
President of the Board of Trustees  of the New York State

                 Asylum  for Idiots, etc.
Most respectfully,
EDWARD SEGUIN.
New York, February 15,1870,
   58 West 26th Street. 
PUBLICATIONS  BY THE SAME AUTHOR.
1839. Resume de le que nous avons'fait pendant  quatorze mois.
         Esquirol et Seguin.  Paris.
1839. Conseils a  M.  0...., sur de Veducation de son enfant
         idiot.  Paris.
1842. Theorie et pratique de Veducation des idiots.  Lec,ons aux
         jeunes idiots de l'hospice des incurables.  Ire partie.
1843. Ditto.  Second partie.
1843. Hygiene et education des idiots.   Extrait des annales
         d'hygiene a  de  medecine legale.   Paris.   . J. B.
         Bailliere.
1846. Images graduees a Vusage  des enfants  arrieres et idiots.
         Paris.   Aubert.
184(5.  Trailement moral,  hygiene, et education  des  idiots, etc.
         1 vol. 734 pages.  Paris.   J. B. Bailliere.
1847.  F. R.  Pereire,  premier  instituteur des sourds et  muets
         en France.  Samethode pour faire parler les s. muets.
         1 vol. 355 pages.  Paris.   J. B. Baillere.
1852.  Historical JVotice of the Origin and  Progress of the  Treat-
         ment of Idiots.  Translated by  Dr. J. S. Newberry,
         Cleveland, Ohio.
 1864. Idiocy, its  Diagnosis and Treatment by the Physiological
         Method. Translated by Dr. L.  P. Brockett,  Albany,
         N. Y.
 1866. Idiocy  and its  Treatment by the  Physiological  Method.
         Revised by the son of  the author, Dr. E. C. Seguin.
         1 vol. 457 pages.  William Wood & Co., Publishers,
         61 Walker Street, New York.
 1870. JVeiw Facts and Remarks Concerning Idiocy.  W. Wood
         & Co.,  New York. 
SYNOPSIS.
  What Family Physicians must know about Idiocy.—Differ-
ential Diagnosis and Prognosis between Idiocy Improvable
and  Idiocy Incurable.—State  and  Private Institutions for
Idiots; their Number, Importance, and Management  in Syra-
cuse, N. Y., and Barre, Mass.—General and Individual Train-
ing.—Devoted  Female Teachers.—New  Causes of Idiocy.—
Social Evils Prolific of Nervous Degeneracies.—The four Main
Causes of Deterioration and Depopulation actually at Work.
—Necessity of a School for  the Comparative Study  of Idiocy
and Normal Youth ; also  of the Intellectual and Physiolog-
ical Methods  of Education.—Idiocy the Creative Cause of
Physiological Education. 
LECTURE.
  Mr'. President and Gentlemen :—Permit me to enter upon my
subject rather abruptly, as this will be only a lecture, and can
hardly attain the proportions of a pamphlet, or Memoir a Con-
suiter, on topics pertaining to the treatment and prophylaxy of
the neuroses of childhood, which culminate in paralysis, chorea,
epilepsy, and idiocy.
  There are men who  contract all that they touch ;  there are
others who enlarge all the ideas with, which they come  in con-
tact.  To see only  idiocy in idiots, would be to narrow it.  To
see beyond, what benefit can  accrue to society from the actual
improvement of idiots, and from the discovery of means of im-
proving general education by the method expressly contrived
for idiots, at once incorporates idiocy—retrograde phenomenon
as it is by itself—among  the agents of progress.
   The devoted men and women who gave a quarter of a centu-
ry to the improvement of idiots,  have thus enlarged  the theo-
retical and practical importance  of their subject, and rendered
necessary an occasional review of the progress accomplished
through their labors, progress in which the medical profession
at large may not be participant, but of which we can not well
afford to be ignorant.
   Idiocy  being comparatively  of rare  occurrence, and  its
treatment requiring the concourse of resources seldom met with
at home, a family physician  is hardly expected to  treat idiots,
and may as  well  practically ignore  their mode  of training.
But he is often consulted upon the chances of recovery, and the
means of improvement provided abroad for them ;  and if he
answers clearly, the parents follow his  advice;  if  not, they
consult the sorceress, witch, or  spiritual deceiver, who fill up
the blank  left  in  their hopes by our ignorance.   Therefore it 
8
NEW FACTS AND REMARKS
is necessary, upon more than one account, that we, physicians,
become familiar with the minimum of what a general practitioner
must know about idiocy.
  That I will recapitulate.
  1. For the diagnosis and prognosis of idiocy, the want of
comprehension of our ideas by an evidently backward child,
his  incapacity to follow the ordinary course of instruction, his
general or special intellectual deficiencies (when unaccompanied
by physiological disorders), the form of the head, unless in ex-
treme hydro and micro-cephaly, is no criterion.
  But  the following tests  are of value:  (a) The walk" regu-
larly swinging from side to side, not forward and backward,
like that of the  inebriate,  (b) The hand hanging, or auto-
matically busy," or  moist with saliva, which escapes  from the
meaningless mouth, more  abundant  in excitement,   (c) The
look oblique and vacant, or sliding about, lustrous and empty.
id)  The speech null, or limited to a few involuntary words, or
to repeated syllables, or to some obsolete tune, with an oc-
casional yell inserted, to  express a want.   To  sum up, the
criterion of idiocy is found more in  the physiological than in
the psychological symptoms.
  The  prognosis is favorable :  (a)  When the walk does not
deviate much from  the centre of gravity,   (b) When the hand
is firm  without stiffness, not busy with automatic movements,
can take hold and let go on imitation or command,   (c)  When
the look is easily called to action, and the other senses are un-
impaired,   (d) When  the words, even imperfect  or few, have
a connected meaning, and  come  out  opportunely,   (e)  When
the child  is active, without  restlessness,  is pleased to obey,
sensible to eulogy, quite as capable of giving as of  receiving
caresses.
  Contrarily the prognosis is unfavorable :  (a) When, with-
out paralysis, the walk is next to impossible, and accompanied
(besides the sideway swinging) by frequent headlong plunges.
These  plunges forward supersede the lateral movement at a
fearful rate and force when the children are confined  in chairs.
(b)  When the fingers, tapering and cold, stiff or relaxed, can
not be flexed or extended,  can  not grasp or let go, being other- 
CONCERNING IDIOCY.                   9
wise engaged  in some automatic movement, whose prevention     •
causes pain, and lasts no longer than the obstacle opposed to
their automatic habit,   (c)  When the look (besides being use-
less  and unfixable) is implicated  in  the automatic action  of
some other organ, of the fingers, for instance,   (d) When the
touch presents profound or vast anassthesia (oftener than hyper-
aesthesia), disclosed by extensive mordications, bloody lacera-
tions, fearful blows, unfelt by  the child, though so painful to
witness,  (e)  When some feelings of affection have been devel-
oped by kind  parents, and are  not followed by corresponding
intellectual progress.   (/) When idiocy  is  complicated • by
extensive paralysis, and worse, by epilepsy.
   Upon the above minimum of knowledge of  the symptoms of
idiocy,  a physician may form and convey to the parents an es-
timate of what can be expected from the proper training of the
child.   Now the question arises : Where can  the child be best
educated ? answer to which demands  a summary knowledge of
the institutions for idiots, that  the following sketch is intended
to furnish.
   Many sufferings yet need alleviation, many infirmities cure,
many sorrows protection, many weaknesses support; but one
rejoices to see that, through  the flow of egotistic  currents,
arises now and then in our midst a new islet where the needy
can rest.   The institutions founded during the present genera-
tion in behalf of idiots are charities of that class, and present
this unique character, that, called for, conceived and  executed
by a single jet of the heart and brain, with all the resources of
a  luxuriant and generous society, they have, all  at  once, at-
tained a degree of material perfection that leaves nothing to
wish by the philanthropist or even the misanthrope.   How dif-
ferent an  aspect was presented at the beginning of this century,
in the growth of the institutions for the insane !  How long it
took to disencumber them  from the cold  flagstone,  dripping
walls, iron bars  and carcanets, riveted chains and bolts, and
other decorations of the old prison ?  The  ferocious  Couthon
(so-called because he could not see  the use  of  noblemen in
livery and of abbots of the alcove  in modern  society), in his
capacity of administrator of the hospitals and prisons  of Paris, 
10               NEW FACTS AND REMARKS
took an initial interest in that reform.   He witnessed at Bice-
tre the efforts  of Pinel, and gave  the  first  authorization to
loosen their chains, and let them stand free before their bene-
factor ; though saying  at the same time to the hero : " My
dear doctor, I give the authorization, but, on  your demand, at
your risk and peril, sure that they will kill you 1"  Since then
it has taken three generations of Esquirols, Connollys, Leurets,
to raise, upon that old soil of horrors, the present spruce, placid,
and benevolent institution for the insane, hardly distinguisha-
ble from that for idiots by its magnitude.
  This, Mr. President and gentlemen, introduces the subject of
our own schools for idiots.
  A little  more than twenty years  ago, there  was no  educa-
tional establishment for idiots in the United States ; now there
are two in  New York, two in Massachusetts, one in Connecti-
cut, one in  Pennsylvania, one in Ohio, one in Kentucky,  one in
Illinois—at least  nine in all, where  above  one thousand chil-
dren are under  instruction.
  An idea  of these institutions may be formed by visiting the
New York State Asylum for Idiots, which is a public charity,
and the School for Feeble-minded  Children, at Barre,  Mass.,
which is private and self-supporting.  Both  were created  by
the same man.
  Twenty-one years  ago, Dr. Hervey B. Wilbur, then a physi-
cian at Barre,  Mass., undertook  the novel and  perilous enter-
prise of attaching his  own fortunes and those of his  young
family to   the task of educating  idiot children.   He had no
predecessor in this  undertaking  in  this country, and he was
sustained in his good work, against  the forebodings and ridi-
cule of friends  and neighbors, only by the bravery of his wife.
   After a  few years, during which the young couple gave un-
interrupted attention  to their pupils, even  to  the  extent of
keeping the most helpless in their  own  bedroom, Dr. Wilbur
was called, first, to Albany, and  subsequently (when the State
Asylum was erected) to  Syracuse, there to organize the State
institution for this helpless class'; and was succeeded at Barre
by Dr. George Brown, under whose careful and able manage-
ment that  school has attained its present high standing. 
CONCERNING IDIOCY.
11
  These two establishments demand a separate notice, because
they are in some respect types of two classes of institutions, of
two systems of physiological training, and of two wants une-
qually satisfied in our present organization.
  The New York State Asylum for Idiots was founded by an
act of the New York Legislature, dated July 10, 1851 ; and at
every session since, that body has voted an appropriation in its
behalf.  It is  situated on one of those alternately green  and
white knolls which form a natural amphitheatre, whence the eye
looks down to the wonderful growth of the " city of salt," Syra-
cuse, below.   Among the curling smoke of iron, glass, pottery,
and other furnaces, above the sea of vats brimful of brine, stands
the asylum—a tall and elegant building in the Italian style,
surrounded by tasteful grounds, flanked by stables and farm-
houses, extending its  fields  right and left,  and its pleasant
groves—summer  resorts of  the children—over  a tract  fifty
acres in extent.
   The main building is compact and well arranged, containing,
as usual, the apartments of the officers, as well as the living
and training  accommodations for a hundred  and fifty pupils,
the  usual number in attendance.  It  contains also, what can
hardly .be found  elsewhere, a  library of school-books and of
works on metaphysics, psychology, physiology, and nervous pa-
thology, expressly selected to  aid in the elucidation  of the
problems which occur in  the treatment of nervous anomalies,
and in the  education of a  class of children who are certainly
not susceptible of education  by any other system than  that of
physiological training. This collection belongs to the present
superintendent; but it ought not  to be permitted  to leave the
place with  him.    Judiciously and  slowly,  very slowly in-
creased, it will form the  aggregate of written knowledge on
the questions connected with mental retardation and develop-
ment, and will be of invaluable service to the  future teachers
of idiots.
   In planning this  institution,  Dr. Wilbur had ho  model for
reference, nothing but books and theories.   It was the  first
asylum ever expressly built for idiots.  His practical knowledge
of their wants during the  previous two or three years, and his 
 12               NEW FACTS  AND REMARKS

 remarkable mechanical skill and peculiar sense of the fitness of
 things, enabled  him to overcome in  an extraordinary degree
 the architectural difficulties in the construction of such a build-
 ing.  Idiotic children require more room, more air, more light,
 more warmth, than other children ; all these, and especially the
 greater amount  of room, which is indispensable in any attempt
 at improving these weak and sluggish natures, he provided for
 them.
   The pupils of the asylum are of  both  sexes, and  in age
 range from seven years to twenty ;  they  are chosen  from a
 much larger number of applicants, in view of their possible
 improvement with the means there at command.  Those  who
 are absolutely helpless,  either on account  of restlessness, im-
 mobility,  or accessory disease, must, of course, be rejected,
 since, if received,  they would either  be neglected, or each one
 would monopolize the entire time of  an attendant;  while the
 State appropriation will not permit  more  than one nurse or
^attendant to five or six children.
   The pupils remain in the institution as long as there is visi-
 ble improvement and progress  ; for, though nominally an asy-
 lum, it is really a training-school.*   On  admission,  a descrip-
 tion of the antecedents and existing condition of each pupil is
•entered on the records ;  and in every case sufficient freedom is
 allowed the child, to let him show his capacities, peculiarities,
 and tendencies.   The study of these  serves as a basis  for his
.assignment  to a particular group.   This  assignment  of the
 child to his appropriate group or class is a step which requires
 remarkable discernment  and thorough knowledge of  the pecul-
 iarities of idiots ;  for the  child may  need to  be with children
 of about the same development with himself, or with  those who
 are further advanced, in order to stimulate his ambition ; he
 may require to  be with few or  with many,  with those who are
 too quiet, in order to calm down his excessive excitability ; or
  * Exceptionally, a few old pupils, who are without property or friends anywhere,
are allowed to stay on the farm or in the laundry, where they make themselves
useful and happy, and are paid what their work is worth. This is a paternal not
yet legalized, arrangement. 
.CONCERNING IDIOCY.
13
 with the restless ones, to rouse his more sluggish nature, etc.,
 etc.  He may also need to change from one group to another,
 either in consequence of his  progress, or to  subject him to a
 different mode of training.
   This  grouping introduces  the subject of education ;  and
 what can be more interesting to the mind than the process by
 which another mind is let out or freed from the bondage and
 fetters which have hitherto imprisoned it ?  The success  may
 be but partial;  but it is absolute, so far as it goes.
   The first problem is to disengage and develop the mind of
 an idiot, which has hitherto been as if hidden beneath the use-
 less muscles and the insensate nerves,  components of his weak
 and  inefficient  body.  The second problem, though  by no
 means the last, is to apply this partially liberated intellect  to
 the acquisition of useful knowledge and good habits.
   These  ends are  accomplished, in Syracuse, by a series  of
 agencies whose key is in  the  hand of  the superintendent, and
 whose movements are intrusted alternately and unceasingly  to
 attendants, gymnasts,  and teachers.   The idiots (*<W  means
 isolated) are not for a moment let  alone.  From morning till
 night they are  led from one  mode of activity to another—
 seated only to rest, and constantly working out their own pro-
 gress through experimental and lively teachings.  Early  in
 the morning, as soon as dressed and fed, these children  of the
 neant begin to do something.   From  half hour to half hour,
 they pass from singing or hearing music to exercises of loco-
 motion, standing, training of the hand to prehension, imitation,
 feeling;  then the errors of the senses are  corrected, their
 modes of perception improved in quickness or  accuracy, and
 raised progressively to phenomena more and more intellectual.
 The speech, its concordance with actions, the movements per-
 formed at command, the exercise of the  will through obedience,
 the morality of labor, of partaking of food, of helping relations
 to each  other, of pleasure and pain, of  concurring with God—
in the productions of Mother Earth—all these exercises have
a very different moral, intellectual,  and hygienic result from
those obtained in schools where book,  child,  and chair  are
screwed  together three hours  at a time, or in  reformatories 
14
NEW FACTS AND REMARKS
where children drive the same kind of peg in the same kind of
sole, from morning to night, from day to day, etc.
  "But,"  does  the reader ask, <:are  not reading, writing,
arithmetic, geography, etc., taught also ?"  Oh, yes.   Dr. Wil-
bur has provided abundantly for instruction in these, and has
devised and procured much apparatus to aid in the matter, and
all  the  children, so far as they can, acquire  a knowledge of
these studies.   Some become, after  a time, remarkable  profi-
cients in penmanship ; and one, occasionally, in geography, or
in the rapid combinations  or evolutions of numbers, astonish-
ing even skillful teachers by his readiness on these subjects ;
but the majority profit more by the physiological than by the
classical training ;  they are decidedly poor scholars, and  are
only efficient in kindness,  honesty, and love  of labor propor-
tionate  to their power.
  This  seemingly small success is  really very great, when we
compare it with the original incapacity of idiots.  Dr. Wilbur
has attained it by his superior administrative capacity, his tact
in choosing, commanding,  and  keeping his helpers, but more
than all by his  adherence to physiological training.   Without
group teaching, he could not have  taught so many idiots with
so few subordinates ; without the incitement of systematic imi-
tation, he could not have developed wills where even instincts
were scarcely to be discovered; without sensorial exercises,
he could not have accumulated distinct sensations, pabulum for
comparison and judgment; without general  gymnastics,  he
could not have rendered  human the balanced* animal gait;
and, without special gymnastics, he could never have  given
precision  to  localized movement,  nor restored the paw-like
hand of the idiot to the exalted place assigned it by Galen, at
the summit of  the  creation, on  a level with  the brain itself.
This, at least, Dr. Wilbur  has  done, and  is doing  every year
better and better for the idiot children of the  New York State
Asylum.
  Turn we now to Barre,  and see what Dr. George  Brown has
accomplished for a class of children of similarly incomplete de-
velopment, but of wealthier parentage.  Though I had expected
to find  a marked difference between  a State and  a  private 
CONCERNING IDIOCY.                  15
 institution, yet  the contrast was  even greater  than I had  an-
 ticipated.
   Leaving the  Boston and Albany Railway at Brookfield, we
 rode between the typical  hills  of central Massachusetts, on a
 road alternately shady and open, sometimes in company with a
 brook, the only living thing heard in these narrow valleys, where
 birds even have learned from the  forefathers not to chirrup or
 flutter between their morning and evening prayers.  We passed
 cotton and cheese factories, cottages and dwellings—all  silent,
 too—discreetly avoiding, not elbowing, each other, as they do
 in our  bustling State.  Besides,  they are all white, giving no
 clew to their age—those  of  dubious  date having put on  the
 fresher paint, not unlike the old folks who leave slovenliness to
 rosy youth, and hide under glossy linen and diamonded duck  the
 gradual falling  of the  waves of their pulse,  a  secret between
 themselves and the sphygmograph.
   This description is no digression, since it prepares  us to find
 Barre'a scattered village, and  its institution for idiots a dis-
 collection  of elegant or well-appointed buildings.   It is situated
 on a broad and healthy plateau,  ensconced in trees.  You come
 upon it suddenly;  without preliminary approaches, you have be-
 fore you a shallow and large basin of flowers set in raised mar-
 gins of rich velvety turf, served to the  surprised  senses like a
 repast of scent and colors, guarded by stately evergreens trimmed
 after the  manner  of Versailles, and  fronted  to the left by  the
 principal building, whose steps, columns, architraves, and galler-
 ies, rise above each other in Yitruvian ordonnance.  On entering
 these formal  premises, their impression recalls forcibly the open-
 ing scene of " Telemachus,"to be seen in old editions of the chef-
 d'oeuvre, and  puerile memory whispers : " Calypso ne pouvait se
 consoler" etc.  But there is no mythology here, and, if F^nelon
 is present,  it is neither as the teacher of socialism to the Dauphin
 of France,  nor even as the more conspicuous of the early writers
 on the  education of women, but as  the promoter and inspirer of
 Christ-like charity.
  In this mansion, sanctified by  its present use, Dr. Brown and
his family  reside,  and within  hearing distance  are the rooms
assigned to the worst cases  of bodily and  mental  infirmity. 
16
NEW FACTS AND REMARKS
so that none can suffer without being heard either by Dr. or
Mrs. Brown, whose  care  and watchfulness over the welfare of
all under their charge is constant and all-engrossing.   The other
buildings are occupied by other pupils and their attendants, ac-
cording to their fortune and the treatment which may be neces-
sary ; to each building are attached all appropriate conveniences,
gardens, walks, etc.; the new building, recently completed under
Dr. Brown's supervision, surpasses the rest in the completeness
and perfection of its accommodations.  With such ample provis-
ions as these for the comfort of its inmates, the institution of
Barre  fulfills its twofold object—being a school for those who
can improve, a retreat  for those who can not.
  Here the training and  nursing of individuals  is as strictly
carried out as the general training is at Syracuse.   Private
apartments, servants, horses, carriages, or any other comfort,
may be indulged in, which is beneficial to the pupils  and within
the limits  of their means.  There are many benefits,  as we shall
see presently, derived from this somewhat large liberty.
  There are at Barre about fifty patients brought from all parts
of the  country.  How  many  of these are  offshoots from some
kind of aristocracy, miserable sprouts dried up with paralysis,
softened by imbecility, shaken by the St. Vitus dance, thundered
down by the haut-mal  and the petit-mal of epilepsy and  what
else.... that may befall haughty and empty families for believing
themselves above the brotherhood of man, the universal family
of patient workers, God alone knows.  Mrs. Brown, whose op-
portunities for gathering observations in regard to  children of
this class have been greater than those of any other person now
living,  and whose turn of mind qualifies her admirably for clear
and correct generalization, remarked to me that these children
of endless  siestas and  satieties,  or  of moneyed and sensualist
hyperaesthesia, differed materially from  those equally incapaci-
tated by local influences,  home privations, and mute motherly
suffering during pregnancy ; the former presenting more variety,
the latter more uniformity in their symptoms.  If this  general-
ization of hers is verified, and I know of no facts nor reasons to
the contrary, she is entitled to rank with the ablest thinkers on 
CONCERNING IDIOCY.
17
this subject.  To show the importance of her discovery, let us
give it a shape and formula :
  Among the nomadic tribes there  are no more idiots than in-
sane persons.
  In certain secluded settlements, idiocy is a sequel to cretinism-
  Among the laboring classes, who know of civilization only by
its hardships and  sufferings,  idiocy is found in its simplest and
most easily recognized forms, sthenic and asthenic.
  Among the wealthier classes, idiocy is not only oftener aggra-
vated by accessory diseases, but also complicated with abnormal
semi-capacities or disordered instincts,  which produce hetero-
geneous types to  an almost  unlimited extent.   It is from this
class almost exclusively that we have musical, mathematical,
architectural, and other varieties of the idiot  savant; useless
protrusion of a single faculty, accompanied by a woful general
impotence.
  This discovery  of Mrs. Brown, of  which I have thus tried to
make  myself  the  exponent, will have a bearing on the future
progress of .anthropology and education.  Here  I can already
make use of it to  elucidate a few points of physiological educa-
tion relating  to the individual training of idiots.
   It was in practice empirically admitted that some idiots can
be better improved by general  training (a kind of attraction),
and some by individual training (a kind  of incubation, if I may
call it so).   The fitness of either exclusively, or of its preponder-
ance in the educational process,  was presumed from observation
of the functional anomalies, and, in doubtful cases, a trial of both
methods was resorted to, to  determine which was best.   Diag-
nosis,  however, will be rendered more easy by the new  criterion
just laid down, and a rational diversity of treatment may now
be  insisted upon, almost from  the start, to the benefit of the
pupils and to  the more complete satisfaction  of  the  teachers,
since they will the better understand their task.
   The part of this task mostly insisted upon at  Barre is, for the
reasons assigned  above, the individual training.  Sexes  being
separated, varieties and even individuals in some cases  being
kept apart, the school and gymnasium do not, of course, present
as lively an appearance as they  do  in a State institution.  But
              2 
18
NEW FACTS AND REMARKS
on an examination of these smaller groups, or of the single idiots
engaged either with a teacher or with a child of higher grade
than themselves, you can easily discern the character of this in-
dividual training.   It is the training of deficient  functions by
the immediate action of the teacher on the child.   But, lest this
definition  should itself seem obscure, I will illustrate it by some
examples of the method actually pursued in Barre.   One of these
has reference to imitation, which, after instinct, where it exists,
is the first lever of instruction for the idiot.  Imitation, in its
varied forms, opens the way to instruction  proper.   By it every
member of the body, as well as the body  as a whole, is drilled
to regular action; the hands, in particular, are repeatedly train-
ed to take all those positions which will be required in the acts
of ordinary life or in the course of education.  By it children,
whose whole  gait and manner is stiff and unyeilding, or who are
restless  or immovable, are in more than one sense rebuilt into
human shape  and for ready usefulness.
  Under the  same individual incubation-like training, sensorial
gymnastics extend the sphere  of knowledge, at  the same time
that they perform the more important function of increasing the
modes of vitality from without within ; as  the sap comes up the
tree from under the bark, so the blunted surfaces of the idiot are
taught to  circulate  the  feelings.  The touch is developed by a
series of tactile impressions, in which the  pupil is told nothing,
shown nothing, but made to feel extremely opposite properties
of matter by contact alone.  In other exercises it is the sight or
audition which is trained to perceive, unaided, impressions more
and more delicate.  Sometimes the  exercises tend to develop
the accuracy of feeling, sometimes to increase the rapidity of per-
ception.   By  one series  of exercises, one  set of apparatus, the
ultimate nerve-fibrils (innumerable and infinitesimal brains of
the periphery) have their sensibility exalted ; by other exercises,
another set, the white conductors (or wires) are  taught to for-
ward in normal time a dispatch from the periphery to the central
office of registration of impressions, etc.  The improvement in
these processes is capable of positive measurement, since, at the
beginning, an idiot requires several  seconds to transmit an im-
pression from without within,  or a volition or order from within 
CONCERNING IDIOCY.
19
without, whereas the normal time for these operations is only
uV11 of a second for the former operation, and ?Vth for the latter.
Thus the progress of sensation, perception, volition, and even
self-control, may become susceptible of mathematical measure-
ment, just in proportion as the  method of physiological educa-
tion is rendered  more positive by the precision of those who
apply it.
  Here the question naturally arises :   When  inert children
are, year after year, provoked  to vitality in all its modes from
without within ; when,  by this  slow process,  they are pro-
gressively made to act, to feel, to speak, to will—some a little,
some more,  some like ordinary men—what part has the brain
taken in this transfiguring revolution ?   It received the impres-
sions, it acted on the spur of external stimuli, it remained for a
variable time as  passive as a muscle whose contraction shall
depend upon the excitation to contractility either of a centripetal
or of a centrifugal  nerve.   But so  far  the encephalon did not
give any evidence  of spontaneity,  its functional development
took effect by continued impulsion from the periphery to  the cen-
tre ; a centripetal process, during which the cerebrum sent noth-
ing to the outer world, but the outer world sent everything to it
from the peripheric feelers through  the nerve-cords.  This atti-
tude does not look like the supreme autocracy assumed for the
brain and symbolized by Minerva, emerging complete and perfect
from the head of Jove!   The nervous system would seem rather
like an informal republic, where  the presiding officer is vested
with great powers, which he exercises when he has learned what
they are and when he can assume them, but meantime any one is
at liberty to take the initiative who possesses the ability.  Thence
could be concluded that, at least'practically,  the centre of the
nervous system, at any time, is at that point, be it where it may,
in which  its concentrated irritability produces its principal
action.
  This conclusion, deduced from the physiological training of
idiots, corroborates the position taken by several recent anato-
mists and  physiologists, whose discoveries  and  experiments
tend to increase our estimation of the role played in the human
organism by the  pneumogastric and sympathetic systems, and 
20
NEW FACTS AND REMARKS
by the minor ganglia and peripheric fibrils ; lowering to some
extent the assumed omnipotence of the brain proper  in the
psychical domain.  In  this respect, as  in several others, the
treatment of idiots has proved  that its fundamental doctrine
lay deep in  positive knowledge, and that, even in its infancy,
it can be called to offer valuable and important  testimony in
questions relative to the progress of the correlation of sciences.
  I began this  paper  as I entered  the  institutions for  idiots,
thinking only of their modes of improvement, and  trying to
make them  known to  my confreres;  but the philosophy of
the subject has carried me far from the more particular descrip-
tion I had intended to  give of the  method adopted for the re-
generation of these unfortunate creatures, the offspring  of our
sufferings  or our excesses; let me, in closing this descriptive
and didactic part, reour for a moment to these institutions.
  I have endeavored to convey an idea of the differences which
do and  must exist between a public and  a private school for
idiots; how they differ in their social and  scientific objects;
ministering comfort in proportion to previous wants and habits ;
treating the children by the same method, here synthetically,
there more  analytically;  accomplishing the same charitable
and educational object, by means somewhat different, but by
the choicest women and in the same Christian spirit. In this
they are alike ;  in every thing else they are different.  Let us
see :
  (a) The  State  institution is but a school where idiots are
received, if they can improve, and kept as long as they do im-
prove.
  (b) In it, the physiological  treatment is applied mostly to
groups, the children,  constantly in contact, being raised  up
from idiocy by the incessant action of the  whole on each.
  (c) The  sexes are completely separated in the dormitories
and gymnasium—not always at recess.  They take together
their meals, lessons,  walks,  musical  exercises, dancing, and
other evening entertainments.
   On the other hand ;
  (a) The private school is an institution for the young and
improving idiot, and a life-long retreat for the hopeless cases. 
CONCERNING IDIOCY.
21
   {b) In it, the physiological method is applied to a pupil  by
a  teacher, who  carries him (with strict regard  to  his  indi-
viduality) from  instinctive to  intellectual operations, through
personal imitation, etc.
   (c) The inmates live in separate buildings ;  boys  and girls
have their grounds, schools, teachers, matrons, attendants, etc.,
apart.  Some even eat and are taught in their own rooms ; the
best of them only take their meals with  the doctor's family,
and enjoy evening games.
   To sum up, it is difficult to understand, unless by sight, how
the same  thing can be done so  well, and yet so differently, as it
is at Syracuse and at Barre.
   It is, I  assure you, a pleasure  and a duty to bestow  upon
them  both, in  their present condition  of efficiency,  unre-
served praise.  Had  it been my good fortune to visit the train-
ing schools for  idiots in other States, I have no doubt that I
should  have  found  them equally worthy of commendation.
Did space permit, I should have  desired also to speak of the
services rendered to the  cause of the physiological training of
idiots by  organizers like Dr.  Joseph Parrish  and his accom-
plished wife ; by teachers like Misses Young and Wood, who
count, at  least,  sixteen years  of active service in Syracuse  ;
and by authors like Dr.  L.  P.  Brockett, whose  essays and
cyclopasdic articles on idiocy have diffused  more sympathy for
idiots and more knowledge of the best modes of training them,
throughout this country, than has been attempted in Europe.
   I do not feel at liberty to leave this subject, so deeply inter-
esting to  me, without calling  attention to the happy distribu-
tion of labor and  proportions  of the American institutions for
idiots.  The State schools  for the poor; the private ones for the
rich ; sufficiently large to give free scope  to the genius of a
manager,  not so large as to reduce him to jthe condition of a
steward.   We have seen that the creation of public charities of
this high  character is one of the glories of our age.  Their
overgrowth, in  opposition to  private genius and  enterprise,
would repeat the  folly of those  would-be religious establish-
ments of  the  past, which European revolutions have  leveled,
leaving only in history their ruin as a warning.  Let us hope 
22
NEW FACTS  AND REMARKS
that the State institutions for idiots will escape that evil of ex-
cessive growth, which has  already overtaken other establish-
ments of similar  character, in which patients are so numerous,
that the  accomplished physicians  who have them in  charge
can not remember the name of each; where, to superintend,
practically means  building, repairing, laying pipes  for air,
gas, heat,  water, in the  houses, in the grounds or fields, or un-
der the Legislature.  The man whose eminent capacities would
be engrossed by these  and similar  cares could not easily be
also the father, the physician, and teacher of idiots.  Nor is it
probable that he could contribute much toward the elucidation
of those problems of hygiene, nutrition, creation of synergy in
his pupils, etc., which are constantly recurring in his work.
  Another danger would arise from the use of the money voted
for the  support of poor idiots in favor of rich ones, thereby al-
tering the Christian character of these  charities, and giving
them a political  perniciousness.
  A worse and final danger would be, an open trial at absorb-
ing private institutions in public asylums, thereby destroying
even  the  shadow of originality and competition from this new
field  of energy.   Honor to the State for what she does in be-
half of the poor  idiots : encouragement to the individuals who,
unaided,  try to  do better!  All  men, and particularly those
filling official chairs,  are  subject  to drowsiness,  unless kept
awake by active competition ; a single channel is sluggish, but
if crossed by a new one, it receives a fresh impetus.   Side by
side,  State and  private institutions for idiots will stimulate
each other ;  the well-being of these  children and the  progress
of  physiological education require their coexistence,  and will
not fail to receive, each in its proper  sphere, the hearty  and
intelligent support of  the medical  profession throughout the
country.

   Now, Mr. President and gentlemen, it is  my painful duty to
call your  attention to the increase of social  evils, which seems
to act as  the increasing causes of idiocy. 
CONCERNING IDIOCY.
23
   1. Idiocy Reviewed  in  its Bearings on Anthropology.—This
 study was begun by kind lovers of the curious and the wonder-
 ful.  From time to  time  appeared one of these  monographs*
 the most ancient of which Linnasus took  care to collect in his
 i; Natural History."   We owe to the great Boerhaave, that of
 John of Liege; to Louis Racine (as one would say in contem-
 poraneous phraseology, Racine le petit), that  of  Mile. Leblanc
 —a case of imbecility, of obscure origin and  doubtful termina-
 tion, in the mezzotinto of a convent;  to Bonaterre and Itard,
 two chefs-d'ceuvre of description of the boy of  the Aveyron, idi-
 otic and savage altogether ; to Daumer, the mysterious narra-
 tive of Caspar Hauser—an intelligent child,  made practically
 idiotic by imprisonment between four walls, and seclusion from
 anything but a silent jailer and a wooden horse ; and to Esqui-
 rol, who suffered the name of the present writer to appear with
 his own on the first monograph of an idiot treated by the physi-
 ological method : ^Resume de ce que  nous  avons fait pendant
 quatorze mois.—Esquirol et Seguin, Paris.   1839."
   The  oldest of these documents, preserved by Linnaeus, be-
 longed to that class  whose main object was—irrespective of
 their solid foundation  on facts—to be wondered at.  The later
 were of the sentimental cast, whose characters and incidents
 affect  the physiognomy of arguments in the  great lawsuit of
 Nature versus Priesthood.  From Itard to this day the mono-
 graphs of idiots were  either psychical, anatomical, or physio-
 logical, but none of them bore the marks of general observation
 pertaining to the labor of a true anthropologist.   To be our-
 selves one of the delinquents may give us the right—at least it
 gives us the pluck—of declaring that we for one, and possibly
 we as a whole (Itard less than  any of us), have been sadly de-
 ficient in the catholicity of our biological knowledge; and  that
 if we stood by the idiot with a  humane desire  to help him, and
did him justice in the main, we handled idiocy with awkward
  * See their list completed up to the " Savage Boy of the Aveyron," and above
seventy more recent observations, page 17, passim, and appendix, in "Idiocy,"
etc., by E. Seguin. William Wood & Co., publishers, 61 Walker Street, New York.
1866. 
24
NEW FACTS AND REMARKS
and  incomplete  grasp, and did not do justice to the whole of
the problems it includes.
  Some years ago this avowal would have  made an  unfavora-
ble impression in reference to the whole matter upon a numer-
ous .class, holding an  influential position between the friends
and the inmates  of the new institutions.   But now the schools
have done too much  good to their pupils  to be shaken by the
disclosure of an  imperfection which does not affect their direct
object, the training of idiots.  On the contrary, the taking the
problems to be mastered bravely by the horns, will strengthen
those engaged in the fight, consolidate their social position,
and elevate their scientific character.

   2. Idiocy Considered in its Future Btaring on Anthropology.—
It must be  studied by itself in its generality, as if it were an
abstract being,  an entity.  This view  includes  all  historical
and statistical documents  on its proportion to population and
sexes ; on its gravity ;  on the number of  functions modified
by it; on its concurrence with or apparent relation of cause
and effect to other affections.  It includes, besides,  the  study
of isolated idiots, in view  of following through their  life, treat-
ment, and beyond death, the elucidation of certain questions of
correlation  of organ to function, which are the desiderata of
the present  hour, and whose success depends, in a great meas-
ure, upon the selection of typical cases.
  It is not every idiot that is  endowed with the  wretched con-
ditions  necessary to  lay the foundations of a complete mono-
graph ;  some would offer excellent traits, but there is an hiatus
in their history ; or others come with an uninterrupted record,
running back, as it is desirable it should, unto uterine life, but
their case  presents  no general  interest, nor special points
worthy of attention; or  is associated—we might almost say
polluted—with  other diseases, epilepsy, for instance, whose
deleterious effects upon activity and feeling confuse the symp-
toms, and whose .future organic alterations,  on the  cadaver,
may be mistaken for  pathological evidences of idiocy.
   On the other  hand, if few idiots are fit subjects for general
monographs, more are  precious  for the interpretation of iso- 
CONCERNING IDIOCY.
25
latqd points of diagnosis, pathology, therapeutics, and even
normal physiology.  But these limited observations are limited
only in regard to the point to be enlightened.  In every other
respect, to be valuable, they must be as thorough as the most
extensive monographs ; otherwise some important elements of
judgment would escape.   For  instance, if one has prosecuted
for months the development of a missing function, as if he had
given years of attention  to a general training, it is equally im-
portant, in either case, that he keeps notes complete of the gen-
eral disabilities, of subsequent general  progress, and eventually
of the anatomical and histological  condition of the different
nerve tissues at least.
   For these and other reasons, the typical  cases destined  to
serve as sample material for the philosophical history of idiocy
have to be chosen as early as possible, and worked eventually
through several generations of observers.   Otherwise there is
treatment, but no observation, and, therefore, no experience. „
Idiots are improved, the knowledge of idiocy is not;  and, for
fear that constant familiarity  with  the sight of idiots,  in all
their modalities, or modes  of being, would blunt the senses of
the standard man in the  mind  of the observer, we consider it
paramount that any investigation made on idiocy upon  idiots
be conducted pari passu upon normal subjects \jy th the  strictest
similarity ;  at play, at school,  on the  sick list, or on the cold
slab, when possible ;  everywhere, near the abnormal, the nor-
mal ; next to the shadow, the light.
  This study and parallelism lead us to new  inquiries :
   1. What  Causes Produce Idiocy and  Collateral Affections?—
Though  no general question is  so  identified with the former
researches relating to individual idiots, yet it has not received,
so far as we know, that authoritative solution that would pre-
vent much evil and produce much more good.  It  is evidently
one of those questions that could not be answered by indirect
prospecting, and  must be inquired into with the direct object
in view of eradicating  idiocy itself from our  midst, if possible.
But is not everything good possible to men ?   And why did they
conglomerate in families, tribes, and  nations, and why  do they
try to  unify now  in  one humanity, but  to  extend  to larger 
26
NEW FACTS AND REMARKS
   groups these once reputed impossible benefits ?  Have they%not
   already  eradicated  anthropophagy and leprosy ?*   Are we
   not now rapidly suppressing slavery,  small-pox, cretinism?
   And what retards the disappearance of idiocy,' and an eleva-
   tion of the  moral type of mankind comparable to the physical
   beauty which has retaken its seat  on the human face by the
   atoxic effect of vaccine ?   Nothing so much as the insufficiency
   of its etiology; show us its cause, and we will stamp it out.
     In former publications, intermarriage, intemperance, the dread
   of political slaughters, like those perpetrated by Louis Philippe
   in Lyons, and in the Rue Transnonin, by Cavaignac, in June,
   1848 ; by Napoleon, in December, 1851, have been traced as
   direct causes of idiocy.   But this is a place only for new facts
   acquired by recent experience.  Persons engaged in the treat-
   ment of  idiots are nearly unanimous upon the fact that  the vic-
   tims of idiocy have grown more numerous.  If so, the causes of
,  this infirmity must be on the increase ; and what are those now
   and newly at work ?
     Referring idiocy, in the main, to the conditions of uterine
   life, what recent circumstances have occurred that could have
   further impaired the woman as a breeder of embryo and foetus ?
   Her intellectual culture, social and physical gratifications, have
   fully kept pace* with those  of her partner.   Her relations to
   the latter are, if anything, more equal  and independent than
   formerly.  He, certainly,  is  less overbearing, less rude and
   brutal-(according to social station), than he was in the good old
   time.  She has more right to her own, and to what he makes,
   and yet  woman  is not satisfied.  Then, what is the  matter?
   The gist of the  matter seems to be :  "  Better," said Enfantin
   and J. S. Mill, "  if women would tell it themselves ;" that, with
   more subjects of gratification of mind  and body to-day than in
.   the past centuries, women are uneasy, unhappy, because they
  * Moral and physical evils are so intimately connected, one with the other, that
they look like two names for the same thing.  For instance, the eating of a raw ani-
mal substance, culminating in anthropophagy, is everywhere punished by lepra, as
the slave-trade germinates in slavers' bottoms the pustula of the small-pox, and so
forth. 
CONCERNING IDIOCY.
27
do not feel themselves adequate to their task.  Their educa-
tion—a jumble  of that which has made all the male inutilities
we have known—has  not taught them an iota of womanhood.
Their hygiene and  habits have disqualified them for motherly
functions ;  city and house narrownesses do not offer more room
for a new-comer than  their slender pelves ; their tastes run to-
ward niceties incompatible with married life ; fecundation is
the result of maladroitness ; its product, unwelcome, ill-fed, ill-
treated before  as after birth, conceived in apprehension, re-
mains  a nervous ruin, or disappears  in  a storm of some sort.
At this spectacle we can sorrow, but not wonder.   Can we ex-
pect woman to  know what she has not  learned, or to resent
feelings whose  warmth never descended into  herself?  How,
besides, can she conceive and nurture,  with a living enthusiasm,
a child she has no strength  to carry, no room to grow, no sub-
stance to feed, no idea how it is to be handled, cared for, etc. ?
The heaviest task when it  is not the dearest, she shifts it off,
coming out from the struggle  with  a sad countenance and
emaciations foreboding  early degeneracy of some" vital organs.
To be frank, we physicians, teachers, and  parents are more
culpable than herself.
   On the opposite side, referring to the many women overfaith-
ful to  their vow to help their mates any  way, any  how, we
should say  that their task,  their whole task,  as mothers and
wives, heavier  than many hard laboring-men could  stand, has,
of late, been greatly aggravated by their being  made partici-
pators in anxieties  external to  the home.  Too  few husbands
spare their young  wives in this ; and  many women—be it
genuine eagerness or natural inconsideration—rush to  an often
impossible rescue of the sinking fortunes of the family, and too
often, thereby, prepare  their own destruction.  It is of no use
to  enter into particulars ;  when a pregnant  woman has, be-
sides the trials  of gestation, and during that  exalted state of
all functions, to endure the multiple  trials commanded  by an
heroic or silly sense of duty, the chances are many that her in-
fant will  bear  the  stigma of the struggle.   And what is the
fatality that, to-day more than  ever, pushes  men to undertake
more than they can do ; and, as a sequel, women to make ulti- 
28               NEW FACTS AND REMARKS
mate sacrifices?  .   .   .  In nearly every case it  is the rent—
the rent, growing by day, by night, in work, in sleep, in sick-
ness, in death.  Increasing every year, the rock of Sisyphus
was a pebble compared to it.  The renter knows no remission,
no alleviation, no day of the Lord.   He is the lord, and more,
the landlord.  Under his sway, Christ had not a  stone to rest
his head.   The foetus has no place to grow in peace.  Woe to
the pregnant woman and her fruit caught under that crushing
millstone !
   The ancients were wiser.  By the regulations  of the Bible,
young Israelite couples  were allowed to live one happy year
free from  labor and necessities.  This was economy, since it
cost less than the lifelong  support of infirm children, born of
ill-developed and care-worn young  women, who themselves
hardly ever recover from the simultaneous drain on their con-
stitution of pregnancy, over-work, and moral distress.
  On the contrary, no wonder that, from the martyrs of the
flat and depressing dramas silently enacted to-day for a misera-
ble livelihood, are born children, not only idiotic and epileptic,
but insane.  This is a remarkable instance of interpolation of
a new link in the chain of adaptation.  When pregnant women
were simply exposed to home brutalities and privations, their
idiotic children were of the simplest types.   When the mother
had, besides, the mental activity that education and society de-
velop, the idiocy of her child was of a more complex character,
as shown by Mrs. Brown.  But as soon as women  assumed the
anxieties pertaining to both sexes, they gave birth to children
whose like  had hardly been met with thirty years ago ;  insane
before their brain could have been  deranged  by their  own
exertion ; insane, likely, by a  reflex action of the nervous
exhaustion  of'their mother.
  If the present condition of women has such and other corre-
lated influences upon the future generation, this  evil must be
made a valuable argument to change that position.  But what
is the use of putting on the gloves of hypothesis, when we refer,
to a great extent, the malformations, ill nutrition,  and  anoma-
lous tendencies of children  to the  inactive, useless, and unreal
education of women ?  The facts speak higher  than  our voice 
CONCERNING IDIOCY.
29
when showing the most healthy, well-balanced, and serviceable
children  to be born of women hardly educated at all, but used
to a hearty life.   Truly, those  who cause women to receive an
anti-physiological education might dread fantastic procreations ;
and foresee, under the impossible delicacy of forms of the young
lady, the wavering penumbra  of  the  future idiot, insane, or
epileptic.
  The third evil is more complex, though having,  too, its deeper
roots in improvident education. We overburden women ; they
overburden themselves, and choose or accept burdens unfit for
them.  Besides, their uneasiness results from being moved by
several inward currents, neither of them strong enough to cut
an open  channel through the social obstacles.   Among others,
is the current toward matrimony, swift sometimes, rarely strong
enough to overcome the asperities of a day and night depend-
ence, the heaviest of all;  and marriage  is that, or a deceit
Another current is toward  freedom.   Being less subjected  to
animal instincts, and therefore  not so easily subdued as women
of other  ages, heavier fed and less  intellectual, those of to-day
declare their independence and seek for it.  But they do not
possess,  to the same degree with  men,  the two  elements of it,
capital and working capacity ;  so that most of these protestants
against the rule  of man  are yet  reduced  to the,  so far, only
orthodox course—of accepting the means of support from the
envied sex.  This is  a very painful state of transition for both
parties in  which men do  rarely appear to have  received,  in
feminine money, the equivalent of their would-be  liberality; and
women suffer from their incapacity of being, one way or the other,
neither dependent with contentment, nor free with self-reliance.
Children, gotten  under such moral and other pressures, can not
truly be  said to be born from the union, but rather from the
disunion of their parents ;  conceived in antagonism, they can
only be excessive in their tendencies, or monstrous in their or-
ganization.  This condition of family affairs will last till phys-
iological education shall have fairly developed  the tendencies
of women ; of some  for motlierhood and matronly station,  of
others for artistic talents of various grades, which  can insure
their independence. 
30
NEW FACTS AND REMARKS
  There is nothing new in this position.   On the contrary, it
is so old that it seems to be entirely forgotten.
  Women who have remained single, by their own choice, our
own dereliction, chance, misconduct, maltreatment, injustice,
over-destruction of males  by war, or over-production of fe-
males in our species, etc., etc., have not always been  lowered
or cast away among the dangerous classes by our intermittent
repulses and caresses, in disregard of their natural higher as-
pirations.  Nor have  they always been shut up in convents,
where their capacity for labor and power  of tenderness are
buried alive in incense, music, and moral annihilation.  Nobody
seems to remember that once the laws, habits, and religions even,
provided  not for one class of women  only, but for all classes.
Such sayings as that of Taney about a whole race of men, that
some women have no rights that we are bound  to respect, is a
modern infamy ; since, behind every lost woman, may be seen,
Mephistopheles like, the phantasm of a man's lie.   Let us sooner
recall the times of  Pericles, when the greatest statesman of
Greece was his unmarried friend and adviser, Aspasia, one of the
hetairce * of Athens.  Then all classes of women were respected,
or at least had their rights acknowledged, because all had their
archetype in  the Greek heaven,  Olympus.   But as for us, we
had only  one type of womanhood ; and our incredulity or its
uselessness has broken it.  Alas!   Therekindled worship of the
Virgin Mary does not protect the  mothers better than the Made-
lines, and serves only as a delusive mirage to lull the despair of
nuns.  In our Blessed Lady, the impossible has killed the ideal.
   Truly, in a tradition which dates but of yesterday, we have
 carved, out of reality, a beautiful type of womanhood, whose
 reflex influence can  be read on the countenance of American
 mothers.   But the likeness to Martha Washington's face, whose
 beauty is virtue,  can be reached  by the  young  woman only
 through an intermediate type of youthful perfection, that is yet
 to come out from the development of the national character.  In
 the absence of that youthful educational type, it is fortunate to
 * See the learned researches of L. P. Brockett on the historical conditions of women,
in his book, Women1* Bights,  Wrongs, and Privileges. 
CONCERNING IDIOCY.
31
be enabled to say that so many young women resist dear temp-
tations by the sole power of their inward excellence.  But, of
course, treating of idiocy, we meet with the unfortunate excep-
tion.
  The fourth evil is gambling.   It spread from a few narrow
pieces of green baize into the wide  world by the alteration re-
cently introduced—without corresponding legal check—in the
form of property .titles.  Lands,  roads, canals, factories, mob-
ilised in shares, surrender their profits, not to their  workers,
but to the  gamblers  thereof.   Thus millions of men, instead of
going to work every morning, descend in the street, bourse, or
exchange, to secure by hook and crook, their share of the spoils.
That most of them get soon ruined, and would be dishonored if
they had a name, is alien to the matter under consideration ; but
that their wives and families are kept under the dread and de-
moralizing influence of their noble life is to the point.
  Women—who would cherish the idea of raising a brood of
loving creatures, if they were but mated to a cobbler, who secures
by his labor three or four dollars a day—pray earnestly to God
to send them no children to  fear for, in their mortgaged high-
stoop residence, or boarding tinsels,  between a Noah's trunk and
a suspicious bank-book. Those who become mothers in these
dread conditions may feel the anguish of their womb communi-
cated to their fruit.  I have attended a mother of a remarkably
fine family of four children, whose fifth was affected in this wise.
During that pregnancy, her husband was deeply involved in spec-
ulations ; he would say nothing to her about his chances, but she
knew daily, by the way he ate, how much he had lost.   One day
she saw him swallow his dinner without masticating at all; she
fainted  away,  the child hardly moved after, and was born a
cripple and an idiot. Even strong men betray their ruin by some
signs.  Fisk could tell how much Gould had lost by the quantity
of minced  paper he scattered around his desk ; wives feel more
keenly  yet.  The.fiend laughs, but the wife of the loser shakes.
Add, to these barons of the dollar, coming from  their strong
boxes, like bishops and dukes of old from their strong castles,
to prey upon the  revenues of labor, otiler uncounted  millions,
clerks, lawyers, doctors, importers, etc., seemingly dealers in 
32
NEW FACTS AND REMARKS .
 eggs, prayers, pills, flour, bacon, silk, etc., but in reality devo-
 tees of the stock  exchange, whose  fluctuations are  carved on
 their face like deep cuts of the knife in a mouldering log.   The
 women whose social standing depends  on these fluctuations
 soon  learn to read his  facial ledger, upon which he can  not,
 for them, make false entries ; the wife  does not kiss her chil-
 dren  without a tremor for their future ;  the  daughter can not
 build one of these ideal castles of purity and happiness in
 which girls like to fall asleep, without seeing  it crumble under
 the hammer of ruin and shame.
   In  this, do not  women but  partake of the anxieties of men ?
 What an  error!    Man suffers through his  head  and heart,
 woman suffers besides,  and more, through her womb.   This
 privileged torture, which ranks her alternately so  far above
 or below  us, is the point at issue in  moral gynecology.  If
 women live in serene and  secure circumstances, however high
 or low, their sexual qualities and  capacities expand.  Girl,
 her chest timely  swells  under the  waves of  even hopes  and
 rythmical breathings ; her basin enlarges in  harmonious pro-
 portion, and  a full, mellow voice  gives  the  diapason of her
 feelings.   Mother, she watches with  the  untiring equanimity
 of confidence the  spread of her race.  But obstruct  the clear
 vista  of esperance from  the former, and remove  the solid
 canopy of security from  the latter, and  the womb of the  one
 refuses to attain its physiological proportions, and that of the
 other, alternately  depressed,  exalted,  relaxed, contracted,
 burned, and chilled, becomes hemorrhagic, exsanguious, or can-
 cerous ; with the moral results of barrenness,  foeticide, idiocy,
 epilepsy, etc.
  Who of us dare to condemn these women ?
  If they had less feeling, they would not care for the  future.
  If we were more just,  at home and abroad, they would suffer
 less and not be so bad.
  The foregoing causes  of the increase of idiocy and kindred
infirmities  should be  particularly investigated ;  and, if it
is  demonstrated  that# they   have  produced, generally,  the
disastrous consequences which the writer has observed in his
limited experience, those causes ought to  be combated with all 
                     CONCERNING IDIOCY.                  33

 the force of our moral  and professional character, as well as
 with the arguments drawn from past experience and knowledge.
 For this emergency, the domain of physic becomes commensurate
 with the want of society ;  not by any assumption of our own,
 but because it happens that, in the present period, no other men,
 as a body,  possess, to the  same degree as physicians  do, the
 cyclopaedic elements  of judgment in this matter.
   None but physicians are qualified to inquire, and even to pry
 into these  questions of human  affinities,  gestation,  breeding,
 physiological training, emasculation  of capacities, social vam-
 pirism of the idle upon the busy people, etc., which prepare, as
 a leaven, the  rise or  disorganization of certain human families.
 Rome declined,  and Constantinople crumbled, not because the
 priests of Jupiter or  Cybele, or St. Sophia, ignored these ques-
 tions, but  because  physicians who ought  to have studied and
 solved  them  with  authority,  as did  Hippocrates,  Aretaeus,
 Alexander of Trales, neglected  the philosophy of physic, and
 its application to social sciences, for the disputes on pharmacol-
 ogy and demonology, or between herbs and amulets, etc.   But
 among physicians, none  are better qualified to fulfill this phil-
 osophical duty than those engaged in the treatment of nervous
 diseases, and especially of idiocy.
   We say " idiocy," because the time  has come for  the treat-
 ment of " idiots " to take somewhere that synthetical shape of a
 comparative study of idiocy contrasted with normal youth ; of
 the means of educating idiots and other children; of the methods
 of renovating life itself where it is deficient in the ill-born, and
 of increasing it where it exists in the well-born child.
   Indeed, the time  has come when, with a due regard for their
 welfare, and an unremitting zeal for perfecting the hygienic,
 medical, and pedagogic method of  treatment adapted to their
abnormal perfectibility, idiocy will have to be observed in its
relations to anthropology ;  and  the rationale of its treatment
will have to be studied in its bearing  upon the most intimate
problems of the development of man by education.
   After the etiology of idiocy, the first symptoms of it which
can be appreciated are full of interest, but surrounded by much
mystery and uncertainty.  They can not very well be studied
              3 
34
NEW FACTS AND REMARKS
in the existing institutions where children are admitted quite
late in youth.  This is somewhat of a new inquiry, which needs
sincerity and confidence in both ways, on the part of the mother,
and on that of her physician.
  What are the  early Manifestations of Idiocy ?—{a) In  the
Mother.—Eventually,  we  may be called to witness the whole
period of gestation, whose circumstances give rise to the suspi-
cion that  its fruit may  possibly come out altered by idiocy.
Here our duty is double.  Toward science—that we are bound
to forward by all fair means—we are under the professional obli-
gation to watch and note the case in  all its particular actions,
feelings, ideas, dreams even.  After all, if the child comes out
right, the world is the gainer; if, on the contrary, our previsions
are confirmed, our observations accrue to the benefit of science.
But  toward the  mother and the  new-comer our duty  is very
different.  We must not awake in her any suspicion of our sur-
mise ; nor forget that moral impressions are considered by many
—with or without truth—as controlling certain results of preg-
nancy ; nor that, if a woman apprehends our  suspicions, she
may instantly and thenceforward take her share of them to the
detriment of her  health,  of her  nutrition, and of the child; that
her interest  in the matter is one of life or death, and ours only
one of observation.  In  a  word, let us remember, that our first
duty is toward the living, the second to science.  But those oc-
currences are rare in which idiocy may be predicted, and the
materials for its history prepared with a foresight—the more
precious when we meet with one of them.
  Oftener, what  we know of the events and incidents of gesta-
tion comes to us  later, by hearsay, or by the mother herself;
sometimes with an indubitable color of truth  and  reality—at
others, tinted  or  evidently distorted by the imagination.   So
that we must pay great attention to what we hear  on that
score, of events and feelings in  pregnancy ; but be much more
particular  about the place we  assign  to these details in our
memory or memorandum.
  (b) Early Manifestations of Idiocy in Infancy.—The begin-
ning of children, like  that of nations, is enshrouded in fables ;
that of idiots and of great men surpasses all  in marvels.  Let 
CONCERNING IDIOCY.
35
 us only inquire how he suckled, and how long he slavered, and
 when he began  to hold his head, pay attention by the ear or
 eye, hold and let go intentionally and not much more.  This
 is enough to characterize an infant idiot, but does not improve
  (c) Our Knowledge of Idiocy in  Infancy .—This knowledge
 seems to be attainable only by keeping together, like twins, a
 normal and an idiot baby ; and we will see in one cradle vigor,
 command, joy, anger, and tears ; in the other flabbiness, no feel-
 ing but that of hunger, no laugh, no tears ascribable to human
 causes.   When  the  time  for  action  arrives, one  sits, creeps,
 falls, to rise again ;  the other, crouched,  keeps his hand in his
 mouth.   One  begins to speak ; the other only moans.   When
 one supplies himself with  all the good and bad  things he can
 lay his grasp on, the other would starve, if he was not stuffed
 with a  uniform soft  food, often  pushed into  the gullet  by
 the helping hand, deglutition  being  as  impossible as  masti-
 cation.   All the senses of one are  wide  awake ; of the other
 dormant. One induces, deduces, supposes, inquires, to bothera-
 tion ; the other  continues unimpressed,  impassable, isolated,
 iSios.
  But these two cradles, or sooner, these two children, but in
reality these two types—since we have  in view normal youth
and  idiocy—must, as anatomical  models stand  in school,  be
kept in  constant parallelism,  where idiocy  is studied  as  a
branch of morbid physiology.  Then,  by  the  sedulous and
timely observation of the minute physiological deficiencies, as
they prevent action in  one child, and of the corresponding effi-
ciencies as they develop themselves in  the other, and incite him
to action, our sketch will be  completed into a perfect and
useful likeness of human  incapacity  contrasted with  human
capacity.
  We say perfect, because it is the work of years, that must be
rendered more and  more accurate by notation of  the minute
symptoms in their  order of evolution ;  and  useful, because,
upon the tested and retested reality and finish of these descrip-
tions, will rest the new means of improvement  to be  devised
by physiological teachers.
  (d) Symptoms  of Idiocy  under Training.—They may be im- 
36
NEW FACTS AND  REMARKS
proving, stationary, or increasing.   That is  the question not
only for the individual idiot, but to determine the character of
idiocy in a given case, and to test the influence of some parts
of the training on children at large.
  Evpry  child entering the  institution with as complete  a
record as could be gathered of him and of his family anteced-
ents,  this record will  grow by a sort of alluvial process  from
all that is done for  him, and its results.  At first, and twice a
year, oftener repeated in cases of sudden changes, the survey
embraces growth as well as functional development; the size,
weight, and shape of parts, where it is possible ; the color and
other qualities of tissues, the proportion of blood-corpuscles *
the temperature measured by the thermometer, the contractile
power by diverse dynamometers, the tactile  sensibility by the
aesthesiometer, nourishment, and nutrition, nature of secretions,
spontaneity, cheerfulness, and other  notable  functions, all and
each, compared with the same in the average children, that
will be kept near by in training, by the same means and under
similar observation.
   On this point  the  monographs  have attained proportions
which permit us to foresee whither their subjects tend.   Some
have made more or less rapid progress, and qualified for differ-
ent grades of manhood.  Some present meliorations which could
not  have  taken  place  without the  training, though they are
  * A certain proportion of red corpuscles in the blood is considered a test of its
healthfulness, and less as a proof of anaemia.  Hence, various means have  been
devised to find out its composition in given cases.  Among the investigators who
have succeeded in affixing their names to some of these analyses of the blood are,
Becquerel, Schrerer, Schmidt,Scharjin, Zimmerman, Hoppe,Vierordt,and Welcker.
More recently Paolo Mantagazza, of the Italian Institute of Sciences, has devised
an instrument which he calls the Globulometer, which gives the exact quantity of
red corpuscles in a sample of blood.  One of the advantages of the globulometer
is, that it requires but one drop of blood for the experiment.  That drop being
mixed with a given solution of b. c. soda, a transparent receiver is filled with the
mixture,  and held before the eye and a specified light, where its degree of opacity
indicates the quantity of red disks. This experiment presents several advantages:
it requires only a drop of blood, it demands only a few minutes, it can be made at
the bedside.  Though we personally rejoice in the possession of that little jewel of
Italian ingenuity and precision, the globulometer of Dr. Mantagazza, we apprehend
that it will not become, what it should be, one of the favorite instruments of posi-
tive diagnosis of our professional brethren. 
CONCERNING IDIOCY.
37
mostly attributable to growth,  increased strength,  automatic
habits, and unavoidable surroundings.   Some are decidedly as
idiotic as ever.  Some actually retrograde, either by an ab-initio
falling off, or since a certain date, event, or sickness, or by the
effects of that young senility of which idiots give the curious,
and, as we believe, unique example.
  Though individually and  socially these results are very dif-
ferent, the first  preparing, after a simple practical apprentice-
ship, to  leave the  school for the world, where most of them
need yet a special protection and home-kindness ; the second
to pass the remainder of their lives in asylums, where comfort,
no  progress, is looked for;  the third  to be kept where their
observation may most  advantageously be completed. But the
only complete result, for all of them, of our cases, statistics,
and annotations, is to come from—
  (e)  The Post-Mortem Examination.—There on the slab, more
glorious  than the battle-field, have laid the unknown but honor-
ed heroes,  who  helped  Scarpa, Vesalius,  Haller, Morgagni,
Bichat,  Flourens,  Bell,  Brown-Se'quard,  Virchow,  Bernard,
marshals of the scientific empire, to gain their victories ; Harvey
to demonstrate the  circulation of the blood ; as  well as Michael
Servetus that of the lymphatics,  before Calvin had discovered
that his brain also circulated ideas worth burning.  To lie on
that slab, field of scientific victories, is certainly a great honor
for any of us, who,  possibly  good for naught in life, may thus
become useful in death.  To object to it in any case of idiocy
would be an act of hostility to progress, if  not of idiocy itself
doubled  with fatuitas.  After nursing, educating, cherishing the
idiot as no family can, because  we do  it with  the full compre-
hension of his value in the  study of anthropology and physio-
logical education, we want to compare his head, imperfect chef-
d'oeuvre of organism, with the written record  of its imperfect
functions, we conscientiously claim the right,  after recording
the effects, to pry into  the causes, wherever they can be found.
We do it with intention, reflection, pure motives, and respectful
hands ; we would say that it is for us  a religious ceremony, if
rites were progressive, in a religion whose author rewarded his
disciples by the post-mortem  apparition of his own body, which 
38
NEW FACTS AND REMARKS
was the forcible anatomical demonstration of the dualistic theory
of mind and matter, upon which science reposed till the times
of Spinosa, Gassendi, Laplace, Huxley, and his compeers.
   It has been objected that anatomy did not reveal in insanity
as much  as was promised in it3 name.  There is truth in the
objection, for various reasons, into all of which we can not enter.
Suffice it to say : 1. That the means of investigation at command,
till a few years ago, could not reach to the intimate  structure and
nature of the nervous tissue, and that some more improvements
in this are eagerly looked for; and, besides, that probably a
good  deal  of the  attention  hitherto paid to the arched  con-
volutions should be directed toward  the many and distinct
parts which crowd the base of the brain ; in fact, that  the study
of the nervous system is just beginning.  2. The expectations
about  always finding the material lesions of insanity have also
oftentimes  proved fallacious, because, when a physical  cause
has produced insanity, an organic lesion may generally be found ;
but when it is from mental cause, it may come so late in  life, it
may be of such minor severity, and  of so short duration,  that it
can not leave their imprint  on the organism that our present
instrument  of  study  could detect.   3.  The  condition of
idiots is  absolutely the reverse of this.   Idiocy begins to show
its presence always at birth, or at the latest when the babe holds
yet to its mother by the mammae ; and, for its causes, they gener-
ally date from some period, more or less remote,  of the gesta-
tion ; besides, it is  never a mental anomaly alone, that is to say,
isolated from  other functional anomalies, as insanity often is.
Therefore, as we see in the idiot the effects of the other func-
tional  deficiencies upon their respective organs,  we are led to
expect that the same correlation will obtain between the percep-
tive and mental functions on one side and the state of the various
cerebral  organs, on the other.   If  we do not err in this, the
possibility of demonstrating that correlation in idiocy would be
dependent upon the accuracy of the method used in the inves-
tigation, and not on  eventualities as  we apprehend  it  often
must, in  insanity.
   This point gained—and we think it ought to  be made irrevo-
cable by  a written agreement with  the parents of the  pupils 
CONCERNING IDIOCY.
39
before their admission—we will have secured all the means, as
far as the idiots themselves are concerned, of attaining the mul-
tiple object of such moral institution—which  mainly are :
   (a) The causes of idiocy to be thoroughly investigated, and the
parties interested in the  prevention  of these  causes, especially
young women and their husbands, made aware of the dangers
incurred in their posterity by any breach of the laws of moral
health and society, which may deeply impress a pregnant  or
nursing woman.  To this department alone, the publication of
the results of our researches on the intimate,  even secret, even
criminal, causes of idiocy—always omitting  names, of course
—will do a great deal of good ; particularly  in  spreading  the
dread of hereditary punishment set forth in  the Bible, and in
enforcing the claim of women to more kindness, and sparing,
when they are in the most delicate and impressible condition.
  It is not unreasonable  to expect that from  these, and similar
moral improvements, and physically from the  transfer of the
pregnant women from the crowded abodes of the city to  the
comfort of airy and wooded regions—from abundant plain food,
exercise, and  no excitement—young mothers would be more
able to bear and nurture  their children  in physiological con-
ditions, and the children  would be born in due  season, with-
out the influence of enervation and ill-nutrition which tend to
produce idiocy and cognate affections.  Hence these evils would
rapidly diminish.
  (b) The treatment of idiocy would soon be the object of clear and
simple rules,  deduced principally from a parallel of normal and
idiotic children under similar training.  There, anything that
could incite a healthy child to activity and attention, would be
tried on  an  idiot.   Anything which would have made an im-
pression  on an idiot, would be tried on a healthy child ;  render-
ing manifest the similarity or dissimilarity of impressions made
by the same phenomena on both.  The result would be our gain,
soon to be transferred from the experimental to the practical
field of'education.   These results of experiments would be  ex-
pressed—we  would sooner say cast—in a series of propositions,
whose total would constitute—
  (c) The principles of physiological education, because they would 
40
NEW FACTS AND REMARKS
be strictly drawn from physiological experiments.  To attempt
to give here an exposition of these principles—which are already
established elsewhere, and are yet susceptible of increase in
number, perfection, and  extension—would be like a trial of  in-
serting a full didactic treatise in a discourse.  However, a com-
prehensive exposition of the mental  process by which one of
these principles of physiological education was arrived at, does
not seem a work of supererogation  here, to give you, Mr. Pres-
ident and gentlemen, the key to the way of discovering new
ones.
  (d) Educating the mind through perceptions instead of by pre-
arranged reasonings.  When we speak to the reason of a child
with our reason, he  understands us, more or less correctly or
not, always in his own manner, that we can hardly probe on
the  spot,  and whose thoroughness  will  be  shown in his after-
life, but still his mind  and ours have  communicated through
ideas. How different it is  with an idiot!  Our mind addresses
itself in vain to his mind, an immured recess, never lighted be-
fore.  This explains why it was impossible to educate idiots
as long as education was simply a process of transfusion of
ideas from one mind to another.  When that impossibility was
demonstrated, we had to look for other  means of educating the
idiot.  These means, we knew, we  could not obtain from psy-
chology, which had  already proved its  impotence ; we looked
for them in the resources offered by physiology ; we will pres-
ently see with what  results.
   (e) Considering all the manifestations of life  as expressions of
functions, and all functions as resultant from a certain organism,
we set aside the scholastic distinction of mind  and matter, in-
tellectual faculties  and physical functions.   Confident that to
call them one name  or another does not alter their nature, and
could not modify the results of our experiments upon them, we
assumed simply that—
   (/) " If we could take hold of an organ,  we would be able to make
it produce its function."   From this starting-point we gradu-
ated our means of educating the functions of idiots upon  the
facility of our approach to their organs, and we found that—
   (g) " The organs of sensation  being within our reach, and those 
CONCERNING IDIOCY.
41
of thought out of it, the former are the first that we can set in action."
From this selection—nearly a discovery—since it became the
basis of an important part of the method of training  idiots,
resulted the other aphorism—
  (h)  " The physiological education of the senses must precede the
psychical education of the mind."
  These  propositions  received  support from  two classes of
historical experiments :
  Individual Test JVo. 1.—When Itard undertook, in 1801, to
educate the savage boy found  in the forest of the Aveyron,
France, after the Abbe" Sicard  and other psychologists had
tried in vain to communicate ideas to that child of Nature, who
knew absolutely nothing but temperature and hunger, Itard
succeeded  partially in educating him through  sensorial im-
pressions.   For  instance, he could not teach him to  read—that
is to say, to attach an idea to certain combinations of letters—
but he could make him identify the  figure of a few words with
a few things, as, when wanting milk, he presented a card bear-
ing milk written on its face.  Milk was not a word, it was a
sign for the savage.  Of his purely sensorial education, Itard
gives another example rather forcible, though not enforced by
moral considerations.   The boy would sometimes bite a man
in anger, as he had done rabbits to satisfy hunger in his former
haunts;  Itard, once thus cruelly bitten, seized  the  delinquent
by the abdomen, and  held  him out of a window  three  stories
high, apparently ready  to  drop him  on  the  pavement.   He
became very pale, submissive, subdued, and never bit any more.
  Individual Test JVo. 2.—Caspar Hauser, when he came out of
his prison,  was  a perfect blank, as regards both impressions
and ideas ;  having felt nothing, he knew nothing, and had no
thoughts.  His  teacher, Daumer, took precisely that view of
him ; and, instead  of reasoning with him, spoke to his senses,
educated them to receive impressions, and ideas resulted from
these impressions within a short time.  As he had been formerly
made an artificial idiot by forced isolation, so,  the day he was
born to feeling, his mind was born also ;  being formed, by strata
of perceptions, as geological treasures have been, or sooner as 
»
42               NEW FACTS AND REMARKS

are photographic impressions, whose mass would represent the
entire knowledge of a man.
   General Test No.  3, by the Affirmative.—This same mode of
treating  the mind  out  of  the cultivation  of the perceptive
powers attained its highest perfection when  applied in antiqui-
ty to a confederation of peoples, who thereby were enabled to
exhibit every four years, not more industrial products, but
more  manly genius, than any nation ever did.   Greece, from
Asia Minor to Sicily, educated  by the sensorial  process, sur-
cxcited by the divine types of sensorial perfection, presented
to it  as a rational  and religious teaching by its poets, artists,
priests, oracles, historians, attained the royalty  of  the  mind
over the world during the Olympic period from Pythagoras to
Alcibiades ; and
   General Test No. 4, by the Negative.—The period  in which
we find the heaviest dunces on earth is that in which mankind
reprobated the education of and by  the senses, aimed at devel-
oping  spirituality  by  purely intellectual  education, and be-
came entangled by erudition in the depths of ghostly imbecility.
That  was  the  time when individuality was  treated like in-
sanity ; when Cardan and Paracelsus were branded for having
foreseen  the alkaloids  in  crucibles and test-tubes, instead of
cultivating the alchemy of  the infinite.
   Test No. 5, by tlie Absurd.—We have seen a race, hardly ex-
tinct, of accomplished scholars, who could not tell anything, even
" good morning," but in the words  of  Horace, Sophocles, Mil-
ton,  etc.—useless  as harmless gentlemen,  caressing a heavy
chin encased in a high cravat, when loading the atmosphere
with continuous eructations of Greek and Latin.
   Thus, the experimental education of a savage idiot, the philo-
sophical  development of a young man, previously kept in arti-
ficial infancy by isolation, the brilliant and  solid results of the
polytheistic training of several nations, the humiliating con-
sequences  for European  intelligence  of  wiefo-physical  and
pseudo-classical  training, concur in the demonstration, other-
wise and directly  given, during the last  thirty years, in the
school for idiots, that " the physiological education of the senses is 
                  '  CONCERNING IDIOCY.  ,               43

the  royal road to the education  of the intellect;  experience, not
memory, the mother of ideas."
  Let us mark that this touches only one of the problems of
education so dear to humanity,  vital to our race.   The school
for  idiots has been equally ahead  in those questions relating
to the effectiveness of, and harmony between the different sys-
tems, muscular, nervous, etc., by education in gymnastics, imi-
tation, etc.  But this view of the subject is out of our present
reach.
  These  institutions  having taken the leading part in this
movement, given the impulse, or  the direct example,  to the
schools where objects are now  the systematic theme of lessons,
and the faculty of imitation is trained like the other manly
capacities;  having thrown  already some  light  upon the phe-
nomena of  our half-civilized life which produces  idiocy and
cognate  affections, it could be easily shown that, in  giving
prominence to the improvement of tlieir pupils upon that of
the method, these schools have acted in accordance  with the
public's eagerness, which claimed first the individual results of
the new institutions, as a condition sine qua non of their support;
but  that,  in locating these schools through the country,  in
view of the comfort of  the inmates, and of the convenience of
their families, they have put them out of the reach of the con-
course of scientific men and means, which  are concentrated in
capital cities.   These were temporary or local necessities.
  The position of the existing asylums, excellent for their in-
dividual object, the treatment of idiots, may  be maintained with
advantage, but must be  strengthened by the creation of a supe-
rior institution for  the treatment  of idiocy; where questions
corollary to this affection, and  those issuing from the principle
of physiological training ; the correction of the early anomalies
of the mind, and the training of youth  according to the meth-
ods most akin to human activity, will be the object—a school,
normal by its intellectual  procedures, central by the position it
will occupy between exceptional and common schools ; in which
the principles will be looked for as  lovingly as  individual pu-
pils are in others ; where questions, more than children, will be
treated. 
44
NEW FACTS AND REMARKS.
  This necessity of.the  situation—for, if these institutions  do
not progress, they will retrograde—demands the selection of a
suitable place among scientific surroundings ; the direction of
a man who understands  the philosophy of that labor, the selec-
tion of microscopists, anatomists, psychologists, young  medical
men eager for study, devoted women ready to teach, to nurse,
and to acquire the capacities so much wanted in other schools.
With this force at command, there will be treated, besides the
questions directly relating to idiocy and medicine, those which
touch society through education.   It is not a minute too  soon.
  From all the points of the compass, steam and electricity ac-
cumulate men and ideas on this continent that will soon be, for
good or evil, the new world ; new for evil if the comers invade
us, not by the sword, but by their  low spirit of submission to
Eastern or Western bonzes ;  new for good, if  we  are ready,
with a powerful physiological system of education, to assimilate
them, women, men, children, of all races and colors, to our unity
find independence.
  Now that the holiness of ignorance and submission has been
proclaimed as the fundamental dogma of education at the an-
tipodes of humanity, let us physicians, help to build  the pro-
gramme  of physiological education, already sketched in the
school for idiots.   Science will have once more asserted its
social powers, and shown that all ideas arc  sisters  in  God,
which tend to scientific  and religious unity. 
PRESCRIPTION   AND  CLINIC  RECORD.
The Pocket-Book of every Careful and Progressive Physician.
                      Its  Object.
  1.—To show a physician daily what he does, and how every
one of his patients does.
  2.—To  give more precision and certainty to prescriptions
by writing them twice—once  for keeping, and  once  for  the
apothecary.
  3.—To  substitute, more and more, positivism for conjecture
in diagnosis and prognosis.
  4.—To record phenomena on the spot in no time, and keep
their series in sight.
  5.—To  treat complex or  protracted  cases with scientific
unity of plan.
  6.—To enable a physician to continue, with perfect  knowl-
edge, the  treatment of the case of a confrere, absent or sick.
  7.—To measure mathematically the vital forces at any given
time ; also the  effects of electricity and tetanic remedies on
the principal functions.
  8.—To keep physicians posted on  the use of improved in-
struments of medical diagnosis, as surgeons generally are in
regard to those of their art.
  9.—To give the most minute details of their practice an in-
disputable authenticity in the courts of justice.
   10.—To sum up, at any time, their business by the  number
of Records used ; each containing one  hundred prescription
 pages.
   11.—It is of convenient size for the pocket, bound in flexible
muslin covers, and printed, with tables  and illustrations, on a
 fine quality of bank-note paper.
    Price, 50 Cents alsingle copy,  three for One Dollar.
 FOR  SALE  BY W. WOOD & CO., PUBLISHERS, 61 WALKER STREET,
  NEW YORK, AND AT ALL WHOLESALE DRUGGISTS, MEDICAL BOOK-
          SELLERS, AND SURGICAL INSTRUMENT MAKERS. 
„ v Respirations								Pulse-beats per minute. >									_, Decrees of Fahrenheit.											5 o >> b s> 2 »n Ol <»> Qo <o	1 1 o •n <! 2	
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From the Prescription and Clinic Record.—One of fifteen diagrams illustrating the practice of
                                 positive observation. 
Table of Observations during the  Use of  Electricity,

                  Strychnine, etc., etc.
    * Also the Sphygmography of the right and left radial artery, taken
once or often.
    t Measured on the Dynamometer of Mathieu.
    t Measured on a swing fronting a vertical spring-board, alternately
pressed by the right and left foot.
    § Or other points of observation.
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        IDIOCY,

                   AND

             ITS TREATMENT

                  BT THK


PHYSIOLOGICAL  METHOD.

                   ■BY

          EDWARD SEGUIN,  M. D.

 In. one handsome octavo volume of 457 pages, neatly
              bound in muslin.

        Price, $5, by mafl, free of postage.
  [This is the classical treatise on the matter. With it the
present pamphlet, New Facts and Remarks on Idiocy, will be
Bent, without extra charge, to those who will ask for both, at]

     WM. WOOD &  CO., Publishers,
          61 Walker Street, New York, 
77
r,     n e w                     1 / y
FACTS  AND  REMARKS
CONCERlftNG
IDIOCY,
BEING A LECTURE DELIVERED BEFORE THE NEW YORK MEDICAL
              JOURNAL ASSOCIATION,
October 15, 1869.
BY
EDWARD SEGUIN, M. D.
            NEW YORK:

WM. WOOD & CO., PUBLISHERS, 61 WALKER STREET.

               1870. 
 
 
I 
 
 
 



MEDICINE

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