On the education of the imbecile / by Dora Greenwell.

  • Dora Greenwell
Date:
1869
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On the education of the imbecile / by Dora Greenwell. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    10/54 (page 10)
    h* 10 On the Education of the Imbecile. man, is in some degree sheathed and swathed in an organi¬ zation which literally renders him ‘ Incompetent to keep Heights which his soul is competent to win.’ But an idiot is one on whom this bodily organization has acted like the machinery of the iron shroud in the frightful mediaeval story : it has crippled and crushed his rational and intellectual being, which lies within it maimed even to death, inert and passive as the prey within the folds of the boa-constrictor. An idiot is one who is never strong enough to cast off the swaddling bands of infancy, and who lives bound round with them from head to foot, until he exchanges them for the cerecloths of the grave. Therefore there is no sight that our world, so full of sorrow¬ ful ones, can offer, so deeply tragic as that of idiocy. In¬ sanity itself is not so full of fearful suggestion, nor is its problem one of such intricate and overwhelming complica¬ tion. For the poor maniac has at least lived; he is one who has suffered the extremity of woe and loss, but who still retains something of the dignity of him ‘ who has had losses,’ of a being once responsible and intelligent, capable of feeling and inspiring love. He is now, in the expressive French phrase,’ an alien from his kind, cut off from the broad swift-flowing stream of human interests and sympa¬ thies, ‘he is desolate with all his company;’ but the idiot, as his very name implies, is isolated' and has ever been so; he is disinherited from his very birth—even from before it. He is a being disassociated from all around him, without