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.

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    remember that idiocy, in the view of those who best under¬ stand its nature, is to be looked upon as the result of an imperfect physical organization so shutting up the soul within its material envelope that it can neither receive impressions from surrounding objects nor make its own power felt upon the external world. Sometimes, as in cases of hydro¬ cephalus, the senses may be active, and the brain itself in fault, unable to register the impressions sent to it; in others, an active brain may be cut off from all communication with outward things through dull and blunted senses, and through the deadness of the great nervous system, whose fibres are the conductors and agents of motion and sensation. In either case, remarks Seguin, one result follows, isolation, incapacity; or, in other words, that absence of spontaneity which seems the distinguishing characteristic of idiocy. Dr. Down says, ‘Out of 276 children at one time under my care, 118 of them were dumb from the absence of mental power to co-ordinate the vital mechanism of speech into an aptitude for articulate sounds/ In its most complete manifestations, or what is in these books called ‘ profound idiocy,’ the human being is so wanting in sensation and so utterly deficient in will as scarcely to rise above vegetative existence, respiration and digestion being the only acting functions. This state is always attended with great bodily weakness; it is often induced by repeated and frequent attacks of epilepsy, whose recurrence keeps the sufferer physically at too low a point to be raised by any leverage, however skilful, so that these cases are hopeless for the instructor. Beings of this class would perish with hunger in the very midst of food if they were not fed as infants are
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