Abandoned to their fate

Covering a 100-year period in the history of the social policy and practice toward people with severe mental retardation, Abandoned to Their Fate looks at the lives of people once labeled "idiots," "hopeless," or "unteachable." Ferguson examines the problem of what he terms "chronicity," the definition of some of the disabled population as beyond successful treatment or training that would make them suitable for reentry into daily life. He argues that the construction of this hopeless population was necessary in order to demonstrate the success of new approaches to treatment. The government, physicians, and families faced the quandary of what to do with people categorized as "feebleminded." Those who failed to respond to education or treatment were institutionalized, kept isolated except for contact with others like themselves, and simply left to a fate of neglect and exclusion. This book centers on a typical facility in New York. The Rome State Custodial Asylum for Unteachable Idiots (later the Rome Developmental Center) adopted a system of "custodialism" that is representative of the pattern of care provided by most American institutions in the nineteenth and early twentieth cent