AP Story - Mass Sterilization!

By Associated Press, 11/29/2002 12:31

It was what one of the darkest chapters in Massachusetts' treatment of its sick and disabled.

In the 1890s, according to records obtained by Boston Magazine, at least 26 patients at a state hospital for epileptics in Palmer many of them boys 14- and 15-years-old were sterilized by having their testicles cut off.

Everett Flood, then superintendent of the state institution that later became the Monson Developmental Center, reported his gruesome surgeries in a letter to Martin Barr, president of the American Association for the Study of Feebleness, the magazine said.

Flood told Barr, an advocate of the notion that children should be sterilized upon being declared defective to preserve the race, that the patients were either epileptic or showed signs of compulsive stealing, masturbation or ''solitary behavior.''

Although Massachusetts was never among the states that endorsed sterilization, state officials and eugenics advocates at Harvard University and other colleges were still promoting ''purification'' of the population nearly 40 years later, the magazine said.

In 1929, Ransom Greene, the superintendent of the Fernald State School in Waltham, which had been the nation's first residential facility for the retarded when it was launched in 1848, asked the director of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston to help him sterilize ''several high-grade defective girls.''

Frederic Washburn, the hospital director, declined saying his trustees and legal department found that the hospital's participation ''would be inadvisable.''

''It was a shameful period in the history of care and treatment of people with mental retardation,'' Gerald Morrissey, state commissioner of mental retardation said in a statement issued after the magazine article was published. ''In today's society, persons with disabilities are afforded dignity and respect as well as significant legal safeguards to prevent any violation of a person's basic human rights.''

The institutionalized weren't the only targets, the magazine said. The December issue of the magazine hit the stands earlier this past week.

In 1928, with the help of professors and students from Harvard, Smith College and the Massachusetts College of Agriculture, Leon Whitney, a Northampton dog breeder and secretary of the American Eugenics Society, launched a secret heredity study of the residents of two small rural communities in western Massachusetts: Shutesbury and Leverett.

Whitney got the cooperation of local doctors and school officials and the directors of state institutions, including Greene at Fernald, who secretly provided him with academic and medical records of the residents. He also checked tax bills and church attendance and administered what he claimed were ''mental tests'' that would ferret out ''hereditary defects,'' including pauperism, alcoholism, immorality and feeble-mindedness.

''Of course we do not want to make much noise about what we are doing because then we would not get the cooperation of the people,'' Whitney warned in letters, the magazine said. The residents were told only that the information was for a ''study of old families of Shutesbury and Leverett.''

Whitney later used the information in his book, ''The Case for Sterilization,'' calling the communities ''an example of the progress of degeneracy in this country.'' He sent a copy to Adolf Hitler and got a congratulatory note back, the magazine said.

It wasn't clear from the correspondence why Whitney set his sights on the two towns, said Welling Savo, who wrote the Boston Magazine article. However, they had come under the scrutiny of other eugenicists, she said. In 1912, one study described Shutesbury as ''so uniformly decadent that a normal comparison was lacking.''

She also found a 1916 masters' thesis at the Massachusetts College of Agriculture that concluded ''Whenever an example of decadence is sought, among the first names mentioned is this town.''

Shutesbury residents were both appalled and amused to learn of the study.

''Oh my God, that's outrageous,'' said Rebecca Torres, who serves on the Board of Selectmen. ''That's unbelievable.''

''It was chilling,'' said Roberta Hunting, whose father-in-law, Ward Hunting had been Shutesbury's Town Clerk from 1911 until 1961. She said the family, whose genealogy is included in Whitney's records, knew nothing about the study.

Still, Town Clerk Leslie Bracebridge said she couldn't help joking about it. ''It's so absurd,'' she said.