And Neither Have I Wings to Fly

Literary Nonfiction. The shocking true story of the institutionalization and abuse of children and adults with intellectual and physical handicaps in Canada's oldest provincial institution in Orillia, Ontario. Daisy Lumsden and her family were such victims, along with over ten thousand children, including infants, and adults with intellectual disabilities committed over the last century to the institution now known as Huronia Regional Centre, formerly the Asylum for Idiots and Feeble-Minded.

The time frame of the book, 1900-1966, covers the most controversial decades in its history, a time of over-crowding and abuses that reached a crux in the 1950s and 1960s when the inmate population was nearly 3000. Victims of the rising eugenic ideology of the early 1900s that infiltrated Canada from United States and Britain, advocating segregation and involuntary sterilization of the "feeble-minded," Daisy's family uneducated, ignorant, unemployed, incestuous, poor were easily identifiable as "feeble-minded" and "unfit," unwittingly caught up in a genetic "survival of the fittest." But who are the "unfit" in our society? And who decides?

Powerful expose of a part of Canadian history kept secret the book exposes the role of psychiatrists and leading eugenicists in Canada in the abuse of intellectual and physically handicapped children's civil rights in Canada. A true story, it is highly readable and includes full historical data, endnotes, historical sources, photographs, and a bibliography. Readers will experience what it is like being locked up in an institution through the first-hand experiences of heroine Daisy Lumsden and members of her family. Original patient records and psychiatrists reports are incorporated throughout the story providing integrity. The book brings to light a shameful part of Canada's history too long swept under the table.

Of note: A current $1-billion class-action lawsuit is underway against the government of Ontario and the institution for failure to provide proper care and protection for those living within its walls. This book is at the heart of it."