25.

DELINQUENCY WAS INCREASING all over the city, particularly among girls. The editor of Social Health was of the opinion it was due to the inevitable lowering of standards in war time. Justice Edward Starr of the Juvenile Court wondered, bewildered, whether it wasn’t the girls’ youth and foolish innocence that made them so susceptible to unscrupulous, lecherous men.

Dr. MacMurchy, at once concerned, urged Dr. Clarke to reopen his Clinic, only this time linking it to the Juvenile Court. Such a clinic would provide a proper, full, psychiatric study of delinquents. She was, of course, aware of the work of Dr. Charles Goring, the British psychiatrist and medical officer in the English prisons who had written The English Criminal, in which he had urged for the supervision of the unfit “in order to regulate procreation.” And so, in 1914, the Social Service Clinic — Clarke’s preference was “Toronto Psychiatric Clinic” — opened in the basement of the Toronto General Hospital.

It was a resounding success from the start. In the first year alone the Clinic examined over a hundred aments and ten murderers, enthused Dr. Clarke. Dr. Clarence Hincks and Dr. O. C. J. Withrow, young physicians at the Juvenile Court, offered their services without pay one day a week — fine young men. (Dr. Withrow had graduated from the University of Toronto and practised medicine in Thunder Bay. Dr. Hincks’ father was a Methodist minister.)

Young Dr. Hincks had himself suffered from a depressive malady that had hit him out of the blue in university, he confided; he had been rendered immobile on his bed for six weeks. An ideal person, then, who could bring to the Clinic a special understanding of those suffering from mental distress.

As well, Dr. William Bott and Dr. E. J. Pratt (later a famed poet) and a Mr. Freeman set up a Psychology Department at the University of Toronto to help from a psychological aspect. Soon Clinic days had to be upped to two, then three times per week.

The very latest scientific methods were adopted. Mr. Alfred Binet, Director of the Sorbonne Laboratory of Experimental Psychology, a dapper Parisian who wore pince-nez on his nose and had a pointed moustache, had published the first “metrical scales of intelligence” in 1905, along with colleague Theodore Simon. This had been at the request of the French Education Department to identify children who were slow learners in school. The Binet-Simon test had been translated into English and revised for North America by Dr. Henry Goddard, a staunch eugenicist and Director of the new research laboratory at the Vineland Training School for Feeble-Minded Boys and Girls in New Jersey. He had just published an important book, The Menace of Mental Deficiency from the Standpoint of Heredity, by the Vineland New Jersey Training School, absolutely essential reading. Dr. MacMurchy had gone to New Jersey at once in 1911 to learn how to administer the test under the direction of Dr. Goddard himself and Dr. Walter Cornell, Chief Medical Inspector for Philadelphia’s Public Schools. The test included thirty items designed for children aged three to twelve, arranged in order of difficulty; for example, naming objects in pictures, repeating spoken digits, or defining “common words,” etc. (“common,” that is, in the vocabulary of most nice, educated, middle-class children, something Dr. MacMurchy only sensed rather than gave word to.) But Mr. Binet had also introduced the exciting concept of “mental age,” which she understood to mean that if a sixteen-year-old passed the test at a ten-year-old level, he was said to have a corresponding “mental age” of ten and to be deemed “feeble-minded.”

There was a flurry of concern at the Clinic. For the purpose of Binet’s tests had been to help classify the levels of retarded children in Paris in order to provide them with special classes so as to keep them in the school system. Binet asserted that even the intelligence of a feeble-minded child could improve with appropriate teaching, and that one’s environment affected performance, openly challenging Galton’s claim that intelligence was biologically predetermined for life. He had actually called Sir Francis a “brutal pessimist.”

Dr. MacMurchy hesitated. It was one of those moments in time and she knew it. She admitted cautiously that the treatment and training of the feeble-minded indeed “belonged properly under education.” But diagnosis had always been the prerogative of medicine. Anthropometry, the identification of stigmata, was primary to any examination of a mental defective, she insisted. Such stigmata as the size of a patient’s cranium (phrenology), the shape of the nose and eyes, and any abnormalities of the ears and tongue could only be ascertained only by a trained physician, she averred. Every professional knew that such visible abnormalities were more common in the feeble-minded. The lower the grade of mental defectiveness, the more bodily signs or stigmata were present, and that was the guideline, said Dr. MacMurchy, who believed in calling a spade a spade. German cellular biologist August Weismann had stated that no amount of good environment could offset the germplasm that passed on through heredity from generation to generation. What further proof was needed? She personally favoured a variety of tests, including the measurement of the skull for brain capacity.

Now this Mr. Binet and his “educationalists” were claiming that anthropometry, or anthropomorphy, the skill of detecting stigmata, should take “second place” in the diagnosis of the feeble-minded. He was obviously intent on replacing physicians and psychiatrists with psychologists in the schools. That was the danger.

Dr. MacMurchy decided to throw her energies behind her colleagues, for the very future of psychiatry — a relatively budding profession — was at stake, as well as the importance of institutions like Orillia. And so diagnosis and treatment (including who should go to an asylum) remained the mandate of the medical profession, affecting the outcome for the mentally retarded in Ontario for the next half a century, if she but knew. The “feeble-minded” were to remain firmly under the governance of the Ministry of Health until the 1970s.

But there was no denying the precision of the new tests. There was even an equation. William Stern, a psychologist in Germany, had devised in 1910 a ratio of mental age to chronological age times one hundred, indicating “intelligence quotient,” or “I.Q.”:

I.Q. = mental age x 100 = chronological age

Here was a powerful tool for classifying delinquents. Under Dr. Beaton, the old classification of 1881 had simply cited “Deaf Mutes,” “Congenital Idiots,” “Epileptics,” “Helpless Cripples,” “Dements (lunatics),” and “Males and Females Capable of Work.” Now, Dr. Lewis M. Terman, Professor of Psychology at Stanford University and a eugenicist, did his own revision of the test in 1916, stressing intelligence quotient and adding ninety-two items, including general knowledge questions such as: “Who was Ghengis Khan?” and “What is the boiling point of water?” Terman’s The Measurement of Intelligence was soon accepted throughout North America and the Stanford-Binet test became standard, acknowledged Dr. MacMurchy. Indeed, Dr. Hincks was the first to apply it in the Toronto public schools, concerned about the “supra-normals.” Gifted children needed attention as much, if not more, than the feeble-minded in order to produce adults like Dr. Clarke (a brilliant man, thought Hincks, from fine lineage — Dr. Clarke’s father, Charles Clarke of Elora, had been the Honourable Lieutenant-General, member of the Legislature and Speaker of the House in his time).

With the aid of the tests, “Idiots” and “Imbeciles” were now specifically categorized as “below 50 I.Q.,” a useful dividing line, noted Dr. MacMurchy. But there was also an important new “borderline” group of defectives, hitherto unsuspected, defined by Dr. Goddard himself at Vineland. These were the “Moron” and “Half-Morons,” a term taken from the Greek word moronia, meaning “foolish.” The problem was they had no recognizable stigmata. They tested as not quite normal, but not feeble-minded, either.

The new classification system left one in little doubt:

TERM I.Q.

Idiot below 20 or 25

Imbecile 20-50

Moron 50-70 or 75

Dull Normal 80-90

It was generally agreed that an I.Q. of 70, or a “mental age” of twelve, was the upper limit of feeble-mindedness. The “Moron” females, in particular, presented the greatest problem since they lacked stigmata, the vital physical signs of defect and so often appeared to the unsuspecting public as “normal,” even attractive. Canadian law allowed for only Idiots and Imbeciles to be institutionalized, but these ones also needed to be detained in Houses of Refuge or put away permanently in Orillia. Dr. Goddard favoured segregated “farm colonies” for them.

Dr. Martin Barr, Chief Physician at the Pennsylvania Training School for the Feeble-Minded at Elwyn, warned that the “Moral Imbecile” was the most dangerous class of defectives, the male being a sexual pervert “in filthy practices utterly shameless.”

The girls also never ceased to shock. They came flouncing through the Clinic from the Juvenile Court dressed in the latest wartime fashions: bobbed hair, shortened skirts, and dropped waists. Of course, they had not a brain in their heads, noted Dr. Clarke.

“Maggie,” for instance, was a degenerate from London. She had spent all her wages on Scotch whisky and gin. Dr. Clarke computed that she had already cost the province $350 per annum. Out west, a “Jenny Smith”— touted to be “dangerous as dynamite” — had to be put in an institution at once, where, with the correct supervision, she was happy and under control.

One could go on and on. “Maria P.,” eighteen, had not even known the name of Lake Ontario, nor had she even known there was a lake at Toronto. Immoral from an early age, she had run away from home. Of course, the fact that she had had “sexual relations” with her father from the age of eleven was but part and parcel of this sort’s natural proclivities. She had simply gone on to further immorality, and was a menace to the whole community. She belonged in the Jail Farm in Richmond Hill. And then there was “Betsy,” a pretty little butterfly with an undeveloped brain flitting about and sipping at every vice, he wrote. She had left school at thirteen. Like most of her kind, she frequented dance halls, nickelodeons, and Shea’s burlesque on King Street: “I was an usher in one of them Vaudevilles.” Admittedly, Dr. Hincks himself had been known to enjoy an evening at Shea’s in his youth, after a long stint on the wards, no doubt, understandable. “Betsy” had had numerous factory jobs, where she had got “chocolate poisonin’.” She had claimed that it got “under the nails.” “It goes all through your body,” she had confided casually, unaware surely of the implication of her words so lightly given. The point was, “Betsy” had no sense of morality — sex was simply an incident of no importance.

Finally, there was “Peggy,” another low-class Irish immigrant from the bogs, only twenty-two. “Her immoralities are many.” She’d not stuck at any job, either. After being married at nineteen, and having a baby who had died “mysteriously” (probably of syphilis), she had spent her weekends with what she called a “sporty gentleman,” becoming pregnant again. Now she and her new baby both had syphilis. Dr. MacMurchy knew better than most the symptoms of these babies with their horrifying lesions, scarred, depressed noses, and Hutchinson’s teeth. But “Peggy” had scored at “age twelve” level on the Stanford-Binet Test and was, therefore, classified as “Normal.”

Dr. Clarke hesitated, flummoxed. It was obvious “Peggy,” a high-grade moron, must be classified as a “Moral Defective,” a category not exactly on any Binet scale but one that it was surely their duty to define so that she could be put away. Dr. MacMurchy was not even sure it was a legal medical category, for “moral” did not have any definitive physical stigmata.

Dr. Withrow, who had been overseas working with venereal diseases at the University of Toronto Overseas Field Hospital No. 4, organized by Dr. Clarke himself during the war, enthused, however, on his return that the Clinic was doing excellent work with these girls. His Third Annual Report of Toronto General Hospital Social Service Department stressed:

…Two hundred and seventy cases have passed through our hands in nine months and twenty-nine of these have been placed in institutions where they will be well cared for and trained to a degree, and in some instances taken from a community to which they have been a menace. We are hoping great things from this clinic.

Miss Jane Grant, Head Social Worker at the Toronto General Hospital, who had initially referred to Dr. Clarke’s Clinic as a “nut” place, now declared: “Eliminate the feeble-minded and the insane from our communities, and all social work would be a joy!” However, she also cried in a heartfelt way, “How can there be a sight of beauty in the mind of a child whose vision is bounded by bare walls, ash heaps, garbage piles, filth, and grime?” This surely smacked of radicalism, Dr. Clarke frowned. He had arranged for classes two afternoons a week and evening lectures every Thursday at the Clinic for Miss Grant’s students and for young nurses-in-training to gain first-hand knowledge of the feeble-minded and realize what the profession was up against.

The fact was, he had come to realize, that well-meaning but deluded social workers like Miss Grant often only exacerbated a situation. They would find a family, dirty and unkept, the children half-naked and uncared for, the house destitute, and, with commendable zeal, proceed to remedy the conditions. Clothes would be bought, fuel supplied, and the family put “on a new footing.” Useless, of course. The old situation was doomed to repeat itself due to the feeble-mindedness of the parents.

As Rev. S. W. Dean, noted Methodist preacher in the city put it: “Some may be convinced that the sty makes the pig. There can be no question but that the pig makes the sty.”

Dr. Clarke’s daughter, Emma de Veber Clarke — Miss E. de V. to colleagues — agreed. She stood erect in a shaft of sunlight in the small basement of the Clinic, stiff in her nurse’s uniform, her hair drawn back under its tight little cap. Ever loyal to her father, she never doubted the theory of heredity and the inherent feeble-mindedness of most incorrigibles.

Nevertheless, determined Miss Grant set out with her Social Work students from the university to identify and reform the poor south of Bloor Street. Down Parliament Street and across Shuter Street to that terrible area of Irish slum immigrants (where some were too frightened to walk) and Moss Park, and then west to St. John’s Ward, which spread from Eaton’s factories down to crowded, innocuous Queen Street and east to Bay Street, another foul slum. In this they were not alone. The deaconesses of the Methodist church — valuable, upright ladies — were conducting surveys of their own to root out degeneracy and moral turpitude.

Young Miss Alice Chown, who had also thrown away her corsets, insisted that church women should model themselves on social workers. Her father, Rev. S. D. Chown, believed the Methodist church could lead Canada in the new Social Science. The Deaconess Training School should no longer simply provide charity for the poor but encourage self-sufficiency in these people. David Archibald, chief of police, complained that outdoor relief money was not going to the deserving poor but to shiftless paupers only encouraging pauperism, while the Ontario Commission on Unemployment noted that vagrants thrived on soup kitchens.

And so, with a certain fascination did the deaconesses and lady volunteers venture into the slum, its overcrowding implicit with sexuality. Rev. S. W. Dean of the Fred Victor Mission had warned that the slum was the haunt of the most “unspeakable crime of incest and degradation.” The deaconesses were intent on amassing data in a clinical, objective way, of the “Betsys” and “Marias” and the degraded babies they gave birth to. There were cases right then in the Burnside lying-in ward linked to the Toronto General Hospital; Dr. Clarke made it his business to check regularly on such girls giving birth.

Dr. Charles Hastings, Toronto’s own Medical Officer of Health, had identified six main slums in Toronto in his 1911 Report on the conditions of the poor that included “The Ward,” which he cited as a “moral contagion,” and covered, amongst others, Queen Street from Bathurst to Bellwoods, Parliament Street to the Don River and Eastern Avenue. He further noted the “atmosphere of physical and moral rottenness” that pervaded the slums of all large cities. He was concerned in particular about the number of outdoor privies that still existed reeking with stench, which, of course, also contributed to Toronto’s contaminated milk. A Milk Act had finally been passed at the fervent urging of Dr. MacMurchy, and, in 1912, inspectors had dumped 900 gallons of unpasteurized milk down the city sewer. Now Dr. Hastings wanted these privies abolished by law. (The social workers and deaconesses plugged their noses as they plodded through.) It certainly was not afternoon tea in the genteel drawing rooms of Rosedale, reciting Charlotte Jarvis’ poetry, Leaves From Rosedale: “Rosedale the fair and favoured…” Miss Chown insisted that every aspect of the lives of the poor be minutely recorded. “The girl receiving insufficient pay would also be studied,” she promised.

There was but one small voice of objection from a certain “Mrs. Morrison,” a Methodist out in Saskatchewan who had responded in the Christian Guardian: “…Does the girl receiving insufficient pay wish to be studied? Would Alice A. Chown wish to be studied herself? Would you? Would I?”

Enthused nevertheless, the excellent ladies of the Social Work and the National Welfare Bureau organized a National Welfare Exhibit in Toronto in 1916. Citizens and government officials could now view for themselves how slum dwellers lived 365 days a year.

An exact replica of an actual slum house was put together. The Salvation Army Corps provided real furniture taken from slum dwellers’ houses. It was not mentioned how they explained to the bewildered families why their furniture was being carried away and it was doubtful if the poor were invited to visit the Exhibit about themselves. What might they have thought of their filthy mattresses with their broken springs, half-chopped sofas, and incestuous iron beds on display before the ladies and gentlemen of Toronto?

As well, there had been a dramatic sketch called “Presenting Some of the Problems of Feeble-mindedness,” written by one of the members of the new Advisory Committee on the Care of Mental Defectives in Toronto which included Mrs. Huestis, wealthy philanthropist, and Dr. MacMurchy as secretary. The Toronto Sunday World had reported, “A Novel Exhibit to Portray Evils of Feeble-Mindedness — truths thus strikingly presented.”

To acknowledge the influence of heredity, there had been a display of the genealogy of the Kallikak family created by Dr. Goddard in Vineland, a potent reminder of what happened when the feeble-minded were left to reproduce their own kind. One but thought of the infamous Jukes family, which had 1,258 descendants from the original five mentally deficient Juke sisters, still living in 1916. The economic damage upon the State of New York by the Jukes sisters’ progeny over 75 years, as everyone knew, had been reckoned at more than $1,300,000, to say nothing of the diseases they had helped to spread.

Dr. Clarke glowed. There had been on display samples from the files of nearly one thousand cases that had passed through the Toronto Psychiatric Clinic, by now better known as the “Feeble-Minded Clinic.” Citizens of Toronto had read for themselves what was going on in their city. The life stories of “Betsy” and “Peggy” and “Maria” were pinned up for all to see: Peggy’s infidelities, Maria’s incestuous relations, with nary a thought for patient confidentiality.

The success of the Exhibit was unprecedented. “Toronto is roused at last!” exulted Dr. Hincks. “The terrible menace of the feeble-minded has shocked the community.” It was time to press the government.

Of course, the fact that Dr. MacMurchy had once called the conservative government “stupid and absurd” and written in her Tenth Annual Report for 1915: “Are we doing our best for the feeble-minded? Answer, ‘No, certainly not’,” was not exactly guaranteed to endear her to Premier Hearst.

Nevertheless, in her imperious way, her grey hair drawn up in a bun, her monocle glinting, she instigated the petition of the Canadian Conference of Charities and Corrections to Prime Minister Robert Borden and Other Members of the Governments of Canada:

We the undersigned citizens of Canada realizing the great menace that the feeble-minded are to the moral and social life of our communities…. Urge the appointment of a Dominion Commission to study and report upon the provision needed for the country at large to control this menace, and we would even support direct taxation to secure adequate provision for these unfortunates. And your petitioners will ever pray.

First signature on the list: Bishop Plumptre of St. James Anglican Cathedral, Toronto.

The demands had been extensive — laundry colonies, a registry of all mental defectives in the province, a psychopathic hospital, reform of the Refuge Act. Dr. Clarke had estimated the number of defectives in the province as 7,000, but added that, “Toronto alone must possess more defectives than that.” The Industrial House of Refuge on Belmont Street provided custody for nearly a hundred feeble-minded girls and women, and The Haven for seventy-five, a considerable proportion being unmarried mothers. Dr. MacMurchy wanted these girls detained indefinitely, and the government responsible for morons over sixteen years of age. Like her American colleague, Dr. Goddard, she favoured a special “farm colony” to be built specifically for high grades somewhere on the outskirts of Toronto — here Dr. MacMurchy was vague — at a cost of $200,000, maintenance to be shared between the province and the city. The high-grade feeble-minded, many of whom were almost normal in intelligence though of the lowest morals, would provide much of the labour, making the institution self-sufficient. She envisaged small cottages on the “family plan,” fifteen inmates to a “family” with a mother figure in charge. The male and female cottages were to be far apart from each other, on different parts of the grounds, of course.

But Premier Hearst was cautious. It seemed that thousands of so-called feeble-minded individuals who apparently were an even greater menace after age twenty-one, would be turned loose on the city and become the financial responsibility of the province.

He knew already from Mr. Downey, the Superintendent at the Orillia Hospital for the Feeble-Minded, from his Annual Report of 1913, that the institution needed the labour of such high-grade patients to keep down costs. Miss Marion Harvie, head teacher, had noted that many of the girls sent by the Children’s Aid Society of Toronto were of normal intelligence; they had just come from poor or bad homes. Indeed, the Orillia Hospital, like the mental asylums, relied extensively on patient labour to remain viable, especially since paying patients were never more than twelve percent of the population. High-grade patients helped with labour, keeping down the cost of hiring help. They even made shoes and clothing, profitable ventures that helped keep Orillia afloat. What was needed, Mr. Downey said artfully, was not the expense of another institution in Toronto, but a farm colony on the grounds of Orillia itself, and so save further and unnecessary costs. He had hinted of Clarke and MacMurchy: “There are certain people who do not appreciate what we are doing here in Orillia.”

And so Premier Hearst hedged, promising to “look into the matter” by appointing a one-man Royal Commission under the aegis of the Hon. Frank Egerton Hodgins.

“Picayune!” cried Dr. MacMurchy.

Dr. Clarke, equally incensed, joined the attack — comrades together — accusing the Hearst government of ineptitude, of doing nothing for the feeble-minded. There was only Orillia, he confided to Mr. Newton Rowell, leader of the Liberal Opposition, which was always overcrowded. Mr. Downey was simply incompetent to cope with the special type of high grades they had in mind.

“No one objects particularly to Mr. Downey, but his reign at Orillia has been little better than a joke,” Dr. Clarke stormed. Mr. Downey did not offer one thing better than custodial care of a number of idiots and imbeciles. He had no medical degree; the only superintendent of Orillia who was not a physician, Dr. Clarke rounded indignantly; he was a mere former newspaperman and political appointee (friend of Mr. Hanna, the Provincial Secretary, as everyone knew). Motion overturned.

Rumours the government was planning to bring out a Mother’s Allowance, as in the province of Manitoba, was even more outrageous. Mothers’ allowances only encouraged imbeciles to propagate themselves all the more, promoting the survival of the unfittest, snarled Dr. Clarke. “This government lacks grasp, vision, imagination, and common sense!” to the delight of Mr. Rowell.

There was uproar in the Legislature.

It had soon been obvious that the Honourable Frank Egerton Hodgins’ Report on the Care and Control of the Feeble-Minded and Mentally Deficient in 1919 was but a ploy to put them off and appear as if the government was doing something. Though the Honourable Hodgins admittedly expressed sympathy for their cause (he had conferred with both Dr. MacMurchy and Dr. Clarke on the recommendations, as well as influential Dr. Fernald of the Massachusetts School for Idiots the Feeble-Minded Youth, agreeing that pregnant unmarried girls and other “dregs” of society should be institutionalized), nothing concrete materialized. No farm colony, no provincial survey or registration of the feeble-minded and lunatics, no Board of Control to manage the financial aspect of the planned Colony and oversee the institutionalization of the morons.

At least the old Females Refuge Act of 1913 was finally reformed to include the feeble-minded. The new Act allowed physicians not only to certify a woman as “feeble-minded” and have her detained indefinitely beyond the expiry of her sentence, but transferred to a training school, or a reformatory like the Andrew Mercer Reformatory for Females on King Street Toronto, or Orillia, as the physician so deemed. Dr. Hincks, in particular, was delighted. Writing in the Canadian Journal of Mental Hygiene, he reminded readers that mental defectives were people afflicted with stunted brain development, urging: “It is necessary to control the sex lives of these classes.”

But the battle was far from over. Despite his ongoing cyclothymic attacks of depression and hypomanic frenzy, Dr. Hincks or “Hinksey,” as he was known, had founded the Canadian National Committee for Mental Hygiene (CNCMH). It occurred after a miraculous meeting in a home in Rosedale, Toronto, in 1918 with an American, Mr. Clifford Beers, author of A Mind That Found Itself. A former mental patient, Mr. Beers had once tried to commit suicide by throwing himself from the window of his three-storey house while in a severe depression, and had subsequently founded the National Committee for Mental Hygiene in Connecticut.

With Beers’ support, Hincks resolved to found a similar movement in Canada, the Canadian National Committee for Mental Hygiene (CNCMH). Dr. Hincks’ aims for CNCMH included the fight against crime, prostitution, unemployment, juvenile delinquency, moral contamination in primary schools, illegitimacy, military insubordination, pauperism, alcoholism, unfit families, and lax immigration laws that allowed into the country the rag-tags of Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean basin, Jews from the ghettoes of Poland (60,000 alone in Toronto), the Chinese, the Irish, and other undesirables. The CNCMH wanted proper medical inspections at ports of entry to detect lunacy, idiocy, epilepsy, and those carrying contagious diseases such as tuberculosis (and other loathsome diseases).

Excited, Dr. Clarke resigned at once from the Toronto General Hospital to take over as Director of the new venture. Dr. MacMurchy, Dr. Eric Clarke (Dr. Clarke’s son, a psychiatrist like his father), Dr. Withrow, Bishop Plumptre at the Anglican Cathedral, Prof. Bott, Judge Mott of the Juvenile Court, Dr. Hastings (Medical Officer of Health), were amongst the members, as well as Inspector Gregory from the police department, and Miss Lucy Brooking, Superintendent of the Alexandra Industrial School for Girls out on Kingston Road. Miss Brooking claimed that most of the girls there were feeble-minded, “otherwise they would not be delinquent,” she stressed.

A special committee dealing with mental defectives was struck, consisting of the best minds of the city. The Chairman, Dr. Hastings; the Secretary, Prof. Bott.

The first task of the new committee: to undertake a survey of the mental hospitals across the country, at the request of seven provinces, including Manitoba and Nova Scotia. It was conducted by Dr. Clarke and Dr. Hincks with the aid of capable, kind Miss Marjorie Keyes. Miss Keyes had taken over as head nurse at the Clinic in the absence of Miss E. de V. Clarke during the war. She and Dr. Hincks soon became inseparable (Dr. Clarke did not wish to think how inseparable), touring the provinces together. “Marjorie has been in more asylums than any woman in Canada!” Dr. Hincks liked to quip. In the asylum in St. John’s, New Brunswick, they found inmates put to bed in coffin-like boxes with hay at the bottom and slats on top, all boxes except two locked at night. In Edmonton, Alberta, mentally defective children were rolled in long strips of cotton at bedtime, their arms and legs bound, and then piled on a shelf for the night in an asylum. In Nova Scotia, the government had requested a survey of one hundred mentally defective families. The CNCMH study had found that when a father was mentally defective and the mother normal, most of the children were normal in intelligence, but if instead the mother was defective, the children would likely be mentally defective too.

Dr. Hincks’ survey of New Westminster Public Hospital for the Insane in December of 1918, and 1919, stressed that the feeble-minded contributed to the province’s crime, poverty, and prostitution. Sterilization would be a cheaper, more humane method of restricting procreation. On a visit to Orillia in 1921, Miss Keyes was to report seeing a large room full of commode chairs with helpless inmates of the lowest intelligence tied in them all day. What more was needed to alert the Ontario government?

“Why haven’t we got results?” Dr. Hincks stormed at the Social Welfare Congress in January of 1919, not unlike the great Dr. MacMurchy herself. “Because I take it that reforms cost money!”

The new Drury government of the United Farmers Party of Ontario, installed in November of 1919, was suspicious of the CNCMH and “unfeeling,” Dr. Hincks complained. “The government says ‘Don’t knock your province.’ Why, we have enough facts to blow up the Parliament buildings!”

Meanwhile, in Orillia, Mr. Downey, the Superintendent, smiled to himself. He was a suave, round-faced, middle-aged man with baby blue eyes, a blond moustache, and wavy hair parted down the middle. He loved the institution and had grown fond of the patients. “The three years I have spent here have been the happiest of my life!” he had written warmly in a little article for the Bulletin of the Ontario Hospital called “Among The Children” (which included 60 middle-aged women). “The prevailing opinion among those who have never visited the Hospital for the Feeble-Minded,” he observed in an amiable way, “is that it is a very dreary place to live and that work among its population is always disagreeable.”

There were annual picnics on the grounds for the patients, with cake and lemonade, he assured his readers, whom of course included Dr. MacMurchy and Dr. Clarke. Once a week a large launch took patients and staff for a boat ride and everyone was accordingly happy. There were moving pictures in the Amusement Hall in winter.

He especially loved the “high-grade” defectives, bright little girls “like little sheafs of sunshine in the ward,” he wrote. These same little bright ones had actually put on a cantata, “Fairies of the Season,” which had occupied some fifty minutes in the annual Christmas concert and had intricate movements and exacting choral numbers. Premier Hearst himself, a visitor at the event, had remarked that, “the high level of performance of these ones would be a credit to children possessing all their faculties.” No one seemed to wonder why such children were in Orillia in the first place.

Indeed, their gifts were useful in other ways, for the brighter ones often acted as “mothers” to the younger children in the wards. They even made clothes for their “children.” Miss Hale, one of the teachers at the time, noted they often took better care of them than their own real mothers.

Not all patients were at this level, however. There were certain inmates, the “loathsome ones,” who had to be kept separate, confined to special wards. Mr. Downey cut education for these ones (why waste the money?). He knew he was there to cut costs for the government, and he did. These low-grade idiots were seldom seen. Miss Harvie, head teacher, observed privately that she had never seen the inside of the buildings where they were kept, a certain secrecy surrounding them. Even Dr. Beaton had once remarked, sadly, of those “of loathsome visage” who had had to be kept out of sight lest they shock people: “…We have idiocy in all its varied phases, from the semi-bright and confiding child, to the filthy and repulsive adult, without one gleam of intelligence, in whom the soul is indeed locked up, as if in an iron safe.”

Of course, there would always be some dissension among patients in an institution, observed Mr. Downey. It was only natural to expect fighting among sixty middle-aged women enclosed in a senior ward. They had their feuds and their scraps. Some were given to violent outbursts that sorely taxed the patience of the nurses, but any group of middle-aged women, he defended, placed together in one ward in an institution, expected to sleep in the same dormitory, dress in the same bathroom, eat in the same dining room, lounge in the same living room, work and play together, would end up, he wrote, in a “real old-fashioned hair-pulling match.”

But, on the whole, Orillia was a happy, self-productive place. Mr. Downey recalled Miss Nash’s observation of the feeble-minded in Dr. Beaton’s time in the Asylum for Idiots that: “their worries are few and fleeting.… All we have to do is keep them safe and happy in their world.”