Muggivan School of Irish
Dance
Dorian Joye, Manager; muggivanrep@gmail.com
Address: 901 Veterans
Blvd. Ste.205
Metairie, LA 70005
Irish Fest:
John J. (JJ) Muggivan
(504-273-5877), Joni Muggivan (504-405-0622), Sean
Muggivan (504-259-1681), Patti Muggivan (504-481-1953), Jim Gunter (), Ashling McGrath ()
5800 Lafreniere Street
Metairie, Louisiana, USA
70003
This document is being
sent to:
Caroline Crawford,
Jerome Reilly and Jody Corcoran
The Sunday Independent
and other newspapers
All members of the Irish
Government
Some bishops of the
Catholic Church in Ireland
The following is a
collection of published material we will be using as we address and contrast
the significance of what appears to be a high survival rate of babies and
children in orphanages opened in the Irish Channel and elsewhere in New Orleans
from the mid-1840s forward. I (JJ Muggivan) commenced studying psychology at
Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio, Texas in 1969 and was very
fortunate to be studying in the heyday of the transition of what I now call
“bad psychology” to the period of the much improved psychology heralded in by
people like Harry Harlow with his animal studies and people like Bowlby who
based his study on the importance of the bonds between parents and children. This
was also the time when the horrors of separating small children from their
parents were being addressed more thoroughly.
When I first started
reading the story of the Tuam babies in the Irish news media I realized it was
a story that could easily be told as another horror story of the behavior of
Catholic Church clergy but, this time, with one additional feature. This
additional feature was the issue that nuns seemed to now be in the spotlight as
religious leaders causing the abuse and deaths of close to 800 babies under
their care from 1925 through 1961 in an orphanage in the town of Tuam in County
Galway, Ireland.
When I was enrolled at
Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio, Texas in the late 1960s and
early 1970s, I had already become aware of the issue of bad psychology – and
bad baby healthcare - being so universally practiced from the birth of
organized baby care and psychology from the 18th century through
present times. I confronted as soon as I became aware of the problem the taking
of uncared for children from their homes in Louisiana and placing them in homes
throughout the state of Texas long distances from their families. This practice
was stopped because of the work of many who saw its harmful effects. More
enlightened practices for the care of children were gradually made the norm but
the problem of the neglect of children continues to be with us.
Much is owed to people
identified in Chapter Two of Deborah Blum’s book Love at Goon Park and to people like Dr. Harry Harlow
and Dr. Bowlby. Our research on orphanages here in new Orleans since the Famine
Irish commenced arriving in the 19th century through the closure of
these orphanages is very much in its beginning stages but we expect the from
our preliminary surveys that the story is generally a good one and that nuns
(nurses, teachers, etc.) and women had much to do with what may be a very
positive story.
In the coming weeks,
months and years, this is a story the Muggivan
School of Irish Dance will be covering in much detail since this school has
adopted the story of the Irish as a story it will be telling for a long time to
come.
Meanwhile, we have
received much benefit already from three journalists with the Sunday
Independent, Caroline Crawford, Jerome Reilly, and Jody Corcoran for their
recent accounts of the Tuam orphanage. I was planning on presenting an account
of what was the state of the art in both medicine and psychology at the time
the Tuam Orphanage came into existence and I had planned to show that the application
of dangerous child care practices of the time had much to do with the orphanage
death rate. There may be examples from all over the world of orphanages having a
O% survival rate due to what Bowlby calls the early “breaking of affectional
bonds,” between children and their parents.
Crawford, Reilly, and
Corcoran may have given what might very well be the beginning of true story
much impetus in recent days. However, there is much more to the story that
needs to be told. The nuns in Tuam may have been practicing state of the art
nursing and medicine but may not have known that what medicine and psychology of
the time were promoting may have ensured an incredible death rate for babies
and children.
My account is far from
ready for a coherent presentation but I’m presenting what I have found so that
others who may be going in this direction already may be in a position to
exchange information as the story unfolds further.
JJ Muggivan
Permission has not yet
been properly obtained for the use of some of the material being used here.
Corrections will be made later. Stories from the news media and a chapter from
a book are being used in their entirety – or almost their entirety.
The Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home, St.
Mary's Mother and Baby Home,[13] or simply The Home, was a maternity home for unmarried mothers and their children
that operated between 1925 and 1961 in Tuam, Ireland. It was run by the Bon Secours religious order. From its construction
in the mid-19th century until the early 20th century, what became The
Home's building served as a workhouse for the poor.
In 2012, Catherine Corless, a local historian in the Tuam area, published an article
in a local historical journal about her research into the death records for 796
children, mostly toddlers and infants, who had died at The Home during
its years of operation. The recorded causes included tuberculosis, convulsions, measles, whooping cough, and influenza.[14] She believed that many of the children had been buried in
an area at the rear of the site that also included the facility's septic tank.[14]
Numerous news reports based on Corless's research were published
first by Irish and later by international media outlets in late May and early
June 2014, sparking outrage and prompting calls for an investigation.[15][16][17] The Irish government called it a "deeply
disturbing" revelation and immediately came under pressure from
international groups such as Amnesty International to launch an investigation.[18][19] However, Catherine Corless quickly responded that the
matter had "been widely misrepresented" in the media and her own
statements had been misquoted.[14]
The Irish police (Gardai) released a statement on 3 June: “These
are historical burials going back to famine times. There is no suggestion of
any impropriety and there is no garda investigation. Also, there is no
confirmation from any source that there are between 750 and 800 bodies
present."[18]
·
Tuam is served by
the N17 road (Galway to Sligo) and the N83 road (to Ballyhaunis) as well as R332 and R347. A bypass of the N17
(avoiding the currently congested junctions to the west of the town) is also
planned, with land acquisition commencing by Galway County Council in late
2006. It is interesting to note that the design of this highway includes a
bridge over the existing mothballed railway lines, thus acknowledging the
potential future re-opening of the line.
·
Tuam railway station is located on the disused railway line from Athenry to Sligo. There was a part-successful
campaign by West-on-track to have the line reopened as a Western
Railway Corridor which was
recognised in the Transport21 project. Construction work to reopen the line
between Ennis and Athenry was completed in 2009.[20] Passengers trains now run between Limerick and Athenry
(where connections to Galway can be made) with further extensions planned. Tuam
railway station opened on 27 September 1860, closed to passenger traffic on 5
April 1976 and finally closed altogether on 18 December 1978.[21] The rail lines were heavily used by trains transporting
sugar beet to the Irish Sugar Factory (Comhlucht Siúcra Éireann Teo.) formerly
located off the Ballygaddy Road. The train line was used during the filming of
"The Quiet Man", and can be seen when John Wayne disembarks at
Ballyglunin, around 6 km (4 mi) from Tuam.
St. Jarlath's College, founded in 1800
Tuam is the location of several second level educational
institutions, St. Jarlath's College, MacHale Vocational School, Presentation
College Currylea and St Bridget's Secondary School. St.
Patrick's College (formerly
Tuam Christian Brothers School), was amalgamated with St. Jarlath's College in
June 2009. There are 4 main primary schools, Mercy Convent and the Presentation
Convent for girls, St. Patrick's Primary School for boys, and Gaelscoil
Iarfhlatha, an Irish language primary school (bunscoil lán Ghaeilge) for both
boys and girls…
Cathedral of the Assumption, built in
1827–1837
Tuam has two cathedrals; The Cathedral of the Assumption (Roman Catholic), seat of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Tuam, and the Church of Ireland's St.
Mary's Cathedral. The town's patron saint is St. Jarlath…
The above
was downloaded from a Google search under the heading “the Tuam Babies”. The
summary account of what was reported in newspapers over the past few months
reads as follows:
In 2012, Catherine Corless, a local historian in the Tuam area, published an article
in a local historical journal about her research into the death records for 796
children, mostly toddlers and infants, who had died at The Home during
its years of operation. The recorded causes included tuberculosis, convulsions, measles, whooping cough, and influenza.[14] She believed that many of the children had been buried in
an area at the rear of the site that also included the facility's septic tank.[14]
The Home was
in operation between the years 1925 and 1961 during which time which time it is
suggested the 796 babies died and were buried on its grounds. The causes of so
many deaths during such a short interval of times are listed above. The purpose
of making this presentation is to show that such a high death rate for babies
in an orphanage or in a home for babies separated from their mothers and
families was not unusual at the time covering the period during which these
babies died.
The research
now suggests that many of these babies did not die primarily from physical
diseases but from the loss of maternal care and intimate human
involvement. To simplify this
presentation an entire chapter from a book written by Dr. Deborah Blum is being
incorporated into this presentation which gives a summary account of the
problems of babies dying in institutions over the past 100 years or more.
Rather than re-write what Deborah Blum has reported, especially in Chapter Two
of her book, Love at Goon Park, entitled Untouched by Human Hands, the entire
chapter is being incorporated here. The cited chapter, which follows in its
entirety, includes some observations by the undersigned.
***
Love at Goon
Park, Harry Harlow and the Science of Affection, Copyright 2002 by Deborah
Blum
Chapter Two
Untouched by
Human Hands
The apparent repression of love by
modern psychologists stands in sharp contrast with the attitude taken by many
famous and normal people.
Harry F.
Harlow.
The Nature
of Love, 1958
The
frustrating, impossible, terrible thing about orphanages could be summarized
like this: They were baby killers.
They always
had been. One could read it in the eighteenth-century records from Europe. On
foundling home in Florence, The Hospital of the Innocents, took more than
fifteen thousand babies between 1755 and 1773; two thirds of them died before
they reached their first birthdays. In Sicily, around the same time, there were
so many orphanage deaths that residents in nearby Brescia proposed that a motto
be carved into the fondling home’s gate: Here children are killed at public
expense.” One could read it in the nineteenth-century records from American
orphanages, such as this report from St. Mary’s Asylum for Widows, Foundlings,
and Infants in Buffalo, New York: From 1862 to 1875, the asylum offered a home
to 2,114 children. Slightly more than half – 1,080 – had died within a year of
arrival. Most of those who survived had mothers who stayed with them. “A large
proportion of the infants, attempted to be raised by hand, have died although
receiving every possible care and attention that the means of the sisters would
allow as food, ventilation, cleanliness, etc.”
And yet,
babies, toddlers, elementary school children, and even adolescents kept coming
to foundling homes, like a ragged, endless, stubbornly hopeful parade. In the
orphanages, the death of one child always made room for the next.
Physicians
were working in and against an invisible lapping wave of microorganisms, which
they didn’t know about and didn’t understand. Cholera flooded through the
foundling homes, and so did diphtheria and typhoid and scarlet fever. Horrible,
wasting diarrheas were chronic. The homes reeked of human waste. Attempts to
clean them foundered on inadequate plumbing, lack of hot water, lack even of
soap. It wasn’t just foundling homes, of course, where infections thrived in
the days before antibiotics and vaccines, before chlorinated water and
pasteurized milk. In the United States, more than one fourth of the children
born between 1850 and 1900 died before the age of five. But foundling homes
concentrated the infections and contagions, brought them together in the way a
magnifying glass might focus the sun’s rays until they burn paper. The
orphanages raised germs, seemingly, far more effectively than they raised children. If you brought a group of
pediatricians together, they could almost immediately begin telling orphanages
horror stories – and they did.
In 1915, a
New York physician, Henry Chapin, made a report to the American Pediatric
Society that he called “A Plea for Accurate Statistics in Infants’
Institutions.” Chapin had surveyed ten
foundling homes across the country; his tally was – by yesterday’s or today’s
standards – unbelievable. At all but one of the homes, every child admitted was
dead at age two. His fellow physicians rose up – not in outrage but to go him
one better. A Philadelphia physician remarked bitterly that “I had the honor to
be connected with an institution in this city in which the mortality among all
the infants under one year of age, when admitted to the institution and
retained there for any length of time, was 100 percent.” A doctor from Albany, New York, disclosed
that one hospital he had worked at had simply written “condition hopeless” on
the chart as soon as the baby came into the ward. Another described tracking
two hundred children admitted into institutions in Baltimore. Almost 90 percent
were dead within a year. It was the escapees who mostly survived, children
farmed out to relatives or put in foster care. Chapin spent much of the rest of
his career lobbying for a foster care system for abandoned children. It wasn’t
that he thought foster homes would necessarily be kinder or warmer – he hoped
only they wouldn’t kill children so quickly.
By Chapin’s
time, of course, thanks to researchers such as Louis Pasteur and Alexander
Fleming and Edward Jenner, doctors recognized that they were fighting
microscopic pathogens. They still didn’t understand how those invisible
infections spread – only that they continued to do so. The physicians’ logical
response was to make it harder for germs to move from one person to the next.
It was the quarantine principle: Move people away from each other, separate the
sick from the healthy. That principle was endorsed–no, loudly promoted–by such
experts of the day as Dr. Luther Emmett Holt, of Columbia University. Holt made
controlling childhood infections a
personal cause. The premiere childcare doctor of his time, he urged parents to
keep their homes free of contagious diseases. Remember that cleanliness was
literally next to Godliness. And remember, too, that parents, who weren’t all
that clean by doctors’ standards, were potential disease carriers. Holt
insisted that mothers and fathers should avoid staying too close to their
children.
Before Holt,
American parents usually allowed small children to sleep in their bedrooms or
even in their beds. Holt led a crusade to keep children in separate rooms; no
babies in the parental bedroom, please; good childcare meant good hygiene,
clean hands, a light touch, air, sun, and space, including space from you, mom
and dad. And that mean avoiding even affectionate contact. What could be worse
than kissing your child? Did parents really wish, asked Holt, to touch their
babies with lips, a known source for
transmitting infection?
If parents
had doubts about such lack of contact, Holt’s colleagues did not. In the 1888 The Wife’s Handbook (with Hints on Management of the Baby),
physician Arthur Albutt also warned each mother that her touch could crawl with
infection. If she really loved the baby, Albutt said, she would maintain a
cautious distance: “It is born to live and not to die” and so always wash your
hands before touching, and don’t “indulge” the baby with too much contact so
that “it” – the baby is always “it” in this book- may grow up to fill a “useful
place in society.”
In foundling
homes, wedged to the windows with abandoned children, there was no real way to
isolate an ailing child – nor did anyone expect the foundlings to occupy many
useful places in society. But administrators did their best to keep their
charges alive. They edged the beds farther apart; they insisted that, as much
as possible, the children be left alone. On doctors’ orders, the windows were
kept open, sleeping spaces separated, and the children touched as little as
possible – only for such essentials as a quick delivery of food or a necessary
change of clothes. A baby might be put in a sterile crib with mosquito netting
over the top, a clean bottle propped by its side. The child could be kept
virtually untouched by another human being.
In the early
twentieth century, the hyperclean, sterile-wrapped infant was medicine’s ideal
of disease prevention, the next best thing to sending the baby back to the
safety of the womb. In Germany, physician Martin Cooney had just created a
glass-walled incubator for premature infants. His Kinderbrutanstalt (“child
hatchery”) intrigued both manufacturers and doctors. Because preemies always
died in those days anyway, many parents handed them over to their physicians.
Doctors began giving them to Cooney. He went on an international tour to
promote the hatchery, exhibiting his collection of infants in their glass
boxes. Cooney went first to England and then to the United States. He showed
off his babies in 1902 at the Pan American Exposition in Buffalo, New York.
During the next two years, he and his baby collection traveled to shows as far
west as Nebraska. Cooney settled in Coney Island, where he successfully cared
for more than five thousand premature infants. Through the 1930s, he continued,
occasionally, to display them. In 1932, he borrowed babies from Michael Reese
Hospital for the Chicago World’s Fair and sold tickets to view the human
hatchlings. According to fair records, his exhibit made more money that year
than any other, with the exception of Sally Rand, the famous fan-dancer. The
babies in the boxes were like miracles of medicine; they were alive when
millions before them had died. Cooney said his only real problem was that it
was hard to convince the mothers to take them back. Oddly enough, they seemed
to feel disconnected from those babies behind the glass.
Sterility
and isolation became the gods of hospital practice. The choleras and wasting
diarrheas and inexplicable fevers began to fall away. Children still got sick –
just not so mysteriously. There were always viruses (measles, mumps, things we
now vaccinate against) and still those stubborn bacterial illnesses that plague
is today; pneumonia, respiratory infections, drearily painful ear infections.
But now, doctors took the position that even the known infections could be
handled by isolation. Human contact was the ultimate enemy of health. Eerily
unseeable pathogens hovered about each person like some ominous aura. Reports
from doctors at the time read like descriptions of battle zones in which no
human was safe - and everybody was dangerous. One such complaint, by Chaicago
physician William Brenneman, discussed the risks of letting medical personnel
loose in the wards. Nurses weren’t allowed enough sick leaves and they were
bringing their own illnesses into the hospital; interns seemed to not
appreciate that their “cold or cough or sore throat” was a threat. Physicians
themselves, Brenneman added sarcastically, apparently felt they were completely
noninfectious when ill, as long as they wore long “white coat with black
buttons all the way down the front.” How could you keep illness out of
hospitals when doctors and nurses kept coming in?
Brenneman,
of Children’s Memorial Hospital in Chicago, thought children’s wards were
similar to concentration camps, at least when it came to infection potential.
He evoked the prison camps of World War I, where doctors had found that
captured soldiers were crawling with streptococcus bacteria. Were wards so
different? Tests had shown that 105 of 122 health workers at the hospital were
positive for the same bacteria, a known cause of lethal pneumonias. “It is
known what streptococcus did in concentration camps during the World War. One
is constantly aware of what it does in the infant ward under similar conditions
of herding and mass contact.” The less time a child spent in the hospital, the
better was Brenneman’s rule and he urged doctors to send their patients’ home;
or, if they had no home, into foster care, as quickly as possible. And if they
had to be hospitalized? Push back the beds; wrap up the child quickly, keep the
nurse away when you could.
Harry
Bakwin, a pediatrician at Belleview in New York, described the children’s ward
of the 1930s like this: “To lessen the danger of cross infections, the large
open ward of the past has been replaced by small, cubicled rooms in which
masked, hooded, and scrubbed nurses and physicians move about cautiously so as
not to stir up bacteria. Visiting parents are strictly excluded, and the
infants receive a minimum of handling by the staff.” One hospital even “devised
a box equipped with inlet and outlet valves and sleeve arrangements for the
attendants. The infant is placed in this box and can be taken care of almost
untouched by human hands.” By such standards, the perfectly healthy child would
be the little girl alone in the bed burnished to germ-free perfection, visited
only by gloved and masked adults who briskly delivered medicine and meal of
pasteurized milk and well-washed food.
Hospitals
and foundling homes functioned, as Stanford University psychologist Robert
Sapolsky puts it today, “at the intersection of two ideas popular at the time –
a worship of sterile, aseptic conditions at all costs, and a belief among the
(overwhelming male) pediatric establishment that touching, holding and nurturing
infants was sentimental maternal foolishness.” It was just that doctors were
engaged in a quest for germ-free perfection. Physicians, worshipping at the
altar of sterility, found themselves shoulder to shoulder with their brethren
who studied human behavior. Their colleagues in psychology directly reassured
them that cuddling and comfort were bad for children anyway. They might be
doing those children a favor by sealing them away behind those protective
curtains.
Perhaps no
one was more reassuring on the latter point than John B. Watson, a South
Carolina psychologist and a president of the American Psychological Association
(APA). Watson is often remembered today as the scientist who led a professional
crusade against the evils of affection. “When you are tempted to pet your child
remember that mother love is a dangerous instrument,” Watson warned. Too much
hugging and coddling could make infancy unhappy, adolescence a nightmare - even
warp the child so much that he might grow up unfit for marriage. And, Watson
warned, this could happen in a shockingly short time: “Once a child’s character
has been spoiled by bad handling, which can be done in a few days, who can say
that the damage is ever repaired?
Nothing
could be worse for a child, by this calculation, than being mothered. And being
mothered meant being cradled, cuddled, cosseted. It was a recipe for softness,
a strategy for undermining strong character. Doting parents, especially the
female half of the partnership, endowed their children with “weaknesses, reserves,
fears, cautions, and inferiorities.” Watson wrote a whole chapter on “The
Dangers of Too Much Mother Love,” in which he warned that obvious affection
always produced “invalidism” in a child. The cuddling parent, he said, is
destined to end up with a whiny, irresponsible, dependent failure of a human
being. Watson, who spent most of his research career at John Hopkins
University, was a nationally known and respected psychologist when he trained
his sights on mother love. Articulate, passionate, determined, he was an
influential leader in his field, that his followers were known as Watsonian
psychologists.” And like him, they came tp consider coddling q child as the
eight of humankind’s deadly sins. “The Watsonian psychologists regard mother
love as so powerful (and so baneful) an influence on mankind that they would
direct their first efforts toward mitigating her powers,” wrote New York
psychiatrist David Levy in the late 1930s.
Watson
believed that emotio9ns should be controlled. They were messy; they were
complicated. The job of a scientist, of any rational human being, should be to
figure out how to command them. So he was willing to study emotions, but mostly
to show they were as amenable to manipulation as any other human behavior. The
emotion of rage, he said, could be induced in babies by pinning them down. That
was a simple fact, observable and measurable and controlled by the mastery of
science – with the credibility and chilly precision of a discipline such as
physics.
Psychology
was a young science at the time, founded only in the nineteenth century. Until
that point – perhaps until Darwin – human behavior was considered the province
of philosophy and religion. Scientists considered physics, astronomy, chemistry,
as serious research subjects, but those subject had hundreds of years behind
them. Even one of the founders of the American Psychological Association,
William James of Harvard, said that psychology wasn’t a science at all - merely
the hope of one.
As a child,
Watson had been dragged to tent revival after tent revival by his mother. He
still remembered with revulsion the sweaty intensity of the faithful. He was
determined to wash the remnants of spirituality and, yes, emotion out of his
profession. “No one ever treated the emotions more coldly,” Harry Harlow would
say years later. To his contemporaries, Watson only argued that a scientific
psychology was the way to build “a foundation for saner living.” He proposed
stringent guidelines for viewing behavior in a 1913 talk still known as the
Behavior Manifesto.
“Psychology
as the behaviorist views it is an objective, experimental branch of natural
science,” he insisted. Its goal was the prediction and control of behavior.
“Introspection forms no essential part of its methods, and neither does
consciousness have much value.” Psychologists should focus on what could be
measured and modified. In the same way that the animals could be conditioned to
respond, so could people. The principle applied most directly to children.
Watson’s psychology was in near perfect opposition to the intimate,
relationship-focused approach that Harry Harlow would develop. Rather, he
argued that adults – parents, teachers, doctors – should concentrate on
conditioning and training children. Their job was to provide the right stimulus
and induce the correct response.
And that was
what Watson argued, forcefully, in his 1928 best-seller, The Psychological Care of the Child and Infant. The British philosopher, Bertrand Russell
proclaimed it the first child-rearing book of scientific merit. Watson, he
said, had triumphed by studying babies the way “the man of science studies the
amoebae.” The Atlantic Monthly called
it indispensable; the New York Times said
that Watson’s writings had begun “a new approach to the intellectual history of
man.” Parents magazine called his
advice a must for the bookshelf of every enlightened parent.
From today’s
perspective, it’s clear that Watson had little patience for parents at all,
enlightened or not. Watson wrote that he dreamed of a baby farm where hundreds
of infants could be taken away from their parents and raised according to
scientific principles. Ideally, he said, a mother would not even know which
child was hers and therefore could not ruin it. Emotional responses to children
should be controlled, Watson insisted, by using an enlightened scientific
approach. Parents should participate in shaping their children by simple,
objective conditioning techniques. And if parents chose affection and nurturing
instead, ignoring his advice? In his own
words, there are “serious rocks ahead for the over-kissed child.” Watson
demanded not only disciplined children but disciplined parents. His
instructions were clear: Don’t pick them up when they cry; don’t hold them for
pleasure. Pat them on the head when they do well; shake their hands; kiss them
on the foreheads, but only on big occasions. Children, he said, should be
pushed into independence had, from the day of their birth. After a while,
“you’ll be utterly ashamed of the mawkish, sentimental way you’ve been handling
your child.”
Watson was a
hero in his own field, hailed for his efforts to turn the soft-headed field of
psychology into a hard science. He became a hero in medicine because his work
fit so well with the “don’t touch” policies of disease control. The physicians
of the time also considered that affection was, well, a girl thing, something
to be sternly controlled by men who knew better. The Wife’s Handbook flatly warns mothers that their sentimental natures
are a defect. The book’s author, Dr. Arthur Albutt, takes a firm stand against
spoiling, which he defines as picking babies up when they cry, or letting them
fall asleep in one’s arms. “If it cries, never mind it; it will soon learn to
sleep without having to depend on rocking and nursing.” Dr. Luther Holt took
the same stance and his publication, The
Care of Feeding of Children, was an even bigger success. There were fifteen
editions of his book between 1894 and 1935. Holt believed in a rigorous,
scientific approach to the raising, or let’s say, taming of the child. The
whole point of childhood was preparing for adulthood, Holt said. To foster maturity
in a child, Holt stood against the “vicious practice” of rocking a child in a
cradle, picking him up when he cried, or handling him too often. He urged
parents not to relax as their child matured. Holt was also opposed to hugging
and overindulging an older child.
It’s easy
today to wonder why anyone would have listened to this paramilitary approach to
childcare. Undoubtedly – or at least we might hope – plenty of parents didn’t
take heed. Yet, Holt and Watson and their contemporaries were extraordinarily
influential. Their messages were buoyed by a new, almost religious faith in the
power of science to improve the world. The power of technology to revolutionize
people’s lives was a tangible, visible force. Gaslights were flickering out as
homes were wired for electricity. The automobile was beginning to sputter its
way down the road. The telegraph and telephone were wiring the world. There
were mechanical sewing machines, washing machines, weaving machines – all
apparently better and faster than their human counterparts. It was logical to
assume that science could improve we humans as well.
John Watson
wasn’t the only researcher to publicly urge scientific standards for parenting.
The pioneering psychologists G. Stanley Hall, of Clark University, entered the
childcare field as well. In 1893, Hall helped found the national Association
for the Study of Childhood. His own work focused on adolescence and he believed
that the difficulties encountered at this time of life were in part due to
mistakes by parents and educators in the early years. Hall admired much about
what he called the adolescent spirit and its wonderfully creative imagination.
But it needed discipline, he said, moral upbringing, strict authority to guide
it.
Speaking to
the National Congress of Mothers – a two thousand-member group organized in
1896 to embrace the concept of scientific motherhood – Hall urged Victorian
tough love upon the. Their children needed less cuddling, more punishment, he
said; they needed constant discipline. After Hall’s talk to the mother’s
congress, the New York Times rhapsodized
in in an editorial, “Given one generation of children properly born and raised,
what a vast proportion of human ills would disappear from the face of the
earth.” Women at the conference left determined to spread the word. No more
adlibbing of childcare, they insisted. There were real experts out there, men
made wise by science. Parents needed to pay attention. “The innocent and
helpless are daily, hourly, victimized through the ignorance of untrained
parents,” said the Congress of Mothers’ president, Alice Birney, in 1899. “The
era of amateur mother is over.” (The mothers’ congress, by the way, changed and
grew and eventually became the PTA.)
The demand
for scientific guidance was pressing that the federal government’s Child Bureau
– housed in the Department of Labor – after all, childrearing was a profession
– went into the advice business. The bureau recruited Luther Holt as primary
advisor on its “Infant Care” publications. Between 1914and 1925 , the Labor
Department distributed about 3 million copies of the pamphlet. Historian Molly
Ladd-Taylor, in her wonderfully titled book, Raising a Baby the Government Way, reports that the Child Bureau
received up to 125,000 letters a year asking for parenting help. The bureau
chief, Julia Lathrop, said that each pamphlet was “addressed to the average
mother of this country.” The government was not, she emphasized, trying to
preempt doctors. “There is no purpose to
invade the field of the medical or nursing professions, but rather to furnish
such statements regarding hygiene and normal living as every mother has a right
to possess in the interest of herself and her children.”
The “Infant
Care” pamphlet covered everything from how to make a swaddling blanket to how
to register a birth. It discussed diapers, creeping pens (which we today call
playpens), meals from coddled eggs to scraped beef, teething, nursing,
exercise, and, oh yes, “habits, training, and discipline.” After all, “the wise
mother strives to start the baby right.”
The care of
the baby – according to the federal experts – demanded rigid discipline of both
parent and child. Never kiss a baby, especially on the mouth. Do you want to
spread germs and look immoral? (This part, obviously, straight from the mouth
of Luther Holt.) And the government, too, wanted to caution mothers against
rocking and playing with their children. “The rule that the parents should that
the parent should not play with the baby may seem hard, but it is without doubt
a safe one,” Play – tickling, tossing, laughing – might make the baby restless
and a restless baby is a bad thing. “This is not to say that the baby should be
left alone too completely. All babies need ‘mothering’ and should have plenty
of it..” According to federal experts, mothering mean holding the baby quietly,
in tranquility-producing positions. The mother should stop immediately if her
arms feel tired. The baby is never to inconvenience the adult. An older child –
say above six months – should be taught to sit silently in the crib; otherwise,
he might need to be constantly watched and entertained by the mother, a serious
waste of time in the opinion of the authors. Babies should be trained from
infancy, concludes the pamphlet, so “smile at the good, walk away from the bad
– babies don’t like being ignored.
Universities
also began offering scientific advice to untutored parents. Being research
institutions, they tended to reflect John Watson and the zeitgeist of
experimental psychology. Reading them
today is curiously like reading a pet-training guide – any minute, the mother
will be told to issue a “stand-stay” command to her toddler. In the Child Care and Training manuals, published
by the University of Minnesota’s Institute of child Welfare, the authors
advised that the word “training” refers to “conditioned responses”.” They
assured their readers that when a mother smiles at her baby, she is simply
issuing a “stimulus.” When the baby smiles back, he is not expressing
affection. The baby has only been conditioned to “respond” to the smile.
Further,
parents should be aware that conditioning is a powerful tool, the Minnesota
guidebook warned. For instance, if a child falls down and hurts herself,
mothers and fathers should not condition her to whine. They might do that if
they routinely pick her up and comfort her. Treat injury lightly and “tumbles
will presently bring about the conditioned response of brave and laughing
behavior,” the guidebook advised. Watson had declared that babies feel only
three emotions: fear, rage, and love (or the rudiments of affection), and the
Minnesota psychologists agreed. They warned that it is easy to accidentally
condition unwanted fears. The researchers cited the common practice of locking
children in a dark room to punish them. They recommended against it. This, they
said, only conditions the child to fear darkness. A stern word, a swift swat,
is so much better. The scientists also suggested that parents try not to worry
about their children and their safety so much: Fear conditions fear. “The
mother who is truly interested in bringing up children free of fear will try to
eliminate fear from their own life.” Watson equated baby love with pleasure,
brought on by a stroking touch. But he also believed that too much affection
would soften the moral fiber of the children. So did the Minnesota group. Their manual
states that although ignoring and being indifferent to a child could cause
problems, it was “a less insidious form of trouble than the over-dependence
brought about by too great a display of affection.”
It was serendipity, it was timing – the
ideas fit together like perfectly formed pieces of a puzzle. Medicine
reinforced psychology; psychology supported medicine. All of it, the lurking fears of infection, the saving graces of hygiene, the fears of ruining a
child by affection, the selling of science, the desire of parents to learn from
the experts, all came together to create one of the chilliest possible periods
in childrearing. “Conscientious mothers
often ask the doctor whether it is proper to fondle the baby,” wrote an
exasperated pediatrician in the late 1930’s.
“They have a vague feeling that it is wrong for babies to be mothered,
loved, rocked and that it is their forlorn duty to raise their children in
splendid isolation, ‘untouched by human hands’ so to speak and wrapped in
cellophane like those boxes of crackers we purchase.”
Oh, they were definitely saving children.
In 1931,
Brenneman reported that his
hospital in Chicago was averaging about 30 percent mortality in the children’s
wards rather than 100 percent. Yet the
youngest children, the most fragile, were still dying in the hospital when they
shouldn’t. They were coming in to those
spotlessly bygienic rooms and inexplicably fading away. At Children’s Memorial, babies were dying
seven times faster than the older children; they accounted for much of that
stubborn 30 percent mortality. Brenneman
also noted that babies who did best in the hospital were those who were “the
nurses’ those who enjoyed a little extra cuddling, despite hospital rules. Sometimes the hospital could turn an ill ness
around, he said, by asking a nurse to “mother” a child, just a little.
New York pediatrician Harry Bakwin had
come up with a description for small children in hospital wards. He titled his paper on isolation procedures
“Loneliness in Infants.” French
researchers had begun to suggest that the total “absenc3e of mothering” might
be a problem in hospitals. An Austrian
psychologist, Katherine Wolf, had proposed that allowing a mother into a
hospital ward could improve an infant’s survival chances. She insisted that there might be actual risk
from “the best equipped and most hygienic institutions, which succeeded in
sterilizing the surroundings of the child from germs but which at the same time
sterilized the child’s psyche.” Did this
make sense? Absolutely—today. At the
time, absolutely not.
Hadn’t psychology declared that children
didn’t need affection and mothering? Why
would anyone even consider the notion that hygiene and that wonderfully sterile
environment might be dangerous to a child?
The idea was just silly; so silly, so ridiculous, so trivial in fact,
that the field of psychology pretty much ignored Wolf. Bakwin,
Brenneman, and the whole idea.
Years later, British psychiatrist John Bowlby went hunting for studies of
the relationship between maternal care and mental health. He could find only five papers from the 1920s
in any European or American research journal.
He could find only twenty-two from the 1930s. What he found instead were thousands of
papers on t troubled children—on delinquent children born out of wedlock,
homeless children, neglected children.
Neglect, as it turned out, bred neglect beautifully. As one physician
wrote, “The baby who is neglected does in course of time adjust itself to the
unfortunate environment. Such babies
become good babies and progressively easier to neglect.”
In a curious
way, it took a war to change things, and a major one at that, the last great
global conflict, World War II. Perhaps a
minor skirmish would never have shaken psychology’s confidence so well. It was an indirect effect of the war that
actually started catching researchers’ attention. Bomb fallout, the smashing apart of cities
across Europe, the night bombings of cities by the Germans, the counter-bombings
of the Allies, street after street in London blown apart, Dresden fire-bombed
into a ruin of ashes. As the fires
blazed, as their homes and streets shattered around them, many parents, decided
to protect their children by sending them away.
They hustled their offspring out of the big-city targets to stay in the
homes of friends or relatives or friendly volunteers in the countryside. In England alone, more than 700,000 children
were sent away from home, unsure whether they would see their parents
again. “History was making a tremendous
experiment,” wrote J.J. Van Den Berg, of the on these children; they were safe,
sheltered, cared for, disciplined—and completely heart-broken.
Austrian
psychologist Katherine Wolf listed the symptoms: Children became listless,
uninterested in their surroundings. They
were even apathetic about hearing news from home. They became bed-wetters; they shook in the
dark from nightmares and, in the day, they often seemed only half-awake. Children wept for their parents and grieved
for their missing families. In the
night, when the darkness and the nightmares came calling, they didn’t want just
anyone; they wanted their mothers.
Nothing in psychology had predicted this; Wolf was describing affluent,
well-cared-for children living in friendly homes. It was startlingly clear that they could be
clean and well-fed and disease-free—you could invoke all the gods of
cleanliness and it didn’t matter—the children sickened, plagued by the kind of
chronic infections doctors were used to seeing in hospital wards, It seemed that having good clean shelter
really didn’t always keep you healthy.
The refugee children were defining home in a way that had nothing to do
with science at all.
Note by JJM:
In 1955 an English doctor attempted to interview the Bishop of Galway about the
care of babies in a Magdalene Orphanage. His notes provide valuable information
supporting the findings of Deborah Blum as described in Chapter Two of her
book, Love at Goon Park, and as cited
here.
The
following is the account of the doctor on his attempted interview as published
in the Sunday Times:
To gain access to the Magdalene Laundry, Dr Sutherland had
to accept interrogation by the fearsome Bishop of Galway, Michael John Browne –
one of the most senior Catholic clerics and a noted supporter of the notorious
sectarian boycott of Protestants in Fethard-on-Sea.
Dr Sutherland's original 1955 manuscript kept by his
grandson Mark (hallidaysutherland.com) is a remarkable contemporary account of
what he found at the Tuam mother-and-child home 59 years ago.
He wrote: "At Tuam I went to the old workhouse, now the
Children's Home, a long two-storied building in its own grounds. These were
well-kept and had many flowerbeds. The home is run by the Sisters of Bon
Secours of Paris and
the Reverend Mother showed me round. Each of the sisters is a fully trained
nurse and midwife. Some are also trained children's nurses. An unmarried girl
may come here to have her baby. She agrees to stay in the home for one year.
During this time she looks after her baby and assists the nuns in domestic
work. She is unpaid.
"At the end of a year she may leave. She may take her
baby with her or leave the baby at the home in the hope that it will be
adopted. The nuns keep the child until the age of seven, when it is sent to an
Industrial School. There were 51 confinements in 1954 and the nuns had now 120
children. For each child or mother in the home, the County Council pays £1 per
week. That is a pittance.
"If a girl has two confinements at the home she is sent
at the end of the year to the Magdalen (sic) Home Laundry at Galway. Children
of five and over attend the local school. All the babies were in cots and the
Reverend Mother said: 'We wouldn't allow a girl to take her baby to bed with
her unless it was at least two months old. Then she is probably fond of it.
Before then there might be accidents.'' Dr Sutherland also wrote a harrowing
account of being mobbed by "a score of the younger children" at the
home, in the hope he might adopt and give them a family home.
"The whole building was fresh and clean. In the garden
at the back of the House, children were singing. I walked along the path and
was mobbed by over a score of the younger children. They said nothing but each
struggled to shake my hand. Their hands were clean and cool. Then I realised
that to these children I was a potential adopter who might take some boy or
girl away to a real home. It was pathetic. Finally I said: 'Children, I'm not
holding a reception.' They stopped struggling and looked at me. Then a nun told
them to stand on the lawn and sing me a song in Irish. This they did very
sweetly. At the Dogs Home, Battersea, every dog barks at the visitors in the
hope that it will be taken away."
Dr Sutherland later met Bishop Browne and made a
contemporaneous note of the often hostile exchanges as he tried to get
permission to visit the Magdalene Laundry.
Bishop Browne: "Why do you want to see the Magdalene
Home?"
Dr Sutherland: "I want to see how you treat unmarried
mothers. Many of these girls come to England. It is said that 55 per cent of
the girls in British Catholic Rescue Homes are Irish."
Bishop: "That is propaganda. Fr Craven began it.
Cardinal Bourne repeated it. For 25 years I have asked for the figures. They
can't give them. Do you know the figures?"
Sutherland: "No, I'm trying to get them."
Bishop: "You will find there are only a few. Hundreds
of decent Irish girls are going to England. At this moment your government are
advertising high salaries for Irish girls to go to England as nurses in your
mental hospitals."
Sutherland: "English priests say that most of the Irish
lose their faith within six months of coming to England."
Bishop: "Then why don't your English priests look after
the Irish instead of throwing bastards in our face!"
Sutherland: "My Lord, no-one is throwing bastards in
your face. Ireland is a Christian country where going to Mass is a social duty
difficult to avoid."
Bishop: "That is normal. It should be so in
England."
(Dr. Southerland’s contemporaneous account of his
observations of what he observed and experienced at the Tuam Orphanage - and
the account of his experience with the bishop of Galway – corroborate the
observations and findings of Deborah Blum).
Sunday Independent
- obtained from Internet on June 16, 2014.
Back to
Chapter Two of Deborah Blum’s book:
Bakwin, by
that time, was blistering up the medical journals. He had supplemented the signs at Bellevue
that said “Wash Your Hands Twice Before entering This Ward” with new ones
declaiming “Do not enter this nursery without picking up a baby.” In a paper published at the height of the war
in 1944, he described hospitalized babies in a way that sounded startlingly
like the separated children in England.
The medical ward infant was still and quiet he didn’t eats; he didn’t
gain weight; he didn’t smile or coo.
Thin, pale, he was indeed the good baby, the easy-to-neglect baby. Even the breathing of these children was
whisper-soft. Bakwin wrote, barely a
sigh of sound. Some infants ran fevers
that lasted for months. The simmering
temperatures didn’t respond to drugs or anything the doctors did. And the fevers, mysteriously, vanished when
the children went home. A doctor ahead
of his time—by a good three decades—Bakwin won support he needed from his
superiors at Bellevue to let mothers stay with their children if it was an
extended illness. He like to point out
that with the mother around, fatal infections had dropped from 30-35 percent to
less than 10 percent in 1938, and this was before the availability of drugs and
antibiotics became widespread.
“The mother,
instead of being a hindrance, relieves the nurses of the care of one patient
and she often helps out in the care of other babies.” But Bakwin and Bellevue were an odd-island-out
in the sea of medicine. Standard
hospital policy in the 1940l restricted parents to no more than a one-;hour-
long visit a week, no matter how many months the child had been there. Textbooks on the care of newborns still rang
with the voice of Luther Holt and the dread fear of pathogens. Experts continued to recommend only the most
essential handling of infants and a policy of excluding visitors. Even in the 1970s, a survey of wards for
premature infants found that only 30 percent of hospitals allowed parents even
to visit their babies. And less than
half of those hospitals would allow a parent to touch her child.
Bakwin
argued that babies are emotional creatures, that they need emotional contact
the way they need food. Of course, he
put it in words becoming to the doctor he was.
“It would appear that the physiologic components of the emotional
process are essential for the physical well-being of the young in fact.” But he wasn’t afraid to suggest that this
could be a bigger problem than just what he saw in hospital wards. Orphanages and asylums also ran on the
sterilization principle. And although
children might stay days, weeks, occasionally months, in a medical ward, they
might stay years in the foundling homes.
Bakwin gave a simple example of the problem, centered on what might seem
a trivial point: smiling. Somewhere
between two and three months, he pointed out, most babies began to smile back
at their parents. “This is not the case in infants who have spent some time in
institutions.” They didn’t return a smile. He and his nurses, if they had time,
could coax a response, but there was nothing spontaneous about it and they
often didn’t have time. What if the child stayed longer? What would happen to
her then? Or him? If people couldn’t make you happy as a baby, could they ever?
Another New
York physician, William Goldfarb, was also becoming worried about the fate of
children in homes. The foundling homes were like a magnified version of a
hospital ward; the emphasis was on cleanliness, order, self-control,
discipline. Since psychology had declared affection unnecessary - perhaps even
detrimental – to healthy child development, no one was wasting warmth on these
children, who were unwanted anyway. In the homes, youngsters were fed, clothed,
worked, praised, punished, or ignored, but policy did not direct that they be
cuddled or treated with affection. Often
homes discouraged children from even making close friendships with each other
because such relationships were time-consuming and troublesome. Goldfarb worked
with Jewish Family Services, which operated a string of foster homes around the
city. The children he treated were like the bomb escapees – apathetic, passive,
and, which he found most troubling, they seemed to be extending their isolation
zone. The foundlings often appeared incapable of friendship or of even caring
about others. “The abnormal impoverishment in human relationships created a
vacuum where there should have been to strongest motivation to normal growth,”
he wrote in 1943. At least children in their own homes – even if they had cruel
or hostile parents – had some thread of a relationship that involved emotional
interaction. The vacuum, Goldfarb insisted, was the worst thing you could
inflict on the child, leaving a small boy or girl alone to rattle about in some
empty bottle of a life. The younger they were thus isolated, the worse the
effect. “A depriving institutional experience in infancy has an enduring
harmful psychological effect on children,” he said, and he meant all
dimensions.
Two other
New York-based researchers, David Levy and Loretta Bender, took up the cause as
scientists in that urban community began sharing concerns. Like Bakwin, Loretta
Bender worked at Bellevue; she headed the hospital’s newly created child
psychiatric unit, and many of her clients came from foundling homes. They were
“completely confused about human relationships,” she wrote; they were often
lost in a fantasy world that might have served as a kind of shelter where the fantasies
were not so ugly. The children spun their worlds hot with anger, cold with
visions of death. If this was evidence of how foundling homes raised the
youngsters, they were not producing anything that looked like normality.
Levy’s
interest began at another end of the spectrum. Starting in the late 1930s, he
had decided to study those overprotective mothers so criticized by Watson. He
wanted to compare extremes; thoroughly watched-over children versus motherless
foundlings. He did find some happy children held tight under domestic wings.
Some were desperate for escape, some inhibited into near silence, some arrogant
and exhibiting a sense of entitlement. The foundlings he met were often silent
or desperate. But they were often unnerving, as well. Many of the orphans had
learned starched and polite manners. Too often, Levy couldn’t move past that
poliched amiability. Neither, it appeared, could anyone else. The foundlings,
especially long-time ones, were the well-behaved strangers at a party who have
perfect manners and complete inner indifference to you. Those upright behaviors
did sometimes get them adopted. But they inevitably chilled the affection out
of such relationships. One hopeful mother, after a year of trying to coax some
warmth out of her adopted child, returned the little boy. She said that she
felt that she had been punished enough. “Is it possible that there results a
deficiency disease of the emotional life, comparable to a deficiency of vital
nutritional elements within the developing organism?” Levy wondered.
Of course,
this was a worry mostly still buried in academia, a matter of research journals
and scientific debates. The lonely-child syndrome that Bakwin described so
eloquently has a a name “hospitalism.” But what did that mean? Most people had never seen a child suffering
from hospitalism, or watched a baby spiral down in his weeks on the ward. Bakwin could write of the despairing sigh of
a child’s breath. He could draw a heart-wrenching
portrait of the way a lonely baby would begin to wither, until he began to look
like an old man. And Bakwin did do that,
all of that, with determined eloquence.
But his words, however frustrated and angry, were still words in a
medical journal. They were read and
debated by a select few. It seemed that
to change the picture, some advocate of the lost child would need to think
about a far wider audience.
Scientists
like to work within their own community, communicate in their own jargon,
publish in their own journals. But to be
a crusader, one must sometimes push beyond the academic envelope. John Watson had understood that perfectly—and
used it to remarkable effect. Researchers
working with orphaned children were reaching that same awareness. They would need the power of public opinion
to change the system. They would need to
make people see the problem, literally.
The power of the filmed image suddenly beckoned as a way to break
through the refusal to find out what children needed. In particular, a Viennese psychiatrist names
Rene Spitz and a Scottish medical researcher named James Roberstson Both came
to that conclusion. Spitz and
Roberstson, on different continents and for different reasons, decided that
words were never going to win this fight.
Each one decided to find a movie camera.
Each would attempt to show people exactly what was a being done to
children.
Spitz was a
Vienne-born Jew who fled from Austria to France, and then from France to New York,
as Hitler’s armies spread across Europe.
He had worked with Katharine Wolf in Austria on the issue of sterile
children’s wards. In New York, he
settled down with a passion to join forces with the likes of Harry Bakwin and
William Goldfarb. In 1945, he was the
author of yet another research paper.
“Hospitalism: An Inquiry into the Genesis of Psychiatric Conditions in
Early Childhood.” If one reads beyond
the scientific terminology, his paper tells the compelling story of four months
that Spitz spent comparing two set of children.
None of the children was blessed in his circumstances. One group consisted of infants and toddlers
left by their parents at a foundling home.
The others attended a nursery school attached to a prison for women.
Spitz’s
description of the foundling home would have a familiar feel to anyone
following Bakwin’s words. The place was
gloriously clean. Each child was kept in
a crib walled off with hung sheets—or what Spitz tended to call “solitary
confinement.” The home observed the
common practice of “don’t touch” the child.
Masked and gloved attendants bustled around, arranging meals and
delivering medicine. Still, the only
object the children saw for any length of time was the ceiling. In spite of “impeccable” guards against
infection, the children, all less than three years old, when Spitz
arrived. By the time he left, twenty-three
were dead, killed by relentless infections.
The nursery,
by contrast, was a chaotic, noisy play place, a big room scattered with
toys. Children constantly tumbled over
each other. The prison nursery allowed
mothers to stay and play with their children.
Perhaps because it was such a break from cell life, the mothers did as
much as possible. Or perhaps they just
wanted to be in a place where they found plenty of hugging and comfort. None of the children there died during Spit’s
study. That didn’t mean that you could
blame all the deaths on loneliness. But,
Spitz insisted, it should be considered as a legitimate peril, a recognized
threat to health.
The
“foundling home does not give the child a mother, or even a substitute mother,”
Spitz wrote. There was one staff
attendant for every eight children, or what he called “only an eighth of a
nurse.” The problem with solitary
confinement, he argued, is not that it’s boring or static or lacks opportunities
for cognitive stimulation, although all of that is true, and none of that is
good. The more serious problem for the
children was that there was no one to love them. Or like them.
Or just smile and give them a careless hug. And it was this, Spitz said—isolation from
human touch and affection—that was destroying the children’s ability to fight
infection. At the center of Spitz’s
argument is a simple statement: For a child, love is necessary for survival. His first choice to provide that was the mother. He wouldn’t turn away others, though—an
affectionate caretaker, person actually interested in the child, someone more
than one-eighth of a nurse. Any and all
of those people were, he thought, a medical necessity. ‘We believe they (the children) suffer
because their perceptual world is emptied of human partners,” he said
flatly. What is life without a
partner? Can there be a home without
someone who welcomes you there?
Spitz found
that his paper received, well, mild interest, moderate attention. It added to the ongoing argument—the one that
was going nowhere.
Spitz
prepared to fight harder. He had filmed
the children as they came into the foundling home and had allowed the camera to
continue observing as the weeks passed.
Simmering with his own outrage, Spitz turned his grainy little
black-and-white film into a 1947 psychology classic, a cheap little silent
movie, its title cards crammed with furiously compassionate words. He called the film simply, Grief: A Peril in Infancy. It
starts with a fat baby named Jane, giggling at the experimenter, beaming at the
people around her, reaching to be held.
A week later, Jane sits in her crib, peering constantly around,
searching for her mother. She is
unsmiling and, when Spitz picks her up, she breaks into uncontrollable sobs;
her eyes are pools of tears. There’s the
next little girl “unusually precocious” says the title card, seven months old,
happily stroking Spitz’s face, shaking hands with him. A few weeks later, she’s
pale, unsmiling, dark circles curve under her eyes. She won’t look up at Spitz
now. He gently raises her from the crib. And the she clings to him so
desperately that he has to pry her off when he leaves. She’s still sobbing when
the camera turns to another baby, lying flat, staring into the air, pressing a
fist against his face; and another, curled up, trembling, gnawing on her
fingers. The title card this time is short and indeed to the heart of the
problem: “The cure: Give Mother Back to Baby.”
Spitz took
his film from medical society meeting to medical society meeting in New York.
In his eloquent book on the importance of early relationships, Becoming Attached, psychologist Robert
Karen writes that one prominent analyst marched up to Spitz with tears in his
eyes saying, “How could you do this to us?” The film did indeed cause the
debate over mother-relationships to steam. Could Spitz be right? Could some
fifty years of psychiatry be so wrong? Even eight years after Grief was
produced, the quarrel still simmered. Critics shredded the film all over again
as emotionally overwrought and nonscientific. Even in the late 1960s,
researchers were arguing over whether he was right. But it was almost
impossible, as Spitz had known, to argue those weeping children away.
Another film
was circulating by this time, James Robertson’s documentary of children in
medical care. It was a cheap little film, too. Robertson estimated that it cost
$80 to produce. His was a different story from Spitz – and the same. Robertson
wanted to tackle children in hospital wards and what it cost them to feel
abandoned by their parents. This was still, of course, during the time of brief
weekly visits. He called his film A
Two-Year-Old Goes to the Hospital.
For a child
at that time, hospitalization was, essentially, isolation from home and family
and friends and everything that might have given a sick child security and
support. Robertson’s film followed a poised little toddler named Laura. He said
once that she was so naturally poised that he worried that her temperament
would render her case meaningless. And Laura did indeed to easily into her
hospital bed, But by the next week, she was begging her parents to take her
home; and the next, pleading with them to stay; and by the next, hardly
responding to them at all, just her lips trembling as they left her behind. At
the end of the film, she was like a frozen child, silent and unresponsive.
Months later, Laura, back home and secure again, saw Robertson’s film, turned
to her mother and said, angrily, “Why did you leave me like that?”
Robertson
showed his film to an audience of three hundred medical workers in England. The
initial reaction was concentrated fury. The hospital staffers felt personally
attacked. Many demanded that the film be banned. “I was immediately assailed
for lack of integrity,” Robertson recalled.” “I had produced an untrue record.
I had slandered the professions.” In 1953, Robertson became a World
After page
60 insert the following by Caroline Crawford:
Sunday 15 June 2014
Children at Tuam home were 'emaciated' and starved
Inspectors'
1947 report reveals the extent of abuse at nuns' care home
Caroline Crawford
PUBLISHED 08/06/2014|02:30
A
model of the Mother and Baby home in Tuam Co, Galway, by historian Catherine
Corless. Photo: Andrew Downes
THE full extent of the horrendous conditions
children were forced to live in at the Tuam mother-and-baby home, where up to
300 infants are buried, are revealed in an official inspector's report obtained
by the Sunday Independent.
The damning 1947 report, compiled after a visit to the home,
paints a picture as grim as the harrowing accounts of starved children that
emerged from Romanian orphanages after the fall of Ceausescu in the early
1990s.
It tells how children were suffering from malnutrition and
in many instances were pot-bellied – a sign of starvation. The report records
children as having wizened limbs, with many described as being 'mentally
defective'.
One child is described as 'a miserable, emaciated child with
a voracious appetite and no control over bodily functions', while another is
reported to be 'emaciated, with flesh hanging loosely on limbs'.
It also reveals that the home was crowded with 271 children
and 61 mothers living there at the same time. This number exceeded the 'desirable'
level of 243, according to the inspector.
Of the 31 infants examined, 12 were described as being
'emaciated and not thriving'. The stark report also records one child with
abscesses on hips and boils on their body.
Laying out in stark detail the staggeringly high number of
children who were dying in the home each year, it reveals:
* 34 per cent of children died in the home in 1943;
* 25 per cent died in 1944;
* 23 per cent died in 1945.
More than one-in-four (27 per cent) of children living in
the home in 1946 lost their lives that year.
An extract from the report notes the shocking number of
deaths of babies in the home, stating: "The death rate amongst infants is
high... The death rate had appeared to be on the decrease but has now begun to
rise again."
Stating that 21 deaths occurred out of 66 births or
admissions in the year to September 1946, the report adds: "It is time to
enquire into the possible cause before the death rate mounts higher."
However, despite the shocking number of deaths, the report
found that "the care given to infants in the Home is good, the Sisters are
careful and attentive; diets are excellent. It is not here that we must look
for cause of the death rate".
The inspector raises the risk of infection being brought in
from outside the home as one possible cause and raises concerns about a lack of
an isolation unit. It also points out that there was no testing for venereal
diseases and that the doctor caring for the kids was over 80 years old, and
calls for a younger doctor with "more up-to-date knowledge" to be
considered.
Death records obtained by local historian, Catherine
Corless, for the home make clear the sheer level of neglect prevailing
throughout the institution.
A list of the children who died shows that in many cases
infants were dying within days of being born. In one outbreak of measles, 27
children died together.
Others died from fits, oedema, abscess of the scalp and in
one case, laryngitis.
"There was neglect and that's the truth. There are all
sorts of reasons given for the causes of death. It's not enough. It would
suggest that they just had to put down something," Ms Corless told the
Sunday Independent.
She described the death rate as "scandalous",
adding that it was "simply colossal".
"The report just talks about the children as they found
them. The inspectors called to the home every other year and a copy of the
report from 1947 shows the state of the emaciated babies. It's in the report,
there's no denying it.
"The truth needs to be known. You can see the state of
the babies from it, they were recorded as not thriving and with emaciated
limbs. When you see that, you can't just hide that away. Pot-bellied is a sign
of hunger. You can't hide the truth of it," she added.
She also points to the significant funding the nuns received
for the care of these children and their mothers.
"You can't excuse that no matter what the times were
like. The nuns were getting well paid for those children. They were getting a
pound a head for each mother and child from the government, which was quite a
bit of money at the time. They were self-sufficient, they had their own
vegetable gardens which the mothers tended so when you look it that way, the
treatment of them can't be accepted," Ms Corless added.
Sunday Independent ------
Insert
the following by Jerome Reilly:
News
Sunday 15 June 2014
Author battled clergy to gain first-hand experience of
mother-and-baby homes
Jerome Reilly
PUBLISHED 08/06/2014|02:30
Historian
Catherine Corless with the report on the Tuam babies from 1947. Photo: Andrew
Downes
"We wouldn't allow a girl to take her baby
to bed with her unless it was at least two months old. Then she is probably
fond of it. Before then there might be accidents." – Reverend Mother of
Bon Secours mother-and-baby home in Tuam
THE year was 1955 and the nun was speaking to Dr Halliday
Sutherland, a Scottish doctor, author and TB treatment pioneer who visited both
the Tuam home run by the French sisters, and the infamous Magdalene Laundry in
Galway City as he was researching his book, Irish Journey.
To gain access to the Magdalene Laundry, Dr Sutherland had
to accept interrogation by the fearsome Bishop of Galway, Michael John Browne –
one of the most senior Catholic clerics and a noted supporter of the notorious
sectarian boycott of Protestants in Fethard-on-Sea.
Dr Sutherland's original 1955 manuscript kept by his
grandson Mark (hallidaysutherland.com) is a remarkable contemporary account of
what he found at the Tuam mother-and-child home 59 years ago.
He wrote: "At Tuam I went to the old workhouse, now the
Children's Home, a long two-storied building in its own grounds. These were
well-kept and had many flowerbeds. The home is run by the Sisters of Bon
Secours of Paris and
the Reverend Mother showed me round. Each of the sisters is a fully trained
nurse and midwife. Some are also trained children's nurses. An unmarried girl
may come here to have her baby. She agrees to stay in the home for one year.
During this time she looks after her baby and assists the nuns in domestic
work. She is unpaid.
"At the end of a year she may leave. She may take her
baby with her or leave the baby at the home in the hope that it will be
adopted. The nuns keep the child until the age of seven, when it is sent to an
Industrial School. There were 51 confinements in 1954 and the nuns had now 120
children. For each child or mother in the home, the County Council pays £1 per
week. That is a pittance.
"If a girl has two confinements at the home she is sent
at the end of the year to the Magdalen (sic) Home Laundry at Galway. Children
of five and over attend the local school. All the babies were in cots and the
Reverend Mother said: 'We wouldn't allow a girl to take her baby to bed with
her unless it was at least two months old. Then she is probably fond of it.
Before then there might be accidents.''' Dr Sutherland also wrote a harrowing
account of being mobbed by "a score of the younger children" at the
home, in the hope he might adopt and give them a family home.
"The whole building was fresh and clean. In the garden
at the back of the House, children were singing. I walked along the path and
was mobbed by over a score of the younger children. They said nothing but each
struggled to shake my hand. Their hands were clean and cool. Then I realised
that to these children I was a potential adopter who might take some boy or
girl away to a real home. It was pathetic. Finally I said: 'Children, I'm not
holding a reception.' They stopped struggling and looked at me. Then a nun told
them to stand on the lawn and sing me a song in Irish. This they did very
sweetly. At the Dogs Home, Battersea, every dog barks at the visitors in the
hope that it will be taken away."
Dr Sutherland later met Bishop Browne and made a
contemporaneous note of the often hostile exchanges as he tried to get
permission to visit the Magdalene Laundry.
Bishop Browne: "Why do you want to see the Magdalene
Home?"
Dr Sutherland: "I want to see how you treat unmarried
mothers. Many of these girls come to England. It is said that 55 per cent of
the girls in British Catholic Rescue Homes are Irish."
Bishop: "That is propaganda. Fr Craven began it.
Cardinal Bourne repeated it. For 25 years I have asked for the figures. They
can't give them. Do you know the figures?"
Sutherland: "No, I'm trying to get them."
Bishop: "You will find there are only a few. Hundreds
of decent Irish girls are going to England. At this moment your government are
advertising high salaries for Irish girls to go to England as nurses in your
mental hospitals."
Sutherland: "English priests say that most of the Irish
lose their faith within six months of coming to England."
Bishop: "Then why don't your English priests look after
the Irish instead of throwing bastards in our face!"
Sutherland: "My Lord, no-one is throwing bastards in
your face. Ireland is a Christian country where going to Mass is a social duty
difficult to avoid."
Bishop: "That is normal. It should be so in
England."
Sunday Independent -----
Insert the following by Jody Corcoran here as follows:
Sunday 15 June 2014
They are names familiar to us: they were us all
Finally
we can give the acknowledgement that was denied to the children during their
brief existence, writes Jody Corcoran
Jody Corcoran
PUBLISHED 15/06/2014|02:30
Tuam
mother and baby home where the bodies of almost 800 babies are believed to be
buried.
Who was Mary Connolly? She died on April 30,
1944, one of three children to die that day of measles. It seems likely she had
spina bifida, that is, her spinal column had failed to form properly while she
was developing in the womb.
Contributing to her death was "congenital
hydrocephalus", more commonly known as "water on the brain", the
cause of which is usually genetic but can be also acquired within the first few
months of life.
What was remarkable about Mary is that she lived for seven
years before she seems to have succumbed to an outbreak of measles which also
claimed the lives of Julia Kelly and Catherine Harrison that day.
In the language of the time, under cause of death, there is
also written the word "idiot" alongside Mary Connolly's name. It is
coldly shocking to see now, but was commonly used in the Tuam mother and baby
home, and elsewhere, at the time.
In all, 17 children were termed "idiot" or
"congenital idiot" in death, including Mary Connolly, who lived for
five days with measles before her death was certified. At least her death was
certified. In several instances, it seems certification did not take place.
Take the Roache twins as an example, a boy and a girl who
were not christened. They died on October 19, 1942, having lived for 23 hours.
"Premature birth" was the cause, the girl's death certified, the
boy's not.
In only two instances an inquest was held into the cause of
death, in the cases of James Murray and Bridget Cunningham.
James died on November 4, 1925, aged four weeks. His cause
of death is listed as "syncope", which is the medical term for
fainting or passing out, but his passing out is said to have come from
"natural causes". The record also states: "Child apparently well
a couple of hours before his death." An inquest was held the day after his
death.
Bridget Cunningham died on January 22, 1928, aged two months.
The cause was given as: "Asphyxia caused by her mother over laying her
deceased child." An inquest was held the following day.
SEE ANALYSIS Pages 20, 22 & 36
Two children died on Christmas Day: Peter Lally in 1925,
aged 11 months, the cause "Intestinal Tuberculosis" and Josephine
Staunton in 1949, aged eight days, the cause "Congenital heart disease.
Icterus". Icterus may refer to Jaundice. Both deaths were certified.
Some of the children seem to have had horrific deaths –
"Abscesses of scalp from birth. Haemorrhage from mucus membranes" –
while others died from what are today relatively minor illness, tonsillitis for
example.
But in truth, there is a heartbreaking life story behind the
short lives of each child on the list: 18 died, directly or indirectly, from
what is called "Marasmus", a form of severe malnutrition which
includes two girls with the surname Kenny and Gilmore.
That is the striking nature of this list of the dead,
published to formally acknowledge a brief existence, an acknowledgement denied
in their short lives – their names are the names familiar to us all, our
families, neighbours, friends, school friends, names we can link to our leaders
and our heroes in sport, culture and life.
They truly were us all.
There are two Corcorans, Patrick who died from
"congenital heart disease" on April 11, 1941 aged one month, and
Annie, my paternal grandmother's name, who died of measles on December 2, 1936,
aged 11 months. Both deaths were certified.
Sunday Independent
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