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The Massachusetts Home for Idiotic and Feeble-Minded Youth, later named the Fernald State School, had a long and at times scandalous history. Below is a short paragraph about the institution.
Social reformer Samuel Gridley Howe founded the school in 1848 with a $2,500 appropriation from the Legislature. Records of Dr. Howe and the beginnings of mental retardation services in the United States reside in Fernald’s Howe Library. Under its first resident superintendent, Walter E. Fernald (1887-1924), the school became a model educational facility in the field of mental retardation. In 1925, the Legislature passed a bill officially naming the school the Walter E. Fernald State School. In its later years it became involved with various experiments that came to light in the 1990's where doctors at the hospital were conducting radiation experiments on the patients living there. It is slowly closing due to an ever decreasing patient population. (Taken from Asylum Projects.)A different view of Walter Fernald, who was the administrator at the time of Stanford's visit, is given in this article, titled "Abandoned Psychiatric Hospitals," appearing in the website, Morbidology.
Fernald was a staunch advocate for eugenics, a misapplication of Darwinian principles and genetics, and was on the board of the Eugenics Society. He genuinely and strongly believed that the best way to improve society was to isolate those whom he considered unwanted or inferior, mainly due to physical or mental disability. As a matter of fact, he advocated for the forced sterilization of people with developmental disabilities. 8Unfortunately, as this article elsewhere notes, as much as half of the inmates of the Fernald school were not developmentally disabled, but just unwanted or given up by parents who could not afford to support them.
Below is a picture of the Dormitory, taken probably around the turn of the century.
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