Care of the Feeble-minded: Conference in London: Yesterday: Suggested Reforms: In the absence of Lord Radnor, Lord Shuttleworth presided at Denison House, Victoria, yesterday, at a conference of persons interested in the care and Control of the Feeble-Minded. Dr. H. B. Donkin delivered an address on the need of establishing one authority for the care of the feeble-minded. The Royal Commissioners he said were practically unanimous in their conviction that a single central authority to supervise any form of administration dealing with the care and control of the mentally defective was absolutely indispensable. … … The new Board would have to see that a large number of persons were properly controlled under a new certificate which would require a high degree of medical knowledge and skill. Mrs. Hume Pinsent, who was a member of the Royal Commission, said that the injustice and even cruelty caused by the inefficient methods of the four authorities dealing with the feeble-minded was really beyond description. The Board of Education educated 9,000 children at three times the normal cost, and then, at the age of fourteen or sixteen, turned them adrift, incapable of self-support or control. The Local Government Boar allowed them to drift in and out of the workhouses, and, under the control of the Home Office, they were sent to industrial schools, where there was no chance of making them self-supporting, or into inebriated homes. The Lunacy Commission alone could be said to approach the subject from a useful point of view. There should be a single authority to take cognisance of all degrees of mentally defective people, and to frame a consistent and continuous policy. Until there were powers of detention, the money put forward on behalf of the mentally defective was so much money thrown into the gutter. It was worse than useless to place the mentally defective under care and control until the age of sixteen and then let them free … … (discussion continues) … …
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Referenced
GRO0245 Devonport: Ellen Frances Parker: 1866 – 1949