Edith and the Rampton leucotomies
In May 1938 sixteen-year-old Edith Haithwaite was up before the magistrates in Ripon, Yorkshire, on a charge of larceny. Edith admitted to the crime and was bound over for twelve months. Within a couple of months she had broken the conditions of her bond by associating with "a certain person". So she was up before the magistrates again and this time the punishment was harsher. Edith was remanded to an approved school. Evidently she didn't settle at the approved school because a couple of months later the magistrates were again considering her case. This time they committed her to an institution as a mental defective. She was to spend the next eighteen years incarcerated for her crime of larceny. And during that incarceration she underwent a leucotomy.
Mental defectives had a relatively brief existence in Britain. They were created by the Mental Deficiency Act of 1913 and abolished by the Mental Health Act of 1959. They were divided into three different categories: the "imbeciles" and "idiots" who would nowadays be considered to have a learning disability and the more nebulous group of "feeble-minded". The latter included people of average intelligence who had somehow fallen by the wayside, the "socially inefficient" as they were called in those days. They often arrived at their diagnosis of mental deficiency via extreme childhood adversity and institutional care or, like Edith, the courts.
In 1920 there were about 10,000 mental defectives in institutions in England and Wales; by 1946 that number had grown to nearly 60,000 with a further 43,000 under statutory supervision in the community. There were two State Institutions for "violent and dangerous" mental defectives: Rampton near Nottingham and Moss Side near Liverpool. Usually the inmates of Rampton and Moss Side had been transferred from other mental deficiency institutions and the violence and danger often consisted of self-harm, suicide attempts or window smashing. It was in Rampton that Edith ended up.
In 1927 the Mental Deficiency Act, which applied only to those in whom a defect was supposed to have been present since birth, was amended to include post-encephalitics, survivors of the encephalitis lethargica pandemic who were sometimes left with destructive and anti-social tendencies as a result of the illness.
Mental Deficiency legislation had originally received support from politicians of all parties (Liberal MP Josiah Wedgewood - the "last of the radicals" - was a notable opponent of the Act) as it was seen as a more humane alternative to incarceration in lunatic asylums, workhouses or prisons. But by the 1940s there was widespread concern about the numbers of people being held under the Act and the National Council for Civil Liberties led a campaign which exposed abuses of the Act and accused authorities of using the inmates of mental deficiency institutions as a source of cheap labour. One teenage girl featured in the NCCL's campaign had been found to be working ten-hour days in an institution's laundry and kitchen for a shilling a week, most of which was taken back to pay for a sweet ration.
George W Mackay, the Medical Superindent of Rampton, together with Sheffield neurosurgeon James Hardman introduced leucotomy into the institution in 1947. Within little more than a year twenty operations had been carried out and George Mackay had written an article for the Journal of Mental Science entitled "Leucotomy in the treatment of psychopathic feeble-minded patients in a state mental deficiency institution". The diagnosis of psychopathic in those days was given to patients who self-harmed and smashed things. Typical was AVT, a young man who had been admitted to Rampton at the age of 13 from a children's institution after two suicide attempts. An very good chess player, his only crimes were to have violent outbursts in which he smashed crockery and to be "given to homosexual practices". Following leucotomy at the age of 23 he was employed in the ward pantry and was able to look after crockery without smashing it, putting him in the "markedly improved or recovered" category. Young women could earn the label of psychopathic by showing "emotional instability" or "moral deficiency". Of the first twenty patients operated on, two had epilepsy and five were post-encephalitics. One patient was just fourteen years old and had been admitted to Rampton aged nine. Mackay was pleased with the results in this girl, saying "from being a depraved and hopeless little animal she is now quite a sociable, clean child." She had also gained a lot of weight and "would go on eating indefinitely if not stopped". One patient died and five were unchanged or worse but Mackay was not deterred and ended his article by expressing his intention to operate on "a wider group of clinical types".
Edith had agreed to a leucotomy because she had been told that it would lead to her release. It didn't. Instead it was her sister's writ of habeas corpus which finally led to her freedom when the High Court decided that her eighteen-year detention as a mental defective had been illegal as the Ripon magistrates had overstepped their authority.
Mental defectives had a relatively brief existence in Britain. They were created by the Mental Deficiency Act of 1913 and abolished by the Mental Health Act of 1959. They were divided into three different categories: the "imbeciles" and "idiots" who would nowadays be considered to have a learning disability and the more nebulous group of "feeble-minded". The latter included people of average intelligence who had somehow fallen by the wayside, the "socially inefficient" as they were called in those days. They often arrived at their diagnosis of mental deficiency via extreme childhood adversity and institutional care or, like Edith, the courts.
In 1920 there were about 10,000 mental defectives in institutions in England and Wales; by 1946 that number had grown to nearly 60,000 with a further 43,000 under statutory supervision in the community. There were two State Institutions for "violent and dangerous" mental defectives: Rampton near Nottingham and Moss Side near Liverpool. Usually the inmates of Rampton and Moss Side had been transferred from other mental deficiency institutions and the violence and danger often consisted of self-harm, suicide attempts or window smashing. It was in Rampton that Edith ended up.
In 1927 the Mental Deficiency Act, which applied only to those in whom a defect was supposed to have been present since birth, was amended to include post-encephalitics, survivors of the encephalitis lethargica pandemic who were sometimes left with destructive and anti-social tendencies as a result of the illness.
Mental Deficiency legislation had originally received support from politicians of all parties (Liberal MP Josiah Wedgewood - the "last of the radicals" - was a notable opponent of the Act) as it was seen as a more humane alternative to incarceration in lunatic asylums, workhouses or prisons. But by the 1940s there was widespread concern about the numbers of people being held under the Act and the National Council for Civil Liberties led a campaign which exposed abuses of the Act and accused authorities of using the inmates of mental deficiency institutions as a source of cheap labour. One teenage girl featured in the NCCL's campaign had been found to be working ten-hour days in an institution's laundry and kitchen for a shilling a week, most of which was taken back to pay for a sweet ration.
George W Mackay, the Medical Superindent of Rampton, together with Sheffield neurosurgeon James Hardman introduced leucotomy into the institution in 1947. Within little more than a year twenty operations had been carried out and George Mackay had written an article for the Journal of Mental Science entitled "Leucotomy in the treatment of psychopathic feeble-minded patients in a state mental deficiency institution". The diagnosis of psychopathic in those days was given to patients who self-harmed and smashed things. Typical was AVT, a young man who had been admitted to Rampton at the age of 13 from a children's institution after two suicide attempts. An very good chess player, his only crimes were to have violent outbursts in which he smashed crockery and to be "given to homosexual practices". Following leucotomy at the age of 23 he was employed in the ward pantry and was able to look after crockery without smashing it, putting him in the "markedly improved or recovered" category. Young women could earn the label of psychopathic by showing "emotional instability" or "moral deficiency". Of the first twenty patients operated on, two had epilepsy and five were post-encephalitics. One patient was just fourteen years old and had been admitted to Rampton aged nine. Mackay was pleased with the results in this girl, saying "from being a depraved and hopeless little animal she is now quite a sociable, clean child." She had also gained a lot of weight and "would go on eating indefinitely if not stopped". One patient died and five were unchanged or worse but Mackay was not deterred and ended his article by expressing his intention to operate on "a wider group of clinical types".
Edith had agreed to a leucotomy because she had been told that it would lead to her release. It didn't. Instead it was her sister's writ of habeas corpus which finally led to her freedom when the High Court decided that her eighteen-year detention as a mental defective had been illegal as the Ripon magistrates had overstepped their authority.
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