On the education of the imbecile / by Dora Greenwell.

  • Greenwell, Dora, 1821-1882.
Date:
1869
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On the education of the imbecile / by Dora Greenwell. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    curiously enough, considered as forming a variety in the genus Homo. Its headings read strangely— Juvenis Lupinus Hessensis, 1544—a young man found in Hesse among wolves. Juvenis Ursinus Lithuanus—a young man found among bears in Lithuania. Juvenis Ovinus Hibernus—a young man found among wild sheep in Ireland. Juvenis Bovinus Bambergensis—a young man found among herds of oxen near Bamberg ; and so on through the sorrow¬ ful catalogue, ‘ Sorte funesta clari. ’ Contemporary with Itard’s labours may be noticed those of another celebrated physician, Fodere, a Savoyard, who gave his attention to Cretinism, a local form of idiocy, involving physical and mental degeneracy of the profoundest type, attributable as is generally known to atmospheric causes, and to hereditary transmission in the places which have originally favoured its development. Fodere entered on the path since then more fully explored by Dr. Guggen- biihl, and tried to ameliorate the condition of the Cretin* of the Alpine valleys, to make him serviceable in rural industry, and in some degree to educate him. But the attention, never perhaps very general, which had been excited by the writings of Itard and Fodere was not of that * It is not perhaps generally known that the word Cretin, linked with such painful and repellent associations, is a modification of the family name of the great family of Christ. They were called ‘ Chretiens’ by the peasantry, in the same spirit that has sometimes given them the name of ‘innocents,’ and which still continues in Eastern countries to invest insanity with a protecting halo. And the name imports that these are Christians as it wer& par excellence, children of the good God, born irresponsible, and therefore incapable of ever displeasing Him.