Vermont Eugenics

'Therapeutic Castration' of Boys

'An Effective Means of Race Preservation'

The 1904 annual meeting of the New England Kurn Hattin Homes Association was held on June 3rd. William J. Van Patten, former Burlington mayor and Vermont Senator Pro Tem, was reelected president and also chairman of the board. The annual report quotes the following:

"Since our annual meeting, held June 10, 1903, eight boys have been admitted to the homes and eight have left. Five of the boys admitted are from Vermont, two from New Hampshire and one from Massachusetts. Of those leaving, five returned to their relative, two were placed in private families and one was sent to the Hospital Cottages for Children at Baldwinville, Massachusetts.

The Hospital Cottages for Children opened at Baldwinville, Massachusetts in 1882, as an institution for the "training, and treatment of "diseased, maimed, feeble-minded, destitute and orphan children." Children, with physical as well as mental handicaps, were boarded at the Hospital while awaiting commitment to state schools.

In 1898, an article in the American Journal of Psychology by Everett Flood, M.D., Superintendant of the Hospital Cottages for Children in Baldwinville, Massachusetts, previously of the Worcester Lunatic Hospital, reported on the castration of male children who were inmates of the institution: "24 were operated on because of persistent epilepsy and masturbation, one for epilepsy with imbecility, and one for masturbation with a weakness of mind." About half the children were under 14 years of age, the others ages 15 to 17. According to the report, 14 of the cases were Americans, six Irish, one Scotch, one Swedish, the others of unknown extraction. At the time of the report, 17 of the cases were still in the institution, 3 were in "lunatic hospitals", 5 at home with parents, and the location of one unknown.

Flood believed that those considered to be mentally and socially "defective" should be prevented from having children. His gruesome surgeries were reported to the American Association for the Study of Feebleness, who wrote in 1904 that children should be sterilized "immediately upon being adjudged defective... as an effective means of race preservation." One wonders what became of the Kurn Hattin boy who was committed to the Hospital Cottages for Children. Was he sexually mutilated by Dr. Flood in the name of science and human betterment by brutal emasculating castration? But as the superintendent of Kurn Hattin, A.G. Frazier stated during a fundraising visit to St. Johnsbury, Vt., "No child but of the best moral character and of sound mentality is accepted at the school."

A disturbing aspect of the history of eugenics in the United States is the use of "therapeutic castration" as a means of controlling the behavior of institutionalized children. At the turn of the 20th century, eugenics was a popular and widely accepted idea, and many physicians and scientists believed that it was possible to improve the genetic quality of the human race by selectively controlling reproduction. The use of eugenics as a means of controlling human reproduction is now widely recognized as a violation of human rights, and the dehumanizing practices of so-called "therapeutic castration" and coerced or forced eugenical sterilization are no longer performed in the United States. However, the legacy of eugenics continues to be felt in many ways, including the ongoing debate over reproductive rights and the ethical issues surrounding genetic engineering and gene editing.

The board of trustees meeting reveals that Kurn Hattin Homes for Children not only "placed out" the children in their alleged care to Vermont farms and homes who needed trained workers, but they also had relationships for committing children to other institutions, not just in Vermont, but also in other states. Matthew Crenson, in Building the Invisible Orphanage writes of the increased reliance on orphanages as the 19th century progressed; how most children in those institutions actually had a parent living; how there never were enough orphanages to house all dependent children. Late nineteenth-century progressive reformers became disenchanted with "institutionalism" and devised the modern foster care system and mother's pensions (Vermont Mother’s Aid) as alternatives. In the 1800s and early 1900’s, dependent children were often indentured and placed out to live on farms. The architects of this placing out system thought they were taking children from bad environments and putting them in Christian (Protestant) homes, but Crenson cites moving examples of children indentured on farms whose overriding memory was of the cold, demanding, and sexually abusive households they lived in, “I have never read as good, an account of the politics of "placing out" in the nineteenth and twentieth century.”

Contemporary historical records show that Kurn Hattin had a strict probationary period for its newly admitted children of between 3 and 6 months. The residential school administered Psychometric testing as part of that evaluation process. Field investigators of the Eugenics Survey of Vermont later conducted psychometric tests and obtained extant internal records of inmates of many of Vermont's institutions for the Vermont Commission on Country Life - Committee on the Handicapped, which was chaired by Kurn Hattin director, William Mayo, whose work and political lobbying is acknowledged to have resulted in the legislative passing and enactment of Vermont's state sanctioned 1931 eugenical sterilization law.

Psychometric testing has its roots in the work of British psychologist, Francis Galton and a cousin of Charles Darwin, who coined the idea and the term Eugenic, meaning wellborn. Galton is considered the father of psychometrics. In the late 19th century, he developed the concept of mental tests, which he believed could be used to measure intelligence and other mental abilities.

He and other psychometricians applied statistical methods to the study of human differences and the heredity of intelligence, introducing the use of questionnaires and surveys for collecting data on human communities, which he needed for his genealogical and biographical studies. Psychometric tests became a means to isolate and manipulate marginalized communities using the language of science. Supporters of eugenics in the early 1900s used psychometrics to identify "idiots", "imbeciles", and the "feebleminded," who the eugenicists argued, threatened to dilute the 'original strong pioneer' genetic stock of America.

Notes on the Castration of Idiot Children