Page Introduction
Welcome to the disABILITY and the Medical Establishment timeline. Here you will find a descriptive timeline featuring disABILITY and the medical community from 400 BC to 1982.
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disABILITY and the Medical Establishment Timeline
The medical establishment has played a pivotal role in the lives of individuals who have disabilities. In antiquity, individuals with "differences" were viewed with curiosity, superstition, seen as harbingers of evil or as a connection to the devine, and were pitied, and/or persecuted. As scientific and medical knowledge advanced, the medical community began to classify and concoct cures or treatments to lessen or eliminate the disabling conditions. Medical researchers seeking to prevent or treat disabilities often viewed the large groups of institutionalized individuals as prime candidates for medical experimentation. These individuals often had no voice in their participation in the research. Here are some key events in the history of disABILITY and the medical community.
400 B.C.
Hippocrates, the Greek physician, wrote the first work on epilepsy disputing that the disorder was a curse or caused by the gods. He believed that epilepsy was a brain disorder. "It is thus with regard to the disease called Sacred: it appears to me to be nowise more divine or more sacred than other diseases, but has a natural cause from the originates like other affections. Men regard its nature and cause as divine from ignorance and wonder, because it is not at all like to other diseases."
1494
Malleus Maleficarum, or translated "The Hammer of the Witches," is a witch hunting manual which discusses seizures as a characteristic of witches. The manual was written by two Dominican Friars with the authority of the pope.
1745
Phillipe Pinel, a doctor at La Bicetre, a Paris asylum, unchains the mental patients at the institution. The unchaining of the insane became known as the "moral treatment" and was replaced with the use of straitjackets. Seven years later he would create a four part classification system of major mental illnesses, a first of its kind.
1751
The Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia, with the help of Benjamin Franklin, is the first hospital to create a special section for the treatment of mental illness and mental retardation. In 1756, these patients would be chained to the walls of the basement and put on display for a fee.
1773
Virginia establishes the first hospital solely for the treatment of "idiots, lunatics and other people of unsound mind."
1801
Jean Marc Gaspard Itard attempts to teach and train Victor the "Wild Boy of Aveyron." Itard, whose career started in the medical field, devised methods of instruction that are still influential.
1812
Dr. Benjamin Rush, considered the "father of American psychiatry," writes his Observations and Inquiries upon the Diseases of the Mind. It was the first textbook on psychiatry in the United States. Rush also signed the Declaration of Independence.
1821
The Bloomingdale Asylum opened in 1821 devoted to the care of the mentally insane. The asylum used moral treatment on the insane patients. The asylum later moved to White Plains in 1894.
1838
Jean Etienne Esquirol publishes Des Maladies Mentales. Esquirol was the first to distinguish between mental illness and mental retardation. He also established a classification system for mental disabilities.
1860
Cerebral Palsy was first classified by the British surgeon William Little. It was first named Little's Disease but was also known as Cerebral Paralysis.
1866
Johnathan Langdon Down publishes the first clinical description of what is later known as Down syndrome.
1869
The first wheelchair patent was registered with the United States patent office. This image shows an early 20th century wheel chair.
1883
The term "eugenics" is coined by Sir Francis Galton.
1907
Indiana passes the first eugenic sterilization law.
1913
Mental examinations for immigrants are proposed to the United States Congress. Henry Goddard administers the tests on Ellis Island and deportations increase dramatically.
1915
Dr. Harry Haiselden allows a disabled newborn to perish and promotes this as a way to reduce the disabled population. In 1916 the movie "The Black Stork" is produced to further advocate the practice.
1921
Franklin Roosevelt contracts polio. Elected President of the United States in 1932, Roosevelt tried to hide his disability.
1927
Buck v. Bell is heard in the Supreme Court of the United States. The court rules in favor of forced sterilization of the feeble-minded.
1927
Franklin Roosevelt helps to establish the Warm Springs Foundation for the rehabilitation of polio patients in Warm Springs, Georgia. One year later he ran successfully for New York Governor. Roosevelt had visited the naturally warm springs to relieve his paralysis from polio in 1924 and built his home there as well.
1927
The first Iron Lung was invented by Harvard medical researchers Philip Drinker and Louis Agassiz Shaw. Polio patients that had difficulty or were unable to breathe would be placed in the iron machines to aid inflating and deflating the lungs.
1941
Rosemary Kennedy is lobotomized and two years later sent to the St. Coletta School in Jefferson, Wisconsin. She spent 57 years at the school until she passed away at the age of 86.
1943
The classification of autism was introduced by Dr. Leo Kanner of Johns Hopkins University. Kanner used the term "early infantile autism" and the characteristics he described in a paper published in The Nervous Child are still included in the autism spectrum of disorder.
1952
Dr. Jonas Salk developed a polio vaccine that went through massive testing in the United States and Canada in 1954. The United States government sanctioned the vaccine in 1955 but it eventually caused 10 deaths and 260 cases of polio.
1953
Medical experiments are conducted on 100 boys at the Fernald School in Waverly, Massachusetts. The boys were subjected to radioactive elements in their food to determine the effects.
1961
Dr. Robert Guthrie's PKU (phenylketonuria) newborn screening test is ready to be implemented. PKU is a heredity disease that causes severe brain damage and leads to mental retardation. The test, a simplified version of prior tests, requires only a drop of a newborns blood placed on filter paper. A trial of the test is implemented on almost 3,000 residents of the Newark State Institution near Rochester, New York.
1963
A new polio vaccine was developed by Dr. Albert Sabin. His form of the vaccine was taken orally instead of the earlier syringe method.
1963
The Mental Retardation Facilities and Community Health Center Construction Act was passed. John F. Kennedy signed the bill into law on October 31, 1963.
1965
Medicare and Medicaid are established under the Social Security Amendments. Medicaid established health insurance for Americans considered disabled.
1982
Doctors in Bloomington, Indiana had advised the parents of a disabled newborn baby to reject a life saving operation. The case, known as the "Baby Doe" case, involved a newborn with Down syndrome.