Profit and Loss: Institutional Labour in England, 1913-2004

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The aims of this proposed study will be:* To investigate the use, extent and importance of patient, or inmate, labour in English and Welsh institutions and colonies, from 1913, the year the Mental Deficiency Act was passed, to 1948, the year of the establishment of the NHS.* To investigate and identify the changes in institutional activity and production methods after 1948, up to 2004, when the original Bristol-based Industrial Therapy Organisation closed.* To rethink, through this two-pronged analysis, how disability was constructed in the professional and public imagination, and thus to fill a significant gap in the existing historiography.For at least 100 years, people with Learning Difficulties worked, without wages or pensions, in institutions, hospitals, occupation centres and colonies which would not have survived without their labour. Indeed, The Wood Committee (1929) had advocated the formation of self-sufficient 'colonies' that would cater for all groups of mental defective, regardless of age or level of disability. These institutions were designed to rely on patient labour for their very survival - large-scale, indefinite confinement was costly. Mental deficiency was not, in itself, curable. This fact alone might go some way to account for its lack of exploration in the published histories of madness and confinement, from the early nineteenth century. Mental deficiency did not generally offer the physician the opportunity to theorise, experiment and so to triumph. Nobody was going to find a chemical, surgical or even therapy-based cure for mental deficiency, and later behaviour modification therapy was controversial and could be more expensive than sedation treatments. The histories of the Learning Disabled, the retarded, the mentally defective, the imbecile and the idiot can be difficult to find. They are buried beneath the weight of our endeavours to understand, evaluate and document the ways we have dealt, through time, with madness - a condition which Scull(2015) asserts to be 'something wholly outside [civilisation] and alien to it.' Foucault (1964) draws us to note the outsider status of the patient in their delirium - a word derived from the Latin, delirare, meaning to deviate, be deranged, literally 'to deviate from the furrow'. His exploration of the theory of 'othering' as a means to exert and maintain power over a particular, deemed to be weaker, group also resonates with the concepts of construction and medicalisation of both mental illness and intellectual disability. If the mentally ill are considered to be 'other' through time, where does that place the idiot, imbecile or mental defective? Frankly, some commentators barely give them a passing mention - they are a mysterious, incurable 'also-ran'. The history of the mental institution and the mentally ill confined therein has been explored at length. We need to be aware that the idiot, the imbecile and the mad in England generally shared accommodation and treatments until the early 20th century, given a lack of legal imperative to identify and separate them. Indeed, the highly controversial surgical procedure of frontal lobotomy, 'not recommended for curing or treating intellectual or developmental disabilities' (Kate Clifford Larson, 2015) was used in American hospitals for 'feeble minded' patients into the late 1940's. However, the specific examination of the condition and experiences of Learning Disabled people throughout history is scant. Dan Goodley (2001) speaks of 'absent literature' and in 1987, Ryan and Thomas noted that, 'Mentally handicapped people are still as hidden from history as they are from the rest of life. What history they do have is not so much theirs as the history of others acting either on their behalf or against them.' Over thirty years later, we are still some considerable way from dealing with that omission.