Every public issue has a history profitable to explore, a history of problem emergence, social recognition, and arrival before governmental officials. Few issues, however, have a background as lengthy and rich as the care of mentally disabled persons, which reaches back to days before the formation of the U.S. republic.
Throughout most of Western history, mental impairments have been viewed in terms of the supernatural. This tendency peaked during the Middle Ages, when "lunacy" and "idiocy" were understood either as divine punishment or the result of involvement with evil spirits. As Albert Deutsch , author of The Mentally Ill in America ( 1949: 6), remarks, "Therapeutic measures in mental illness [have been] based on the prevailing theory of causes." Accordingly, in medieval times, the primary methods of prevention and care were magic and ritual. Consider, for example, a typical tenth-century English cure for insanity: "In case a man be lunatic; take a skin of mere-swine (sea-pig) or porpoise, work it into a whip, swinge the man therewith, soon he will be well. Amen" (quoted in Deutsch, 1949: 12-13). At its worst, the medieval approach to the problem of mental deviancy was less antic. It has been estimated that, between the mid-1400s and 1700, not less than 100,000 persons were executed as witches, many of whom probably suffered from some form of mental illness (Deutsch, 1949: 18).
Bringing with them European customs and attitudes, colonial Americans shared many Old World superstitions about mental problems. In the mid-1600s, the whipping post and the gallows were common punishments in cases of supposed demonic possession. But at the same time, a more benign approach was slowly coming into existence as Western society emerged from the shadow of the Middle Ages. By the late 1700s, for example, physicians were beginning to consider the relationship between.......
