Dayhoff Soundtrack: Baltimore’s Rosewood scandal: Wealthy families sprang asylum inmates to be servants.

Tuesday, March 18, 2014

Baltimore’s Rosewood scandal: Wealthy families sprang asylum inmates to be servants.

Baltimore’s Rosewood scandal: Wealthy families sprang asylum inmates to be servants.: "Crooked lawyers sprang inmates from an asylum to make them slaves.

By Jesse Bering"

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/medical_examiner/2014/03/baltimore_s_rosewood_scandal_wealthy_families_sprang_asylum_inmates_to_be.html?wpisrc=newsletter_jcr:content&mc_cid=f6af3629f2&mc_eid=b27361148d

The Rosewood Center (née the Maryland Asylum and Training School for the Feeble Minded, est. 1888) is an abandoned mental hospital on the outskirts of Baltimore. The state closed its doors only in 2009 after a mountain of angry complaints involving understaffing, patient abuse, and neglect. Much of the rotting old bedlam now lies in ruins or is caked in thick soot, the aftermath of a recent suspected arson. But even in this dilapidated state, its imposing presence stirs up a sense of the foreboding.

Like many overwhelmed psychiatric facilities built around the turn of the last century, Rosewood had been dogged by shameful accusations for a long time. The most scandalous—the one that sets Rosewood apart from other asylums—was made by Leo Kanner on May 13, 1937. Before a hushed gathering at the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in Pittsburgh, Kanner shared the shocking tale of “the Rosewood girls.” It’s not a story most people know about today, but it’s an important reminder of just how destructive an upper class with an unchecked sense of entitlement can be, and how vital it remains to safeguard the interests of those who can’t do so for themselves. It also forces us to revisit an uncomfortable moment in our nation’s history when the practice of eugenics—human breeding for socially desirable attributes, such as intelligence—was viewed by even the most progressive human rights advocates as humane and ethical.

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