On the treatment of children mentally deficient : an address / by G.E. Shuttleworth.

  • Shuttleworth, G. E. (George Edward), 1842-1928.
Date:
1895
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On the treatment of children mentally deficient : an address / by G.E. Shuttleworth. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.

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    help in the difficult discrimination of those who require instruction separately from the deaf child of normal configura- tion. Defects of development, abnormal nerve signs, and defects of nutrition are the criteria upon which my friend, Dr. Francis Warner, has based his industrious researches for feeble-mindedness amongst 100,000 children in attendance at Elementary Schools.* Our time will not, however, permit us farther to pursue these aspects of the subject. I promised to speak to you especially of the mode of Treatment of Children Mentally Deficient, and perhaps in approaching this I may say a few words as to preventive treatment. This will necessarily take us back to the consideration of some of the more common causes of mental deficiency. Some years ago I published, in conjunction with Dr. Fletcher Beach, an article on the Causes of Idiocy and Imbecility, based upon an experience of 2,380 cases. We found that of hereditary causes, the most common was a phthisical or scrofulous family history; then came hereditary mental weakness, insanity or idiocy in the family history; epilepsy and other nerve affections, parental intemperance, maternal ill-health, accident or shock prior to the child’s birth. The fact that parents were cousins was noted in 5*83 of my cases, and in 2’54 of Dr. Beach’s, the latter being of a lower social class than the former. Convulsions, epilepsy, accidents and illnesses to the child itself were the assigned causes in a large number of cases, but many of these were probably associated with an innate predisposition to mental instability, and often the breakdown occurred at critical periods of the child’s development, such as at the first or second dentition or the approach of puberty. We have, therefore, the classifi- cation of cases on the basis of causation as Congenital or original, Non-congenital or acquired, with the intermediate group of Developmental cases. The congenital cases from hereditary causes are doubtless the more numerous class, though if we accept the statement of parents on the subject the reverse would be apparently true. Speaking generally we * See Report on the Scientific Study of the Mental and Physical Conditions of Childhood. London, 1895.