To Err Can Be Inhuman

This is a heart-rending story about how a myth destroyed the hopes and aspiration of several thousands of people. A myth that had got legal sanctity, along with scientific support of that time, is now completely demolished. The ransacked dreams of the people remain scattered as science progress, law amend itself, as a blot on the face of humanity. But the myth that Intelligence can be measured as a physical quantity and intelligence is inheirted continues to exist in the society being nurtured with our limited observation and sporadic experiences.

Epilogue from Stephen J, Gould’s Book “Mismeausre of Man”, 1981

In 1972 OLIVER WENDEL HOLMES JR. delivered the Supreme Court’s decision upholding the Virginia sterilization law in Buck v. Bell. Carrie Buck, a young mother with a child of allegedly feeble mind, had scored a mental age of nine on the Stanford-Binet. Carrie Buck’s mother, then fifty-two, had tested at the mental age seven. Holmes wrote, in one of the most famous and chilling statements of our country:

We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the state for these lesser sacrifices…….Three generations of imbeciles are enough.

(The line if often miscited as “three generations of idiots…”But Holmes knew the technical jargon of his time, and the Bucks though not normal by the Stanford-Binet, were one grade above idiots.)

Buck v. Bell is a signpost of history, an event linked with the distant past in my mind. The Babe hit his sixty homers in 1927, and legends are all the more wonderful because they seem so distant. I was therefore shocked by an item in the Washington Post on 23 February 1980-for few things can be more disconcerting than a juxtaposition of neatly ordered and separated temporal events. “Over 7,500 sterilized in Virginia,” the headline read. The law that Holmes upheld had been implemented for forty-eight years, from 1924 to 1972. The operations had been performed in mental heath facilities, primarily upon the white men and women considered feeble-minded and antisocial-including “unwed mothers, prostitutes, petty criminals and the children with disciplinary problems.”

Cherrie Buck, now seventy-two lives near Charlottesville. Neither she nor her sister Doris could be considered mentally deficient by today’s standards. Doris Buck was sterilized under the same law in 1928. She married Mathew Figgins, a plumber. But Doris Buck was never informed. “They told me”, she recalled, “The operation was for an appendix and rupture.” So she and Mathew tried to conceive a child. They consulted physicians at three hospitals throughout her childbearing years; no one recognized that her Fallopian tube had been severed. Last year, Doris Buck finally discovered the cause of her lifelong sadness.

One might invoke an unfeeling calculus and say that Doris Buck’s disappointment ranks as nothing compared with millions dead in wars to support the designs of madmen or the conceits of the rulers. But one can measure the pain of a single dream unfulfilled, the hopes of a defenseless woman snatched by public power in the name of an ideology advanced to purify the race. May Doris Buck’s simple and eloquent testimony stand for million of death and disappointment and help us to remember that the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath: “I broke down and cried. My husband and me wanted children desperately. We were crazy about them. I never knew what they’d done to me.”