Walter E. Fernald State School

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The Massachusetts School for Idiotic Children, renamed the Walter E. Fernald State School in 1925, was a mental hospital for "feeble-minded" boys and hosted one of the most infamous science experiments of the twentieth century. Originally a Victorian sanitarium, the institution became a poster child for the American eugenics movement during the 1920's.

Fernald School is the Western Hemisphere’s oldest publicly-funded institution serving the developmentally disabled. Reformer Samuel Gridley Howe founded the school in 1848 with a $2,500 appropriation from the Massachusetts Legislature. Under its first resident superintendent, Walter E. Fernald (1887-1924), an advocate of eugenics, the school was viewed as a model educational facility in the field of mental retardation.

The school includes 72 buildings total, located on 186 acres at 200 Trapelo Rd, Waltham, Massachusetts. At its peak, some 2,500 people were confined here, most of them children. The institution did serve a large population of mentally retarded children, but the Boston Globe estimates that upwards of half the population tested with IQ's in the normal range. In the 20th century, living conditions were spartan or worse; approximately 36 children slept in each dormitory room.

Despite widespread reports of physical and sexual abuse, the Fernald School is best known as the site of 1946-1953 joint experiments by Harvard University and MIT that exposed young male children to repeated doses of radiation. Documents declassified in 1994 by the United States Department of Energy revealed the following details:

• The experiment was sponsored in part by the Quaker Oats Company
• MIT Professor of Nutrition Robert S. Harris led the experiment, which studied the absorption of calcium and iron
• The boys were encouraged to join a "Science Club", which offered larger portions of food, parties, and trips to Boston Red Sox baseball games
• The club "members" ate iron-enriched cereals and calcium-enriched milk for breakfast. In order to track absorption, several radioisotope tracers were mixed into the meal.
• Radiation levels in stool and blood samples would serve as depedent variables.
• 17 select "members" received iron supplement shots containing more radioisotopes.
• Neither the children or their parents ever consented to participation in a scientific study.

The Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, reporting to the United States Department of Energy in 1994, reported on these experiments:

In 1946, one study exposed seventeen subjects to radioactive iron. The second study, which involved a series of seventeen related subexperiments, exposed fifty-seven subjects to radioactive calcium between 1950 and 1953. It is clear that the doses involved were low and that it is extremely unlikely that any of the children who were used as subjects were harmed as a consequence. These studies remain morally troubling, however, for several reasons. First, although parents or guardians were asked for their permission to have their children involved in the research, the available evidence suggests that the information provided was, at best, incomplete. Second, there is the question of the fairness of selecting institutionalized children at all, children whose life circumstances were by any standard already heavily burdened.

A movement for mental health reform ended the admission of children to Fernald in 1972. The buildings and grounds survive as a center for mentally disabled adults, operated by the Massachusetts Department of Mental Retardation. In 2001, 320 adults resided at Fernald, with ages ranging from 27-96 years and an average age of 47 years. In a December 13, 2004 article in the Boston Globe, Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney announced that the facility would be closed and the land sold by 2007.

[edit] Citations

• D'Antonio, Michael. The State Boys Rebellion. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004.
• Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, United States Department of Energy, 1994. Part II, Chapter 7. Available from [1]
• Bronner, F., R.S. Harris, C.J. Maletskos, and C.E. Benda. "Studies in Calcium Metabolism. The Fate of Intravenously Injected Radiocalcium in Human Beings". Journal of Clinical Investigation. Vol. 35, 1956, pp. 78 88.