Having had been a life-long reader of the Boston Globe* I knew who Charles Pierce was long before he became nationally famous as the almost always excellent political writer for Esquire. And I have almost always admired his work and his insights.
Someone who, apparently, has monitored this blog for past things I wrote tells me that he brought up the Tuam orphanage yesterday. It's a shame he did because like virtually every other journalist who has brought it up, the things he cites while doing it are dodgy at best and totally crappy journalism most typically based on incompetent amateur history. And it's a shame he did so, attaching that to the enormous ongoing national scandal of the Trump-Sessions child abuse scandal. Which I will address after I deal with the really awful misrepresentation of the long ago issue of institutional care of children. I do think that his other resort to finding an appalling parallel, the infamous "Magdalene laundries" is more appropriate.
The link Pierce gives in regard to the Tuam orphanage is to a typically bad Irish CentralNews article from last year, complete with the world-wide reported lie about " how up to 800 children were allowed to die and their bodies stuffed in a septic tank by the Bon Secours sisters in Tuam, County Galway," which was debunked long ago. I wrote about that at the time the "scandal" broke.
This article carries a newer accusation based on the same local amateur historian who, as I recall, tried to distance herself from the septic tank reports, claiming she never made that accusation. But she makes another one that shows how easy it is for a combination of inadequate research and news scribblers on the make to take off when it feeds an appetite for the salacious and scandalous with the prevailing prejudices of the allegedly educated class.
Catherine Corless tracked down death certificates for nearly 800 children. Eighteen she discovered died of starvation; yes, they were starved to death.
There was a link to the death records at the at the Tuam home, I went through them to look for evidence that children were starved to death and found that there was absolutely nothing to support that claim.
First, the definition of the term used for starvation found in the records, marasmus has to be understood. The dictionary definition, how it is used today is,
malnutrition occurring in infants and young children, caused by insufficient intake of calories or protein and characterized by thinness, dry skin, poor muscle development, and irritability.
But in medical language for the period the records were made, "infantile marasmus" was a widespread cause of death and it was known to have many medical causes unrelated to actual failure to try to provide nutrition to an infant or child. It could be caused by any number of things and could be a result of allergies, illness, a complication of other health problems in a time when infant mortality was very high and something a doctor could be expected to see often, inside and outside of an institution. A number of medical papers were written on the topic. This paper, by Dr. Fritz Talbot, MD, written five years before the first of the Tuam deaths attributed to marasmus says
Severe infantile malnutrition has received many names, such as infantile atrophy, marasmus, atrophy, athrepsia and decomposition. It does not represent a definite disease entity nor is there any clear description of exactly what the condition is. It is found in all degrees of severity and it is often difficult to state just when it commences. It is usually associated with symptoms of indigestion, either vomiting or diarrhea, or both, and a loss of weight. Some infections, such as pyelitis or bronchitis often complicates the condition. When most pronounced the infant is very much wasted, the skin hangs in folds and is of a gray pallor, the hands and feet tend to be cold, and toward the end the temperature becomes subnormal and has to be maintained by external heat. Metabolism experiments show that the infant is frequently unable to absorb the food given him. There is no common pathologic basis for the symptoms found in this condition. Marriott has drawn attention to the fact that there is a decrease of blood volume coincident with the malnutrition.
Most methods of study of this condition do not give results which explain what is going on in the body. . .
So, that's what a doctor writing a death certificate would probably mean when he or she attributed a death to "marasmus" or starvation, most often a result of some known or unknown medical condition. And when you look at the records you find that all of the deaths with that attribution at the Tuam home were of infants, in some cases with indications of a known underlying condition that caused it. Here from the spreadsheet of all of the deaths at the Tuam home linked to by the article.
January 5, 1926,
Anthony Cooke, 1 month, convulsions (7 days) Marasmus
June 5, 1926
Patricia Dunne, 2 months Measles (9 days) Marasmus
August 26 1926
Peter McNamara 7 weeks Congenital malformation of colon Marasmus
September 1, 1926.
Mary Murphy 2 months pneumonia (3 days) Marsmus Pneumonia
December 27, 1929
Patrick Kelly 2 1/2 months Marasmus from Birth
I will note this phrase "marasmus from birth" could mean the doctor concluded there was some congenital condition that caused the baby to be unable to get adequate nutrition but used the general term which a person, now, would read and conclude the baby was intentionally or negligently starved to death.
May 7, 1932,
Patricia Judge 1 year, Marsmus certified
June 5, 1933
Mary Fiona Cunniffe 6 months, Marsmus 3 months, Certified
August 22, 1933
John Kilmartin 2 months, Marsmus 2 months Whooping cough, cardiac failure
September 9, 1933, 2 months Marsmus. Asthema. Cardiac failure, Certified
September 28, 1933
Mary Brennan, 4 months Marasmus 3 months, Certified
May 3, 1937
John Patrick Loftus 10 months, Marasmus, Certified
January 23, 1937
Margaret Linnane 3 1/2 months Marasmus certified
January 1, 1938
Teresa Heneghan 3 months, Marasmus, certified
June 6, 1947
Bridget Agatha Kenny 2 months Mental defective, Marasmus, Certified
It's possible I missed some of the "18 deaths by starvation" claimed by Ms. Corless but I did read through all of the stated causes of death and found these fourteen.
If there were something like routine starvation of children - such as in the infamous Canadian "butter box" babies scandal - in an institution as large as that at Tuam, I'd imagine you would expect to see such deaths listed, not in isolation, but in blocks, such as those where childhood illnesses swept through the institution, whooping cough, measles, chicken pox. There are no such blocks of deaths close in time. And to attribute any blame for such negligence, you would need more information than the death certificates provide, such as how long the children were in the institution before they died. It would also be necessary to know to what extent the institution might have acted as a hospital of last resort. I don't know that and I haven't seen any kind of analysis that took a full picture into account.
When I looked into this, when the "scandal" first broke I asked a question that I didn't see any journalist consider, whether the percentage of children who died in the Tuam home was unusual for institutions of the time or, in fact, if those numbers were high for the general, uninstitutionalized population in the care of their parents. I concluded the numbers, especially in the period before modern antibiotics were known, were not unusually high. If you look at the other deaths at Tuam, they read like a list of common reasons young children died at the time.
The Irish Central article starts with an inflammatory quote from Doctor Ella Webb in the Irish Times of June 1924
“A great many people are always asking what is the good of keeping these children alive? I quite agree that it would be a great deal kinder to strangle these children at birth than to put them out to nurse.” speaking about illegitimate children in care in Ireland at the time.
The use of the quote is deceptive and dishonest as it doesn't identify who the "great many people" who were asking that question were. It doesn't sound like contemporary Catholic rhetoric, though it is typical of the secular, especially Darwinist point of view* of the time. I strongly suspect that, despite what the clip said, it misrepresented Dr. Webb's point of view, from the little I've read about her this morning. This description of her seems to be the common consensus of her real character:
It has been argued that St Ultan’s Hospital, established in 1919 served the same functions. However, it appears that the main women doctors involved in its foundation, such as Kathleen Lynn, Katharine Maguire and Ella Webb (née Ovenden) were concerned primarily with improving the health and sanitary conditions of Dublin’s poor, as was evident from their earlier involvement in organisations such as the Women’s National Health Association, rather than the promotion of the professional interests of women doctors.
And this:
Webb is also reputed to have appointed the first Medical Social Worker (or Almoner as they were then known) in Ireland. She had made a request in 1919 at a meeting of the Red Cross Society in Dublin for a Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) to help in the dispensary for sick children that she had established in the Adelaide Hospital in Dublin the previous year. Miss Winifred Alcock, who had been training as an Almoner in London, responded to the request and started voluntary work with Dr Webb. After three years Miss Alcock put in a request for a full time salaried assistant resulting in the appointment of Miss Olive Crawford as the first qualified almoner. This was the beginning of social work in the Irish hospital system.
Dr. Webb studied mortality among children in Dublin under one year old, which was abnormally high in 1915 and did pioneering work in preventative medicine with children. She became famous for prescribing a teaspoonful of Guinness for infants recovering from gastroenteritis. She was also the founder of the Children's Sunshine Home in Stillorgan, Dublin which was originally a convalescent home for children suffering from rickets in the early 1920s.
I will admit that when I saw the name "Webb" I associated it with the enemies of the poor, Beatrice and Sidney Webb, it's something I have no problem imagining might be said at one of their meetings - read the literature of the Fabian Society for confirmation of that - especially such stuff as Karl Pearson wrote and George Bernard Shaw said in Fabian literature. But Dr. Webb doesn't appear to have conducted her career in that manner.
Understanding history isn't as easy as the amateur historian who became famous through this "scandal" and, obviously, even fine, not to mention crap journalists would take it to be. You have to look at the meanings of words for the time they were used, you have to look at things like what children commonly died of and try to understand what it all means instead of looking for support for your preferred prejudices. But that's the typical use of history instead of using it to understand reality. And once a lie like the "babies in the septic tank" are spread, they take on a false sense of fact when they are, in fact, lies.
Anger and outrage, all too easily ginned up, is no substitute for looking behind the articles.
* I don't see any deaths attributed to small pox in the data of the death records. No doubt that was due to vaccination, something that many a Darwinist, including Charles and his son Leonard said shouldn't be done because it kept too many poor children alive who would have otherwise died of it. I wonder who was vaccinating Irish children and others which might have resulted in the absence of such deaths.
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query Tuam. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query Tuam. Sort by date Show all posts
Saturday, June 9, 2018
Sunday, June 8, 2014
I Get Catholic and Irish Bashing Hate Mail
Note: This was posted by error, yesterday, here is a revised version of that post.
The story of the disposal of nearly 800 corpses of infants and toddlers in the old septic tank of the home for unwed mothers at Tuam in Galway, Ireland is bad enough to stand as a scandal of the Catholic Church without you falsely attributing the similar Butter Box Babies scandal at the "Ideal Maternity Home" in East Chester, Nova Scotia to the Catholic Church as well. The two criminals in that case, William and Lila Young, were not Catholics, he was apparently some kind of a Seventh Day Adventist minister or something as well as a chiropractor, she was a midwife. [Note: Thinking about this more, the scandal from Nova Scotia is not known to be like what happened in Tuam, it is more like the baby farming infanticide in the update, below. So far as anyone has said there is no evidence that the babies who died in Tuam were intentionally starved to death.]
As I said the scandal in Tuam is bad enough but the stories are complicated by the fact that the site was also the home of one of the infamous British workhouses, under the British occupation. While I can't find anything like complete records, for that work house, I would imagine like most of them, it had an appallingly high infant and child mortality rate for longer than that and it likely had serious issues of where to bury the dead before the end of its use as a workhouse*. Whether or not the reports of digging up human remains from the people whose houses occupy that site now are from when it was a home for unwed mothers or from the far longer period when it was a workhouse would be useful to know. If accurately assigning blame were the object.
If you've read anything I've written on the topic you will known I've been on record as in favor of a more thorough and public exposure of the horrors of the British Workhouse and Poor Law for several years. Workhouses were set up to be death houses with inadequate food and appalling conditions. Entirely relevant to the present scandal in Tuam, extremely young children and infants who survived long enough were often taken from their mothers and families were routinely broken up on being condemned to the workhouse. Under the British Poor Law being destitute made even infants outlaws sent to workhouses where the allowed daily ration of food had fewer calories than that provided for prisoners.
I am certainly not against looking at similar crimes against humanity committed by whatever institution is at fault. I'm certainly no admirer of the Irish government in the period under question. It was a system with entirely too much collaboration between the state and the church, both corrupted by it and both having a lot to answer for in history. Though most of the countries in the world have a lot to answer for, as the Butter Box Babies scandal in Nova Scotia and many others like it in an entirely secular context. Though it was common for the state to expect religious institutions to provide any provision of welfare at all.
For obvious reasons, this reminded me of the parts of William Carlos Williams memoir detailing his experiences as a young doctor working at the disease and vermin infested Nursery and Child's Hospital in Hell's Kitchen, about that same period. With his description of the conditions it's no surprise that deadly epidemics, killing large numbers of babies were not unknown. Neither were corruption and incompetence. And this was in a state, in a country with far more economic resources than Ireland at the same time, a country without the heritage of the workhouses and poor law, which Ireland had imposed on it during the British occupation. By today's standards, the infant mortality rates, especially for poor people, were rather stunning, everywhere. It also reminded me of his horribly sad short story, Jean Beicke. Child mortality was extremely high, especially before the discovery of antibiotics. Among poor people it was not uncommon for babies to die of infection from the umbilical cord during the first days of life.
* See this:
POOR LAW (IRELAND)—BELFAST WORKHOUSE—INFANT MORTALITY.
HC Deb 02 September 1880 vol 256 cc1053-4 1053
§MR. MOORE asked the Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, Whether his attention has been called to the statement in Dr. M'Cabe's recent Report on Belfast Workhouse, that within the six months from January to June 82 infants have died in that institution; and, if he would inform the 1054 House what per-centage of the whole number of infants this represents?
§MR. W. E. FORSTER Sir, I have seen the Report to which the hon. Member refers, and I am sorry to observe that the rate of infant mortality in Belfast Workhouse is very high. I believe it is true that there were about 82 deaths in six months. I have only this moment received an answer to an inquiry that I made as to the percentage of deaths to the whole number of infants who are in, or have passed through, the workhouse. I understand that it is believed to be about 80 per cent; but I am afraid that I cannot absolutely pledge myself to the accuracy of that statement. As I told the hon. Member yesterday, I will make further inquiry.
And also this interesting paper about the extremely high infant mortality rates in workhouses even before the far more horrific conditions that prevailed after the New Poor Law came into effect. If I could, I would reproduce the graph of deaths in the work house during that period compared with deaths of infants from puerpural fever in Scotland during the period of 1929-1933, on page 39. They were stunningly similar.
Also a revelation is the high number of new born children who died in the first two weeks of life due to infection.
Though, since there is no Catholic Church to bash I am skeptical that you'll see these as important, compared to the Tuam scandal. Which, as I said, is bad enough without using the victims in an unrelated campaign of vilification of people alive today who had nothing to do with what happened then. The Catholic Church owes the victims of its past and present wrongs a full and open confession of what was done and compensation to survivors. It doesn't owe more in that line of shame than other institutions and governments that have a similar record, including the far more recent and ongoing cases of governments as impeccably anti-religious as your langauge. North Korea? China? Romania?
Update: This paper, Bastardy and Baby Farming in Victorian England by Dorothy L. Haller, is worth reading because it documents the casual, commercial industry in infanticide that sprang up due to the New Poor Law. How horrific it was can be seen in just two of the cases discussed.
The response to a proposed registration of those engaged in the trade of baby farming [you can safely read that "infanticide"] was met with outraged reaction from both the establishment and what were, I'd imagine, considered the official radical opposition.
In July 1870 the Brixton horrors perpetrated by Mrs. Waters filled the newspapers. In a matter of a few weeks, she had drugged and starved approximately 16 infants to death, wrapped their emaciated bodies in old rags and newspapers, and dumped them on deserted streets. Nine infants in precarious condition were removed from her home and taken to the Lambeth Workhouse; the majority died from thrush and fluid on the brain shortly thereafter. This and the story of Mrs. Harnett in Greenwich, who, for a fee, took a newborn from the lying-in house of Mr. Stevens and fed it watered down sour milk, arrowroot and corn flour until it succumbed from starvation 18 days later, led to the formation of the Infant Life Protection Society (hereafter called the ILPS) by Curgenven, Hart, and their associates. Through their dedicated efforts, and those of Mr. Charley and Mr. Robinson (MPs), The Infant Life Protection Bill 1871 -- aimed at protecting the lives of bastard children-was drawn up.
The Bill contained a clause which required the registration and supervision of nurses in the manufacturing districts who cared for children on a daily basis, and, much to the ILPS' amazement, it enraged members of the suffrage movement. Lydia Becker, editor of the Women's Suffrage Journal and leader of the Manchester branch of the National Society of Women's Suffrage, blasted the clause. Her journal reeked of the laissez-faire attitudes of the day, "officialism, police interference, and espionage," would oppress the ratepayers and infringe on the rights of the individual. She also objected to the entire registration and supervision process being handled entirely by men.
Adversaries in the House of Commons saw it as an infringement on the rights of parents, stating, "The responsibility for the child in infancy as in later life, lies with them [parents], and we emphatically deny that the State has any right to dictate to them the way it shall be fulfilled." In lieu of reform, the ILPS were forced to settle for yet another commission to investigate baby farming.
The commission's investigation included the testimony of Sergeant Relf, investigator in the Brixton case, which revealed facts in the case of Mary Hall, a lying-in house owner. Neighbors reported a steady stream of young pregnant women entering her home, but infants were never heard crying or seen leaving the premises. Those infants that lived long enough were farmed out, those that did not were buried in the backyard or dumped on some dark street. Neighbors reported seeing Mr. Hall feeding small bloody lumps (believed to be aborted fetuses) to his cats. When Mrs. Hall was finally arrested, she had 800 pounds in her possession; evidence of just how lucrative her murderous business was. The Metropolitan Police Superintendent testified to the difficulty of apprehending and prosecuting baby farmers. On July 10, 1871, the Select Committee on the Protection of Infant Life recommended the registration of all births and deaths, compulsory registration and supervision of lying-in houses and baby farms, all of which were included in the Infant Life Protection Act of 1872.
Dorothy Haller ended her paper this way:
At the close of the Victorian era, Curgenven and members of the Harveian Society, supporters in the House of Commons and in the House of Lords had tenaciously battled for the protection of infant life and a more equitable law regarding the financial security of illegitimate children for almost 40 years. The Victorians heightened sense of social conscience in the latter half of the 19th century certainly recognized the need for reform, but their laissez faire attitudes toward social and economic matters caused the wheels of change to turn slowly. An appeal made before The Society for the Prevention of the Cruelty to Animals in 1881, is indicative of how slowly. Their appeal for the organization of a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children took 8 years (1889) to come to fruition, 65 years after the establishment of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
Obviously, the expectation of people who read with anger and horror about the bodies found at the site of the former institution for unwed mothers at Tuam are naive about how callously infants and children were treated in Victorian Britain, those institutions certainly reproduced in places under British occupation. The New Poor Law ended only after the Second World War in Britain but its cultural impact is likely still here, now. I would like to do more research into how the infants and children of the destitute fared in the United States during the same period but I haven't been able to get to it. I would imagine it would vary quite dramatically from place to place but I doubt that Catholic institutions would be dependably worse than others.
The story of the disposal of nearly 800 corpses of infants and toddlers in the old septic tank of the home for unwed mothers at Tuam in Galway, Ireland is bad enough to stand as a scandal of the Catholic Church without you falsely attributing the similar Butter Box Babies scandal at the "Ideal Maternity Home" in East Chester, Nova Scotia to the Catholic Church as well. The two criminals in that case, William and Lila Young, were not Catholics, he was apparently some kind of a Seventh Day Adventist minister or something as well as a chiropractor, she was a midwife. [Note: Thinking about this more, the scandal from Nova Scotia is not known to be like what happened in Tuam, it is more like the baby farming infanticide in the update, below. So far as anyone has said there is no evidence that the babies who died in Tuam were intentionally starved to death.]
As I said the scandal in Tuam is bad enough but the stories are complicated by the fact that the site was also the home of one of the infamous British workhouses, under the British occupation. While I can't find anything like complete records, for that work house, I would imagine like most of them, it had an appallingly high infant and child mortality rate for longer than that and it likely had serious issues of where to bury the dead before the end of its use as a workhouse*. Whether or not the reports of digging up human remains from the people whose houses occupy that site now are from when it was a home for unwed mothers or from the far longer period when it was a workhouse would be useful to know. If accurately assigning blame were the object.
If you've read anything I've written on the topic you will known I've been on record as in favor of a more thorough and public exposure of the horrors of the British Workhouse and Poor Law for several years. Workhouses were set up to be death houses with inadequate food and appalling conditions. Entirely relevant to the present scandal in Tuam, extremely young children and infants who survived long enough were often taken from their mothers and families were routinely broken up on being condemned to the workhouse. Under the British Poor Law being destitute made even infants outlaws sent to workhouses where the allowed daily ration of food had fewer calories than that provided for prisoners.
I am certainly not against looking at similar crimes against humanity committed by whatever institution is at fault. I'm certainly no admirer of the Irish government in the period under question. It was a system with entirely too much collaboration between the state and the church, both corrupted by it and both having a lot to answer for in history. Though most of the countries in the world have a lot to answer for, as the Butter Box Babies scandal in Nova Scotia and many others like it in an entirely secular context. Though it was common for the state to expect religious institutions to provide any provision of welfare at all.
For obvious reasons, this reminded me of the parts of William Carlos Williams memoir detailing his experiences as a young doctor working at the disease and vermin infested Nursery and Child's Hospital in Hell's Kitchen, about that same period. With his description of the conditions it's no surprise that deadly epidemics, killing large numbers of babies were not unknown. Neither were corruption and incompetence. And this was in a state, in a country with far more economic resources than Ireland at the same time, a country without the heritage of the workhouses and poor law, which Ireland had imposed on it during the British occupation. By today's standards, the infant mortality rates, especially for poor people, were rather stunning, everywhere. It also reminded me of his horribly sad short story, Jean Beicke. Child mortality was extremely high, especially before the discovery of antibiotics. Among poor people it was not uncommon for babies to die of infection from the umbilical cord during the first days of life.
* See this:
POOR LAW (IRELAND)—BELFAST WORKHOUSE—INFANT MORTALITY.
HC Deb 02 September 1880 vol 256 cc1053-4 1053
§MR. MOORE asked the Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, Whether his attention has been called to the statement in Dr. M'Cabe's recent Report on Belfast Workhouse, that within the six months from January to June 82 infants have died in that institution; and, if he would inform the 1054 House what per-centage of the whole number of infants this represents?
§MR. W. E. FORSTER Sir, I have seen the Report to which the hon. Member refers, and I am sorry to observe that the rate of infant mortality in Belfast Workhouse is very high. I believe it is true that there were about 82 deaths in six months. I have only this moment received an answer to an inquiry that I made as to the percentage of deaths to the whole number of infants who are in, or have passed through, the workhouse. I understand that it is believed to be about 80 per cent; but I am afraid that I cannot absolutely pledge myself to the accuracy of that statement. As I told the hon. Member yesterday, I will make further inquiry.
And also this interesting paper about the extremely high infant mortality rates in workhouses even before the far more horrific conditions that prevailed after the New Poor Law came into effect. If I could, I would reproduce the graph of deaths in the work house during that period compared with deaths of infants from puerpural fever in Scotland during the period of 1929-1933, on page 39. They were stunningly similar.
Also a revelation is the high number of new born children who died in the first two weeks of life due to infection.
Though, since there is no Catholic Church to bash I am skeptical that you'll see these as important, compared to the Tuam scandal. Which, as I said, is bad enough without using the victims in an unrelated campaign of vilification of people alive today who had nothing to do with what happened then. The Catholic Church owes the victims of its past and present wrongs a full and open confession of what was done and compensation to survivors. It doesn't owe more in that line of shame than other institutions and governments that have a similar record, including the far more recent and ongoing cases of governments as impeccably anti-religious as your langauge. North Korea? China? Romania?
Update: This paper, Bastardy and Baby Farming in Victorian England by Dorothy L. Haller, is worth reading because it documents the casual, commercial industry in infanticide that sprang up due to the New Poor Law. How horrific it was can be seen in just two of the cases discussed.
The response to a proposed registration of those engaged in the trade of baby farming [you can safely read that "infanticide"] was met with outraged reaction from both the establishment and what were, I'd imagine, considered the official radical opposition.
In July 1870 the Brixton horrors perpetrated by Mrs. Waters filled the newspapers. In a matter of a few weeks, she had drugged and starved approximately 16 infants to death, wrapped their emaciated bodies in old rags and newspapers, and dumped them on deserted streets. Nine infants in precarious condition were removed from her home and taken to the Lambeth Workhouse; the majority died from thrush and fluid on the brain shortly thereafter. This and the story of Mrs. Harnett in Greenwich, who, for a fee, took a newborn from the lying-in house of Mr. Stevens and fed it watered down sour milk, arrowroot and corn flour until it succumbed from starvation 18 days later, led to the formation of the Infant Life Protection Society (hereafter called the ILPS) by Curgenven, Hart, and their associates. Through their dedicated efforts, and those of Mr. Charley and Mr. Robinson (MPs), The Infant Life Protection Bill 1871 -- aimed at protecting the lives of bastard children-was drawn up.
The Bill contained a clause which required the registration and supervision of nurses in the manufacturing districts who cared for children on a daily basis, and, much to the ILPS' amazement, it enraged members of the suffrage movement. Lydia Becker, editor of the Women's Suffrage Journal and leader of the Manchester branch of the National Society of Women's Suffrage, blasted the clause. Her journal reeked of the laissez-faire attitudes of the day, "officialism, police interference, and espionage," would oppress the ratepayers and infringe on the rights of the individual. She also objected to the entire registration and supervision process being handled entirely by men.
Adversaries in the House of Commons saw it as an infringement on the rights of parents, stating, "The responsibility for the child in infancy as in later life, lies with them [parents], and we emphatically deny that the State has any right to dictate to them the way it shall be fulfilled." In lieu of reform, the ILPS were forced to settle for yet another commission to investigate baby farming.
The commission's investigation included the testimony of Sergeant Relf, investigator in the Brixton case, which revealed facts in the case of Mary Hall, a lying-in house owner. Neighbors reported a steady stream of young pregnant women entering her home, but infants were never heard crying or seen leaving the premises. Those infants that lived long enough were farmed out, those that did not were buried in the backyard or dumped on some dark street. Neighbors reported seeing Mr. Hall feeding small bloody lumps (believed to be aborted fetuses) to his cats. When Mrs. Hall was finally arrested, she had 800 pounds in her possession; evidence of just how lucrative her murderous business was. The Metropolitan Police Superintendent testified to the difficulty of apprehending and prosecuting baby farmers. On July 10, 1871, the Select Committee on the Protection of Infant Life recommended the registration of all births and deaths, compulsory registration and supervision of lying-in houses and baby farms, all of which were included in the Infant Life Protection Act of 1872.
Dorothy Haller ended her paper this way:
At the close of the Victorian era, Curgenven and members of the Harveian Society, supporters in the House of Commons and in the House of Lords had tenaciously battled for the protection of infant life and a more equitable law regarding the financial security of illegitimate children for almost 40 years. The Victorians heightened sense of social conscience in the latter half of the 19th century certainly recognized the need for reform, but their laissez faire attitudes toward social and economic matters caused the wheels of change to turn slowly. An appeal made before The Society for the Prevention of the Cruelty to Animals in 1881, is indicative of how slowly. Their appeal for the organization of a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children took 8 years (1889) to come to fruition, 65 years after the establishment of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
Obviously, the expectation of people who read with anger and horror about the bodies found at the site of the former institution for unwed mothers at Tuam are naive about how callously infants and children were treated in Victorian Britain, those institutions certainly reproduced in places under British occupation. The New Poor Law ended only after the Second World War in Britain but its cultural impact is likely still here, now. I would like to do more research into how the infants and children of the destitute fared in the United States during the same period but I haven't been able to get to it. I would imagine it would vary quite dramatically from place to place but I doubt that Catholic institutions would be dependably worse than others.
Tuesday, June 10, 2014
More on the Tuam Scandal
I have to thank my friend RMJ for alerting me to some problems with the story of "800 corpses of babies in a septic tank" at the Tuam institution for unwed mothers. It would seem that the story, widely reported in the media is based mostly on conjecture and reportorial license. How widely spread and believed can be seen from a report in the Irish Times
‘I never used that word ‘dumped’,” Catherine Corless, a local historian in Co Galway, tells The Irish Times. “I never said to anyone that 800 bodies were dumped in a septic tank. That did not come from me at any point. They are not my words.”
The story that emerged from her work was reported this week in dramatic headlines around the world.
“Tell us the truth about the children dumped in Galway’s mass graves” – The Guardian.
“Bodies of 800 babies, long-dead, found in septic tank at former Irish home for unwed mothers” – The Washington Post.
“Nearly 800 dead babies found in septic tank in Ireland” – Al Jazeera.
“800 skeletons of babies found inside tank at former Irish home for unwed mothers” – New York Daily News.
“Almost 800 ‘forgotten’ Irish children dumped in septic tank mass grave at Catholic home” – ABC News, Australia.
It would seem that the septic tank angle which, I will predict, is what most people will remember about this years from now, is based on the decades old memory of a boy who was 10 at the time of the reported discovery. And it's not clear that what he was describing would have been a septic tank at the time that former workhouse became the institution for unwed mothers.
On St Patrick’s Day this year Barry Sweeney was drinking in Brownes bar, on the Square in Tuam. He fell into conversation with someone who was familiar with Corless’s research, and who repeated the story of boys finding bones. “I told her that I was one of those boys,” Sweeney tells The Irish Times in his home, on the outskirts of Tuam. “I got a phonecall from Catherine a couple of weeks later.”
Sweeney was 10 in 1975, and the friend he was with on that day, Frannie Hopkins, was 12. They dropped down from the two-and-a-half-metre boundary wall as usual, into the part of the former grounds that Corless and local people believe is the unofficial burial place for those who died in the home. “We used to be in there playing regular. There was always this slab of concrete there,” he says.
In his kitchen, Sweeney demonstrates the size of this concrete flag as he recalls it: it’s an area a little bigger than his coffee table, about 120cm long and 60cm wide. He says he does not recall seeing any other similar flags in their many visits to the area.
Between them the boys levered up the slab. “There were skeletons thrown in there. They were all this way and that way. They weren’t wrapped in anything, and there were no coffins,” he says. “But there was no way there were 800 skeletons down that hole. Nothing like that number. I don’t know where the papers got that.” How many skeletons does he believe there were? “About 20.”
At the Irish Times link you can read other problems with the story of the septic tank, as reported around the world and believed by, among others, the idiot whose comment embroidered on a shaky story even more to slam Catholic in general and Irish Catholics, in particular.
But the central fact of the high death rate for children at the Tuam institution, while it was being run as a place for unwed mothers should be looked into. Until there are answers as to how the children actually died, why they died, we can't just assume we know what happened.
We certainly shouldn't believe we know what happened on the basis of what has been reported. Ireland, which was one of the poorest countries in Western Europe at the time, is reported to have had a very high infant mortality rate.
And when the deaths occurred, in what years and why, matters in determining culpability. Within living memory, things were entirely different. Even outside of institutions, where death rates are often quite a bit higher, it's just a fact that a lot more babies died then, than now. Even in a relatively far wealthier country.
Sixty years ago, Britain's children were born into a dangerous world.
Every year, thousands died of infectious diseases like pneumonia, meningitis, tuberculosis, diphtheria, and polio.
Infant mortality - deaths of children before their first birthday - was around one in 20.
It took some startling medical discoveries and pioneering work from paediatricians and doctors to turn around an appalling situation.
The early 1930s were a time of frustration for many doctors who powerlessly witnessed the deaths of thousands of babies and young children.
"When I was a student and newly qualified, there was an enormous area where we knew we could do nothing," Dr Leslie Temple remembers.
"We made the most of what little we could do, but over the vast area of childhood illness, all we could do was hold their hands and hope."
Poverty, poor diet and bad living conditions lay at the root of much childhood illness.
Harold Everley Jones was one of Britain's first paediatricians, and spent 40 years working with children. He qualified as a doctor in 1934.
"I stood in a house to which I was called and was amazed to see the wallpaper moving due to the bugs underneath. Many of these houses were little more better than hovels." he recalls.
Antibiotics like penicillin changed everything It was only in 1939 that the world's first anti-bacterial drugs, Sulphonamides, became widely available.
They greatly reduced childhood deaths from pneumonia. Shortly afterwards, in 1944, Penicillin, the original antibiotic, was used to wage war on meningitis. The second antibiotic to be developed, Streptomycin in 1947, tackled the horrors of TB. In 1960, a vaccination to protect against Polio was introduced to British shores from the United States.
I would guess that what was true in Britain was probably at least as true in Ireland and likely worse. Only, there has been too much guessing in this story, already. If not imagination. Since that imagination is going to be heavily relied on in this story, I still recommend both William Carlos Williams Doctor Stories, informed by his personal experience as a doctor in that period, and the sections of his memoir dealing with his medical practice. I also depend, heavily, on my mother's accounts of working as a nurse and technician in hospitals from the late 1930s until after the introduction of penicillin, which she said was like a miracle to medical professionals used to seeing people die of diseases and infections that people my age never even heard of.
Also widely unreported is that the Irish Government and Catholic officials have both called for and begun an inquiry into the institutions for unwed mothers, not all of which were Catholic. It would be worse than a useless waste of time if any investigations concentrated on any particular case in the past because the neglect and deaths of children are hardly confined to any country, religious orientation, social group or identifiable institution. While attitudes towards women who are pregnant while not married or while not married to the father have changed greatly, children still die in large numbers from neglect and other causes.
The periodic stories of children who die because social services in the United States are both disgustingly underfunded and understaffed, the staff, frequently, under educated and under-trained as well. There are also inevitable problems that come from the habits and common received thinking of social workers, trained in a particular theory or ideology of their profession. The "keep the family together" at all costs is an ideal for which the weakest and least articulate people involved will pay that cost. When you are dealing with children, any ethic that doesn't place their safety and needs above such institutionalized theories will, secular, religious, etc. end up with them suffering and dying.
As the paper about infanticide in the guise of baby farming recommended in the post yesterday shows, not all horrors done to children happen in institutions and to large numbers in any particular location or at any particular time. Until a society takes responsibility for all of the children in it, worse than has even been attributed to the institution in Tuam is done. Look at the entirely secular United States where even the mass slaughter of children in schools can't change our gun laws, the thousands of children shot dead here, every year, buried in unknown and forgotten graves haven't moved us sufficiently.
Reading the blog blather, the comments at The Guardian and other papers on this story have left me even more pessimistic about the potential of unfiltered chatter to inform people. Most of the people who seem to believe they have something to say about this obviously are either making it up or depending on people who are making it up. The fact is, we don't know what happened, we may never know, though it's unlikely that any one "thing" "happened" to result in almost 800 babies dying at an institution that operated over four decades. The temptation to reduce that to a factoid or two serves to obscure reality, not to crystallize it so we know and can use that.
‘I never used that word ‘dumped’,” Catherine Corless, a local historian in Co Galway, tells The Irish Times. “I never said to anyone that 800 bodies were dumped in a septic tank. That did not come from me at any point. They are not my words.”
The story that emerged from her work was reported this week in dramatic headlines around the world.
“Tell us the truth about the children dumped in Galway’s mass graves” – The Guardian.
“Bodies of 800 babies, long-dead, found in septic tank at former Irish home for unwed mothers” – The Washington Post.
“Nearly 800 dead babies found in septic tank in Ireland” – Al Jazeera.
“800 skeletons of babies found inside tank at former Irish home for unwed mothers” – New York Daily News.
“Almost 800 ‘forgotten’ Irish children dumped in septic tank mass grave at Catholic home” – ABC News, Australia.
It would seem that the septic tank angle which, I will predict, is what most people will remember about this years from now, is based on the decades old memory of a boy who was 10 at the time of the reported discovery. And it's not clear that what he was describing would have been a septic tank at the time that former workhouse became the institution for unwed mothers.
On St Patrick’s Day this year Barry Sweeney was drinking in Brownes bar, on the Square in Tuam. He fell into conversation with someone who was familiar with Corless’s research, and who repeated the story of boys finding bones. “I told her that I was one of those boys,” Sweeney tells The Irish Times in his home, on the outskirts of Tuam. “I got a phonecall from Catherine a couple of weeks later.”
Sweeney was 10 in 1975, and the friend he was with on that day, Frannie Hopkins, was 12. They dropped down from the two-and-a-half-metre boundary wall as usual, into the part of the former grounds that Corless and local people believe is the unofficial burial place for those who died in the home. “We used to be in there playing regular. There was always this slab of concrete there,” he says.
In his kitchen, Sweeney demonstrates the size of this concrete flag as he recalls it: it’s an area a little bigger than his coffee table, about 120cm long and 60cm wide. He says he does not recall seeing any other similar flags in their many visits to the area.
Between them the boys levered up the slab. “There were skeletons thrown in there. They were all this way and that way. They weren’t wrapped in anything, and there were no coffins,” he says. “But there was no way there were 800 skeletons down that hole. Nothing like that number. I don’t know where the papers got that.” How many skeletons does he believe there were? “About 20.”
At the Irish Times link you can read other problems with the story of the septic tank, as reported around the world and believed by, among others, the idiot whose comment embroidered on a shaky story even more to slam Catholic in general and Irish Catholics, in particular.
But the central fact of the high death rate for children at the Tuam institution, while it was being run as a place for unwed mothers should be looked into. Until there are answers as to how the children actually died, why they died, we can't just assume we know what happened.
We certainly shouldn't believe we know what happened on the basis of what has been reported. Ireland, which was one of the poorest countries in Western Europe at the time, is reported to have had a very high infant mortality rate.
And when the deaths occurred, in what years and why, matters in determining culpability. Within living memory, things were entirely different. Even outside of institutions, where death rates are often quite a bit higher, it's just a fact that a lot more babies died then, than now. Even in a relatively far wealthier country.
Sixty years ago, Britain's children were born into a dangerous world.
Every year, thousands died of infectious diseases like pneumonia, meningitis, tuberculosis, diphtheria, and polio.
Infant mortality - deaths of children before their first birthday - was around one in 20.
It took some startling medical discoveries and pioneering work from paediatricians and doctors to turn around an appalling situation.
The early 1930s were a time of frustration for many doctors who powerlessly witnessed the deaths of thousands of babies and young children.
"When I was a student and newly qualified, there was an enormous area where we knew we could do nothing," Dr Leslie Temple remembers.
"We made the most of what little we could do, but over the vast area of childhood illness, all we could do was hold their hands and hope."
Poverty, poor diet and bad living conditions lay at the root of much childhood illness.
Harold Everley Jones was one of Britain's first paediatricians, and spent 40 years working with children. He qualified as a doctor in 1934.
"I stood in a house to which I was called and was amazed to see the wallpaper moving due to the bugs underneath. Many of these houses were little more better than hovels." he recalls.
Antibiotics like penicillin changed everything It was only in 1939 that the world's first anti-bacterial drugs, Sulphonamides, became widely available.
They greatly reduced childhood deaths from pneumonia. Shortly afterwards, in 1944, Penicillin, the original antibiotic, was used to wage war on meningitis. The second antibiotic to be developed, Streptomycin in 1947, tackled the horrors of TB. In 1960, a vaccination to protect against Polio was introduced to British shores from the United States.
I would guess that what was true in Britain was probably at least as true in Ireland and likely worse. Only, there has been too much guessing in this story, already. If not imagination. Since that imagination is going to be heavily relied on in this story, I still recommend both William Carlos Williams Doctor Stories, informed by his personal experience as a doctor in that period, and the sections of his memoir dealing with his medical practice. I also depend, heavily, on my mother's accounts of working as a nurse and technician in hospitals from the late 1930s until after the introduction of penicillin, which she said was like a miracle to medical professionals used to seeing people die of diseases and infections that people my age never even heard of.
Also widely unreported is that the Irish Government and Catholic officials have both called for and begun an inquiry into the institutions for unwed mothers, not all of which were Catholic. It would be worse than a useless waste of time if any investigations concentrated on any particular case in the past because the neglect and deaths of children are hardly confined to any country, religious orientation, social group or identifiable institution. While attitudes towards women who are pregnant while not married or while not married to the father have changed greatly, children still die in large numbers from neglect and other causes.
The periodic stories of children who die because social services in the United States are both disgustingly underfunded and understaffed, the staff, frequently, under educated and under-trained as well. There are also inevitable problems that come from the habits and common received thinking of social workers, trained in a particular theory or ideology of their profession. The "keep the family together" at all costs is an ideal for which the weakest and least articulate people involved will pay that cost. When you are dealing with children, any ethic that doesn't place their safety and needs above such institutionalized theories will, secular, religious, etc. end up with them suffering and dying.
As the paper about infanticide in the guise of baby farming recommended in the post yesterday shows, not all horrors done to children happen in institutions and to large numbers in any particular location or at any particular time. Until a society takes responsibility for all of the children in it, worse than has even been attributed to the institution in Tuam is done. Look at the entirely secular United States where even the mass slaughter of children in schools can't change our gun laws, the thousands of children shot dead here, every year, buried in unknown and forgotten graves haven't moved us sufficiently.
Reading the blog blather, the comments at The Guardian and other papers on this story have left me even more pessimistic about the potential of unfiltered chatter to inform people. Most of the people who seem to believe they have something to say about this obviously are either making it up or depending on people who are making it up. The fact is, we don't know what happened, we may never know, though it's unlikely that any one "thing" "happened" to result in almost 800 babies dying at an institution that operated over four decades. The temptation to reduce that to a factoid or two serves to obscure reality, not to crystallize it so we know and can use that.
Monday, April 27, 2015
The "Journalistic Standards" of Alternet-Salon, Again
Click bait scribbler Valerie Tarico has a rather sensational piece up at Salon, originating in that other home of the happy clickers, Alternet, in which she says:
In generations past, nursing care was provided by nuns and teachers were spinsters, because avoiding sexual intimacy was the only way women could avoid unpredictable childbearing and so be freed up to serve their communities in other capacities. But if you think that abstinence should be our model for modern fertility management, consider the mass graves that get found every so often under old nunneries.
The link is to one of the pieces pushing the sensational reports of hundreds of skeletons of children found in a "sewer" at what was formerly a home for unwed mothers in Tuam co. Ireland, run by nuns. It wasn't a "nunnery" and before that it had been a British work house. I never have seen an analysis that dated any burials, in or out of sewers on the site that dated the bodies to the period that it was operated by the nuns. Though I have seen that even the local historian, "Catherine Corless, who played a primary role in uncovering the scope of problem," said what she had said was distorted in almost all of the "news" stories and that she'd said no such thing.
‘I never used that word ‘dumped’,” Catherine Corless, a local historian in Co Galway, tells The Irish Times. “I never said to anyone that 800 bodies were dumped in a septic tank. That did not come from me at any point. They are not my words.”
In her piece at Alternet-Salon, Tarico implies that this had something to do with abortion, no doubt invoking the wide spread accusation about nuns having secretly becoming pregnant (no doubt by priests) and either having abortions or committing infanticide to get rid of the unfortunate evidence of their lack of chastity. I've never researched those often told stories, a staple of the trashiest anti-Catholic, protestant lore taken over whole hog by atheists, but suspect they are on the same level of reporting that the world-wide gossip spreading by the allegedly legit media practiced in regard to the Tuam "scandal". When it comes to Catholic nuns, the same practices that promoted the blood libel* and the Protocols of Zion reign in the media, today.
I wrote two posts on this issue at the time the "scandal" broke last year. Apparently other people noticed what I did then, that any skeletons found on the site might have been from the longer period of time it operated as a British work house and that large numbers of children died in Ireland and Britain even when they weren't in institutions. One of the things I read this morning but which I haven't got the time to follow up on puts the rest to the most sensational aspect of the "reports" the "sewer burials".
The most recent revelation has cast an entirely different light on the story. Journalist Philip Boucher-Hayes has interviewed Mary Moriarty, who claims to have fallen into a burial plot on the grounds of the home in the 1970s, when the ground there subsided. She apparently uncovered an underground space containing infant bodies.
Moriarty said she subsequently spoke with a former employee of the home, who recalled helping the nuns to carry deceased infants along an underground tunnel to a burial vault. As Boucher-Hayes states, “Whatever cruelties you could lay at the nuns’ feet, however harsh or medically incompetent the regime they ran was, it was always hard to believe that they would have knowingly put babies in a septic tank. Because there may have been a tunnel running up and into this vault/crypt/space — this one at least is highly unlikely to have been a septic tank.”
This latest revelation correlates with the suggestion of Finbar McCormick, an archaeologist at Queen’s University in Belfast, who stated that the structure uncovered by Sweeney and Hopkins in 1975 is “more likely to be a shaft burial vault, a common method of burial used in the recent past and still used today in many parts of Europe.”
The take away lesson from that is that while secular institutions, such as the British Workhouses, are held to a far more lenient standard than anything which can be related to religion and that line will run in today's media as surely as it would in the worst of 19th century yellow journalism. And online media in the age of neo-atheism has only made that situation worse. And such fables, myths and lies told about religious figures need never to be corrected. The utility of a story in anti-religious invective is what is valued, not exposing any kind of inadequate treatment of children and other people which could reform similar practices today. Living children today are an inconvenient expense and are routinely ignored by the same media.
I am waiting for the widespread atheist condemnation of the school of atheist "ethics" that asserts that infanticide should be legal pushed by such stars of atheism as Peter Singer. Actual infanticide has been promoted by a long line of atheist heroes in the modern period. I'm waiting but not very hard.
* I mention the blood libel because it's been a lot on my mind. I had been doing research on that topic even before I read Marilynne Robinson's amazing and fine essays defending Moses, which I intend to write on at length. I have already learned a lot which I'd never known before, including that Tertullian talked about an earlier form of the blood libel used against Christians in the Roman empire. But spring is a bad time for me to start on a topic I hadn't researched before. I generally don't like to just go with the common received non-wisdom that apparently could get me a paid gig at Alternet or Salon.
In generations past, nursing care was provided by nuns and teachers were spinsters, because avoiding sexual intimacy was the only way women could avoid unpredictable childbearing and so be freed up to serve their communities in other capacities. But if you think that abstinence should be our model for modern fertility management, consider the mass graves that get found every so often under old nunneries.
The link is to one of the pieces pushing the sensational reports of hundreds of skeletons of children found in a "sewer" at what was formerly a home for unwed mothers in Tuam co. Ireland, run by nuns. It wasn't a "nunnery" and before that it had been a British work house. I never have seen an analysis that dated any burials, in or out of sewers on the site that dated the bodies to the period that it was operated by the nuns. Though I have seen that even the local historian, "Catherine Corless, who played a primary role in uncovering the scope of problem," said what she had said was distorted in almost all of the "news" stories and that she'd said no such thing.
‘I never used that word ‘dumped’,” Catherine Corless, a local historian in Co Galway, tells The Irish Times. “I never said to anyone that 800 bodies were dumped in a septic tank. That did not come from me at any point. They are not my words.”
In her piece at Alternet-Salon, Tarico implies that this had something to do with abortion, no doubt invoking the wide spread accusation about nuns having secretly becoming pregnant (no doubt by priests) and either having abortions or committing infanticide to get rid of the unfortunate evidence of their lack of chastity. I've never researched those often told stories, a staple of the trashiest anti-Catholic, protestant lore taken over whole hog by atheists, but suspect they are on the same level of reporting that the world-wide gossip spreading by the allegedly legit media practiced in regard to the Tuam "scandal". When it comes to Catholic nuns, the same practices that promoted the blood libel* and the Protocols of Zion reign in the media, today.
I wrote two posts on this issue at the time the "scandal" broke last year. Apparently other people noticed what I did then, that any skeletons found on the site might have been from the longer period of time it operated as a British work house and that large numbers of children died in Ireland and Britain even when they weren't in institutions. One of the things I read this morning but which I haven't got the time to follow up on puts the rest to the most sensational aspect of the "reports" the "sewer burials".
The most recent revelation has cast an entirely different light on the story. Journalist Philip Boucher-Hayes has interviewed Mary Moriarty, who claims to have fallen into a burial plot on the grounds of the home in the 1970s, when the ground there subsided. She apparently uncovered an underground space containing infant bodies.
Moriarty said she subsequently spoke with a former employee of the home, who recalled helping the nuns to carry deceased infants along an underground tunnel to a burial vault. As Boucher-Hayes states, “Whatever cruelties you could lay at the nuns’ feet, however harsh or medically incompetent the regime they ran was, it was always hard to believe that they would have knowingly put babies in a septic tank. Because there may have been a tunnel running up and into this vault/crypt/space — this one at least is highly unlikely to have been a septic tank.”
This latest revelation correlates with the suggestion of Finbar McCormick, an archaeologist at Queen’s University in Belfast, who stated that the structure uncovered by Sweeney and Hopkins in 1975 is “more likely to be a shaft burial vault, a common method of burial used in the recent past and still used today in many parts of Europe.”
The take away lesson from that is that while secular institutions, such as the British Workhouses, are held to a far more lenient standard than anything which can be related to religion and that line will run in today's media as surely as it would in the worst of 19th century yellow journalism. And online media in the age of neo-atheism has only made that situation worse. And such fables, myths and lies told about religious figures need never to be corrected. The utility of a story in anti-religious invective is what is valued, not exposing any kind of inadequate treatment of children and other people which could reform similar practices today. Living children today are an inconvenient expense and are routinely ignored by the same media.
I am waiting for the widespread atheist condemnation of the school of atheist "ethics" that asserts that infanticide should be legal pushed by such stars of atheism as Peter Singer. Actual infanticide has been promoted by a long line of atheist heroes in the modern period. I'm waiting but not very hard.
* I mention the blood libel because it's been a lot on my mind. I had been doing research on that topic even before I read Marilynne Robinson's amazing and fine essays defending Moses, which I intend to write on at length. I have already learned a lot which I'd never known before, including that Tertullian talked about an earlier form of the blood libel used against Christians in the Roman empire. But spring is a bad time for me to start on a topic I hadn't researched before. I generally don't like to just go with the common received non-wisdom that apparently could get me a paid gig at Alternet or Salon.
Sunday, September 10, 2017
The BBC Brings On Another Aborted Nun-Run Orphanage Scandal Before Its Time
Another day, another e-mail demanding I answer for another Brit Catholic orphanage "scandal" which, upon reading what was sent to me, is just the BBC doing what it's done before, holding Nuns who ran an orphanage to a far higher standard than they do secular institutions or, in fact, the horrific treatment of orphans, widows and paupers that was general in Britain in the 19th and early 20th century. Also, holding the past, especially the pre-antibiotic past, in which infant and child mortality rates, especially in institutional settings and wherever people were poor, to modern expectations.
I don't, from reading what the BBC posted, know if there is an actual scandal attributable to the Nuns who ran the place. And, apparently, neither do they.
The children were all residents of a care home run by Catholic nuns.
At least 400 children are thought to be buried in a section of St Mary's Cemetery in Lanark.
The Daughters of Charity of St Vincent de Paul, which ran the home, refused to comment on the findings.
The research by the File on 4 programme in conjunction with the Sunday Post newspaper focused on Smyllum Park Orphanage in Lanark.
It opened in 1864 and provided care for orphans or children from broken homes. It closed in 1981, having looked after 11,600 children.
A burial plot, containing the bodies of a number of children, was uncovered by two former residents of Smyllum in 2003.
Frank Docherty and Jim Kane discovered an overgrown, unmarked section of St Mary's Cemetery during their efforts to reveal physical abuse which they said many former residents had suffered.
In 2004, the campaigners said the Daughters of Charity told them their records suggested that children had been buried in 158 compartments in the graveyard.
Frank and Jim, who both died earlier this year, believed however, that the numbers were far higher as the nuns had indicated their records were incomplete.
The investigation by File on 4 and the Sunday Post indicates they were right; at least 400 children are understood to be buried in the plot.
"Oh my God, I've got goose pimples. It's shocking," said Frank Docherty's widow, Janet.
"He had been trying for years to find a figure and he didn't get anywhere. That's unbelievable."
The death records indicate that most of the children died of natural causes, from diseases common at the time such as TB, pneumonia and pleurisy.
Analysis of the records show that a third of those who died were aged five or under. Very few of those who died, 24 in total, were aged over 15, and most of the deaths occurred between 1870 and 1930.
Janet Docherty might find that shocking and unbelievable but, having looked at this kind of thing before and the general character of British "charitable" institutions of the period, especially the appalling system of death camps that the Workhouses were, none of it is surprising or shocking, including that rate of death, nor the fact that the dead were buried in a single location without any markers or records. That was typical of the way of death, at all ages, but especially among infants and children, in British and other institutions of most of the time.
If an inmate died in the workhouse, the death was notified to their family who could ,if they wished, organize a funeral themselves. If this did not happen, which was often the case because of the expense, the Guardians arranged a burial in a local cemetery or burial ground - this was originally required to be in the parish where the workhouse stood...
The burial would be in the cheapest possible coffin and in an unmarked grave, into which several coffins might be placed on the same occasion. Under the terms of the 1832 Anatomy Act, bodies unclaimed for forty-eight hours could be disposed of by donating them for use in medical research and training - this was not specific to workhouses, but applied to any institution whose inmates died while in its care. Deaths were, however, not always registered in the normal way.
Pauper funerals were often without mourners. At Bourne in 1901, the workhouse master reported that despite repeated invitations, workhouse inmates always declined to attend funerals. This was perhaps a testimony to the old saying, "rattle his bones over the stones, he's only a pauper whom nobody owns."
And as to the dignity accorded to the graves of the poor, the unwanted, etc.
Following the closure of many of London's old parish graveyards in the 1850s, a number of new cemeteries - often commercially operated - were set up at out-of-town locations. The most prominent of these were the London Necropolis....
In September 1883, the Times carried a report about the transport of pauper bodies to Colney Hatch Cemetery from Clerkenwell workhouse mortuary by an undertake's sub-contractor. It had been alleged that a coach carrying five coffins three of adults and two of children had broken down on Exmouth Street with the coffins rolling into the road. It was also claimed that, for the sake of economy bodies were kept in store until a batch of sufficient size was reached, resulting in offensive smells. The coffins were said to be identified only by a name chalked on them and that during the journey the writing rubbed off Although an investigation of committee of Guardians refuted the allegations it was agreed that the union should acquire its own hearse, coach and horses for the use at pauper funerals.
I doubt they afforded markers for the infants and children who died in horrifically high numbers or even took much notice or bother to document where they were disposed of.
I would suspect that if the BBC looked for bodies of infants and children at just about any British workhouse they would find similar if not worse practices under the auspices of the British government. I have pointed out a number of times, the workhouse system was designed to starve the inmates, the food rations to the inmates was smaller than that given to prisoners. Many children as well as adults died of starvation in them, they even recorded the deaths as by starvation so there was no secret made of it. And I have pointed out that the law in Britain which allowed men to father children out of wedlock, relieving them of any obligation to care for them led to widespread infanticide, enough so that it was not uncommon to find bodies of infants dumped in the streets of London.
And it was hardly just British institutions in the islands that fell under that appalling system of hatred of the poor and powerless, it is typical of institutions of the time.
In order to know if this is a scandal, you would have to know how the children died, if their death rate was unusually high for the years and locations they happened in and if those deaths could have been prevented. Without doing that this is not journalism. Until that is done, it's holding Catholic Nuns to a higher standard than others who operated institutions.
When Is The BBC Going To Look At The Scandal of Eminent British Scientists Advocating The Benefits Of The Deaths OF Infants And Children In The Same Time Period?
You might want to look at this paper, Infant Mortality and the Health of Survivors: Britain 1910-1950 by Timothy J. Hatton to see that there was a real infant and child death scandal in those years and it wasn't one by created by Catholic nuns but in entirely secular scientists and politicians who asserted that a high infant and child mortality rate was socially beneficial, improving the stock of the working class. You can read about that on pages 3-7 of the paper. Two things, first is this quote from the eminent British sociological researcher, Seebohm Rowntree's survey of the working class of York in 1901,
[i]t is sometimes urged that although the individual suffering indicated by high infant mortality is considerable, it is not without some counterbalancing advantages, as sickly children are thus weeded out. Even if this Spartan view is accepted, it must be remembered that of those who survive, a large proportion do so only with seriously enfeebled constitutions.
I will remind people who have read my blog that taking such a "Spartan view" had been promoted by Charles Darwin in The Descent of man in 1872 and it characterized his disciples, who by that time pretty much encompassed the large majority of the educated class of Britain and elsewhere. That can be seen by fact checking this from the same paper.
The most well-known protagonist of the selection view in the early twentieth century was the eminent statistician Karl Pearson. Following Francis Galton he stressed the importance of heredity.
"The selection view" was the assertion that natural selection, the deaths of those of "lesser fitness," especially as children, was beneficial for the surviving population, as asserted by biologists and others who believed in natural selection since it was first invented.
If health was largely inherited, then elimination of the least fit at an early age would increase the average fitness of the survivors as well as preserving racial quality in the longer run [ after a brief discussion of problems with data collection it continues]... As he put it" "the only method by which data for different different districts can be compared is by endeavouring to fix the nature of the environment. We want to know whether under a constant environment, the correlation between the death rates of infancy and of childhood is positive or negative."
Only, Pearson was in little doubt that the actual deaths of infants and children was positive. You can read that section of the paper to see how the scientific assertion that infants and children dying young was a good thing. But there is little to no doubt that Pearson and other British and English language scientists and scholars asserted that there was an up-side to high mortality rates for the children of the poor and destitute. I have mentioned before that Karl Pearson was the author of a pamphlet which decried the use of cesarean section because it kept too many babies and mothers alive who would have died in childbirth, on the assumption that such as did die were inferior and that their survival was a danger to the future of humanity. What Darwin wrought in inventing natural selection is a real scandal but I don't expect the BBC or the people who find these kinds of scandals buried under Victorian orphanages - but only those run by Nuns - will want to look into.
If a real investigation that takes into account actual evidence and compares it to the general child mortality rate in British institutions to see if the Nuns who ran the place were culpable finds a scandal, then I'll address the scandal. As of now, just as in previous cases, the journalists haven't done that.
I don't doubt this will be revisited in the coming days. I wonder if, as the previous "scandal" in Tuam, if it will turn out that the orphanage was located in property of the local workhouse. There was one in Lanark, I wonder how many children are buried in unmarked, undocumented graves who died there under British Government auspices. I wonder if the BBC has ever done any reporting about that.
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