Jack London on Institutional Life
07/19/09 07:30 Filed in: Literature
I've had the distinct honor in my career of working with a number of people who lived in Illinois' institutional system. As a result, I've heard a variety of stories about what this experience was like from their perspective. Those perspectives are many and varied, and always fascinating.
Forest City's own Dr. Kouris is a member of the American Academy of Developmental Medicine and Dentistry. The AADMD is an organization dedicated to to improving medical and dental care for people with developmental disabilities. In their most recent newsletter they provided a link to a 1914 essay by Jack London titled Told in the Drooling Ward. The essay is told from the first-person perspective of Tom, a person living in a large institution.
In the current political climate in Illinois an "institution" for people with a developmental disability is essentially any congregate living setting larger than 8 people. Originally, however, this word in the context of London's story referred to massive facilities built on the asylum model. These structures were typically built on the outskirts of small population centers, and were designed to be self-sufficient (thus maintaining separation). Many of the asylums were working subsistence farms, housed their own power plants, had textile operations for clothing the residents, and nurseries to care both for the infants admitted, and for those born there to the residents. It was typical for the staff working at the programs in the turn of the century to also live there. The Dixon State School was originally a train stop, with the rail grade that ran through the grounds now converted to a bike path.
In short, these were encapsulated worlds unto themselves, with much of the work of maintaining the colonies done by the people living there. London's story, contemporary to the era of these facilities heyday, is extremely consistent with the accounts I've received from the people with whom I've worked. For many of the people living in these settings - particularly those with more severe disabilities - they represented hellish conditions of barely sufficient custodial care. But for a select few - like Tom in the essay - life in the institution presented a setting in which, unlike the wider world outside of the facility, they had real and satisfying responsibilities. I have personally worked with a couple of different women who, for example, fondly recall being "working girls" - working in the nurseries and caring for babies.
Illinois began dismantling it's asylum system in the 1970's and, while it is still woefully behind the rest of the nation in funding smaller settings and closing the large facilities, it no longer operates on the separated colony model that once was in place. The people from whom I've had the privilege of hearing these stories are now in their 50's, 60's, and 70's. Like survivors of the Great Depression and World War II they represent a rapidly disappearing and unreplaceable resource.
The essay is an excellent, brief read, entirely available online at the site linked to above. I highly recommend it.
