Sterilization of Carrie Buck. David Smith

hospitals and the care of the “insane.” In 1901 he was a member of the joint committee which adopted plans for the improvement and rebuilding of the Virginia Penitentiary.

      The choice of Albert Priddy as the Colony’s first superintendent was understandable in light of his past experience as superintendent of Southwestern State Hospital and his political involvement with matters concerning state institutions. He had political connections with Aubrey Strode, since both were Democrats and from the same region of the state. He also had both a political and professional relationship with Dr. J. S. DeJarnette, the superintendent of Western State Hospital. DeJarnette was a power and influence broker within the system of state institutions, and a true believer in eugenics.

      Politically and philosophically, Albert Priddy was the perfect choice.

      Almost immediately after assuming the superintendency, Priddy cemented his DeJarnette connections by making clear in the institution’s public record that he subscribed to the eugenic philosophy advocated by DeJarnette and others in the state hospital bureaucracy at that time. In his first annual report, written in 1910, he made it very clear that he believed epilepsy to be a genetic problem:

      …The epileptic remains with us always, alike the poor, as one of the most pitiful, helpless and troublesome of human beings, with their various and numerous afflictions, and worst to contemplate is the fact that of the known causes which contribute to the development and growth of epilepsy, that of bad heredity is the most potent, and with the unrestricted marriage and intermarriage of the insane, mentally defective and epileptic, its increase is but natural and is thus to be reasonably accounted for.

      Dr. Priddy’s second annual report in 1911 included an invocation that he was to repeat over and over for a decade. He issued a challenge to the state’s lawmakers that was to finally reach fruition in 1924.

      It is reasonable to anticipate a rapid increase in epileptics and mental defectives. Therefore, it seems not inopportune to call the attention of our lawmakers to the consideration of legalized eugenics.

      Thus a public call for compulsory sterilization had been issued.

      From the time it was established, the Colony had admitted some people who were mentally retarded as well as epileptic. During its early years, increasing numbers of people who were mentally retarded but not epileptic were admitted. Finally, by 1914, the mission of the Colony had been officially expanded to include people classified as feeble-minded. Soon, Priddy was focusing his eugenic concerns on that group and emphasizing connections between feeblemindedness, crime, alcoholism, prostitution and other social problems. In his 1915 report from the Colony he spoke of feeblemindedness in forewarning terms:

      This blight on mankind is increasing at a rapid rate…unless some radical measures are adopted to curb the influences which tend to promote its growth, it will be only a matter of time before the resulting pauperism and criminality will be a burden too heavy…to bear.

      Priddy’s statements in his annual reports concerning the “menace” of hereditary feeblemindedness and the socially therapeutic effects of sterilization increased in length and intensity. This escalation seems to have reached its peak in his 1922-23 biennial report. This would be the last report he would write prior to the successful passage of the Sterilization Act and the initiation of the Carrie Buck test case. In this report, Priddy targeted the “high grade defective” or “moron” as a major source of social problems and as the most appropriate candidate for sterilization.

      A few years earlier, Henry Goddard had coined the term “moron” from a Greek word meaning foolish. The label soon came to be applied widely to people who were considered “high grades”—those who were not retarded seriously enough to be obvious to the casual observer and who had not been brain damaged by disease or injury. Morons were characterized as being intellectually dull, socially inadequate, and morally deficient. Priddy wrote:

       High Grade Morons of the Anti-Social Class

      Each day (working) in the custodial care of delinquent high-grade moron girls and women of good physical strength and health impresses me with the gravity of the responsibility which the…management of institutions for the feeble-minded assume in keeping these people…indefinitely to enforce morality in act or rather to restrain them from overt acts of immorality. If they are to be kept from indulging in sexual immorality it means they are to be kept a lifetime in institutions under the strictest custody…This to any fair-minded thinker must appear to be a cruel and unjust degree of punishment for their weaknesses…Besides the humane aspect of it a large percent of the girls and women of this class should be earning their own living in work for which they are mentally and physically adequate, rather than to constitute lifetime burdens on the taxpayers of the State. If they are to be kept in institutions and supported at the expense of the State for the child-bearing period covering at least thirty years, to prevent them from bearing children to increase the population of mental and physical defectives and dependents…it certainly seems more humane and just to them to give them the benefit of a milder and less severe method of attaining the desired end…Therefore, every reasonable and fair-minded person must concede that the withdrawal of the right to propagate their kind could and should be given to society in such cases of females as have demonstrated their constitutional mental and moral inability to use the right of child-bearing as a blessing to humanity rather than a curse.

      Priddy goes on to state that many women were being classified as feeble-minded primarily on the basis of their sexual behavior rather than evidence of impaired mental function. In Priddy’s eyes at least, “moral deficiency” had become synonymous with “mental deficiency.”

      …the admission of female morons to this institution has consisted for the most part of those who would formerly have found their way into the red-light district and become dangerous to society…If the present tendency to place and keep under custodial care in State institutions all females who have become incorrigibly immoral it will soon become a burden much greater than the State can carry. These women are never reformed in heart and mind because they are defectives from the standpoint of intellect and moral conception and should always have the supervision by officers of the law and properly appointed custodians.

      Priddy continued his comments with a discussion of sterilization. He revealed that sterilization had evidently already become a practice at the Colony, at least in his operating room.

      No one could be more opposed to a drastic and far-reaching law providing for the sterilization of mental defectives without careful safe-guard…(however) I view it as the only solution of the problem of the custodial care of them by the State…Within the last seven years between seventy-five and a hundred young women patients in this institution have had operations for pelvic diseases which rendered them sterile, and, after long observation, discipline and training, the most of them have been paroled in good families and have earned their living and led happy and useful lives, and I cannot recall that a single one has ever returned to the institution or against whom complaint has been made by officers of the law as to immorality. Many of them have married hard-working men of a slightly higher mental grade and have conducted themselves properly as married women. The paroling of unsterilized, physically attractive young women from the institution (to the) best of families is not without danger… it is not infrequent for them to be returned to the institution pregnant despite the best of care which was given them. The operation (sterilization), when carefully performed by a skillful operator, is as free from danger to life as any minor surgical operation can be, and it in no way effects the general health and normal functioning of any woman…

      The superintendents of the four State hospitals and the Colony have been appointed a committee by the General State Hospital Board to draft a bill to be presented in the coming General Assembly for a law authorizing the sterilization of such patients as may be found capable of earning their own living and of being released under proper custodial care, without danger to themselves and the public. It is to be hoped that with the best legal talent to draft such a bill, it can come within constitutional limits and enacted into a law.

      The fact that Albert Priddy had diagnosed so many cases of pelvic disease, and that the surgery he performed in these cases so often rendered his patients sterile, is difficult to accept as a