Surgeon who operated on Biden: He's better now than before brain surgery

washington examiner ^ | 4/26/2019 | kimberly leonard

[bitt]

“Henry Goddard served as the Director of Research at the Vineland Training School for Feeble-Minded Girls and Boys in Vineland, New Jersey from 1906-1918. Between 1908, when Goddard first translated a version of the Binet scale and had it published in America, and 1930, over nine million adults and children had been tested using this scale. Standardized mental measurement cemented the authority of psychology as a serious science.

Binet’s original scale of mental measurement had included two gradations of deficiency: the “idiot,” who had a mental age of 2 or younger, and the “imbecile,” who had a mental age of 3 to 7 years. However, Goddard was not satisfied that this scale adequately addressed the problem of mental deficiency (see Thomson 1998). He believed the greatest threat to civilization’s advance lay with those who demonstrated a mental age of 8 to 12 years. This group, consisting of those closest to a “normal” mental age (13 or older), posed the greatest danger, in his opinion. Goddard hoped to draw attention to their presence in the public school systems that were struggling to make “normal” people out of them by keeping them in regular classes. Government agencies were making a grave error in treating them as “normal,” in Goddard’s mind. Even the highest grade of the feebleminded could never become normal, he argued, though they could pass for normal, making them the most likely culprits for spreading the defect to future generations. Rather than trying to disguise or ignore their disabilities, physicians and superintendents needed to underscore them.

Goddard needed a word that would carry scientific legitimacy and arouse public concern, for as Goddard stressed, physicians needed public assistance in hunting out individuals with high-grade deficiencies. Yet there was no word in the English language which adequately expressed the distinctiveness and urgency of their condition. Goddard, therefore, constructed his own term from the Greek word for foolish, moronia and the result was the diagnostic label of the “moron” for those who exhibited a mental age of 8 to 12 years.”

[trebb]

So, a brain that had a serious malfunction and had to be operated on becomes “better than new”...while those that never had a glitch can’t be vouched for....