![]() ![]() ![]() DeJarnette, in his personal papers, notes the characteristics of the illness as disorientation, loss of contact with reality, splitting of the personality. Under DeJarnette’s supervision, electroshock and insulin treatments were used on patients who suffered from Dementia Praecox, or Schizophrenia. DeJarnette is a man of the highest moral character, and of unusual ability, energy, and vigor…Few men in the State had more experience than he in the care and treatment of the insane, a subject which he has made his life work and I think I can safely say that there is no man in the State who is superior, and few who are equal, to him in peculiar fitness for that service in the matter of temperament and technical knowledge.” He “is robust and wholesome of mind and body is “of a most kindly and humane disposition, and of an unusually genial and cheerful temperament and manner all of which, together with his skill and tactfulness in dealing with the insane of whom he has charge, enables him to readily gain and retain their confidence, affection and obedience.” The letter continues, stating that DeJarnette “is an enthusiastic student of his profession,” “a man of much originality of thought and full of initative,” “tactful in the management of his subordinates,” and “a good spirit in his department.” I think that he has positive genius for his particular work.” Byrd ends his letter with a statement validated by many of DeJarnette’s patients themselves: “To me one of greatest recommendations is the affection which his poor unfortunates have for him.” DeJarnette took over as Superintendent that same year.Īnother letter of advocacy, from December 16, 1905, likely from attorney Marshall McCormick of Berryville, Virginia (although the archived letter is unsigned), states that “Dr. I consider him one of the foremost alienists in this Country. I have seen him on the witness stand when testifying as an expert on insanity and I have seen him a number of times with his patients. DeJarnette for a number of years and have had a number of opportunities of observing him. DeJarnette.” Continuing, he writes about DeJarnette’s qualifications: “I have known Dr. I take the liberty of recommending to your favorable consideration Dr. The attorney Richard Evelyn Byrd, from Winchester, Virginia, wrote to the hospital board on December 16: “As a citizen of Virginia I am greatly interested in the selection of a successor to Dr. Blackford, their superintendent who had recently died. In late 1905, Western State was looking for a replacement to Dr. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote in his decision, “It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind…Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”ĭeJarnette was well-liked, respected, and often praised by community members local, state, and federal politicians and judges as well as his patients. ![]() Bell, the Supreme Court upheld a 1924 Virginia law that permitted sterilization of those deemed genetically unfit. ![]() It was the American medical community that created a policy of eugenics, validated by the US Supreme Court. The poem begins: “Oh, why are you men so foolish – / You breeders who breed our men / Let the fools, the weaklings and crazy / Keep breeding and breeding again? / The criminal, deformed, and the misfit, / Dependent, diseased, and the rest- / As we breed the human family / The worst is as good as the best.” DeJarnette’s rhetoric shouldn’t be surprising. He was reported to have read, on many occasions, a poem he wrote, “A Plea for a Better Race of Men,” which had been published multiple times. Joseph Spencer DeJarnette, the Superintendent of Western State Lunatic Asylum in Staunton, Virginia from 1905 through 1947, embraced the ideology of eugenics and sterilization wholeheartedly. ![]()
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