“We Learn By Doing”
Northville’s Wayne County Training School as Institutional Model for the World
© Adam Barrett
WCTS also aided nearby Maybury Sanatorium in the fight against tuberculosis, having routinely done tuberculin tests on all admissions since 1933. ⁸³ Collaboration between WCTS's Dr. Steele and Maybury's Medical Director, Dr. Willis, also continued, as did general experimentation through the years with various vaccines and new treatments. Dr. Steele and WCTS were also mentioned in TIME Magazine, as having taken part in meningitis vaccine experiments with local pharmaceutical giant, Parke-Davis:
Last week Parke, Davis sent up a glad shout from Detroit that not only is Dr. [Newell Simon] Ferry’s meningitis antitoxin a definite means of telling whether or not a child is susceptible to cerebro-spinal meningitis, but that in all probability three stiff doses will protect the child against the disease. Dr. Ferry, with the help of Dr. Arthur Harvey Steele and Dr. Robert Haskell, proved his thesis on the students of the Wayne County Training School at Northville, Mich. ⁸⁴
Some 22 years later, WCTS would acquire the services of the Straith Clinic for performing minor plastic surgeries on children with remediable deformities. ⁸⁵ Dr. Claire Straith of Detroit was one of the original members of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, who came together after World War I to treat mutilated veterans. He eventually founded his Straith Clinic in the David Whitney Building in 1936 when he became interested in remediating the terrible injuries of car-accident victims, and made efforts to educate the public and the auto manufacturers of the dangers of car accidents. Straith had personal discussions with Walter Chrysler and Preston Tucker, and was instrumental in convincing the car companies to begin incorporating such safety measures as padded dashboards and seatbelts. ⁸⁶ By the time the WCTS enlisted his clinic’s services, Dr. Straith had developed industry-leading surgical methods, and it was thought that the “total physical and emotional well being” of some children with birth defects could be improved through the cosmetic operations. The surgeries were performed in the WCTS Hospital Building. ⁸⁷
In 1947, Dr. Strauss and Dr. Laura E. Lehtinen published their landmark Psychopathology and Education of the Brain Injured Child. It was a study on the ways “feebleminded” children learn differently than children with normally developed brains, based partly on their research with children in an experimental class at the WCTS, and was in fact assisted in small part by Drs. Werner and Kephart. Strauss and Lehtinen were able to ameliorate behavioral problems by understanding, then helping patients tackle, difficulties in the academic situation. They found that some were having trouble reading due to difficulty correlating sounds to their written symbols on the page, so they developed visual aids in pronunciation drills “designed to slow down the reading process, to counteract a child’s disinhibition.” Furthermore, they found that left-handed writers seemed to have an inhibited mechanical understanding of the reading process, which once overcome, represented an astounding leap forward in approaching normalcy for the child. ⁸⁸ This study was deemed so useful that it was translated into layman’s terms and marketed to parents under the title, The Other Child.
The idea of special education for “brain-injured” children even seems to have been Strauss’s and Lehtinen's original idea. In the acknowledgements section of their book they thank “Mr. John Tenny of Wayne University,” who “offered us the first opportunity to establish a special class for cerebral palsied children in a public school.” ⁸⁹ In the WCTS Administrative Board minutes for May 24, 1945 it is recorded that Milton Alexander moved to allow Drs. Strauss and Lehtinen to set up “a class for brain-crippled children in Dearborn Public Schools.” The publication of Psychopathology was the capstone for the body of research that represented the entire thrust of the WCTS's line of scientific inquiry since its very inception. It “defined the syndrome without reference to intelligence level;” they asserted that “clinical and psychological examination yielded similar results with all types of brain-injured children, irrespective of their placement on the Binet scale of intelligence.” They had distinguished a new disorder, which was not an irreversible mental defect, but something that could be remediated or overcome. The concept of a “learning disability” was ready to be born, though it would not come to fruition for many more years. ⁹⁰