Medicine: Feeble-minded Love

Most psychologists firmly believe that companionship with intelligent parents and playmates is the most important factor in a child's mental development. The Emperor of Japan shares this view (see p. 31). But last week at the Chicago meeting of the American Association for Mental Deficiency, Psychologist Harold Manville Skeels of the State University of Iowa, questioned this old belief.

Dr. Skeels told how he took 13 mentally retarded pre-school infants away from a bleak Iowa orphanage packed with healthy, intelligent moppets, and placed them in a home for feeble-minded girls. The inmates lavished...

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