Down's Syndrome by Chris Nancollas

Author:Chris Nancollas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: biography, history, down's syndrome, medicine, learning disability, mental illness, culture, society
ISBN: 9780232529692
Publisher: Andrews UK
Published: 2012-05-04T00:00:00+00:00

The New Enlightenment

At first glance, the controversial English politician Enoch Powell would appear to be an unlikely character in the Down’s syndrome story. Powell achieved fame, and notoriety, for his famous 1968 speech on the dangers of uncontrolled immigration, which he ended by quoting the poet Virgil: ‘Like the Roman, I seem to see “the River Tiber foaming with much blood”.’ The ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech defined his public persona and ensured that he became a demonic figure for some, and a sort of folk hero for others. Not the sort of person, one would imagine, who had a lot of time for minorities.

Our interest lies with his time as a Health Minister, when he proved to be an able if controversial legislator. In 1961 he gave a landmark address to the National Association for Mental Health in which he criticised asylums and their place in society, a speech which became known as the ‘water tower’ speech:

There they stand isolated, majestic, imperious, brooded over by the gigantic water tower and chimney combined, the asylums which our forefathers built ... to express the notions of the day. Do not doubt for a moment their powers of resistance to our assault.

Powell’s plan was for long-stay psychiatric hospitals to be phased out, to be replaced by community care - ‘nothing less than the The elimination of by far the greater part of this country’s mental hospitals as they stand today’. The story of healthcare has been littered with wildly inaccurate speculation about the future, but this statement is one of the few predictions made about health that has actually come true. No longer do our cities house the brooding asylums of yesteryear, the ‘water tower’ palaces of shame and fear, to be talked about in hushed whispers. When I was growing up in Cornwall in the 1960s the County Asylum was in Bodmin, and everyone knew that being ‘sent to Bodmin’ meant being locked away behind the walls of that grim Victorian institution. Nor was it a joke, like so many things in the country are, but something to be hidden and feared.

Enoch Powell was not, however, a lone visionary, but was drawing on the legislative and scientific advances which had been made during and after the Second World War. The Welfare State had its origins in the Lloyd George government of 1911, which provided national insurance for unemployment and sickness, but it was the social reformer William Beveridge who provided the framework for post-war Britain. The key document in the planning of services was the Beveridge Report, published in 1942, which dealt with social insurance and allied services, and which became the template for social care in Britain for the rest of the century. It advocated a National Insurance scheme for the funding of health and social care, and introduced the universal child benefit, among other reforms.

But by far the most important advance, not just for learning difficulties but also for all healthcare in Britain, was the creation, in 1948, of the National Health Service.

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