In this report, Priddy targeted the “high grade defective” or “moron” as a major source of social problems and as the most appropriate candidate for sterilization.
A few years earlier, Henry Goddard had coined the term “moron” from a Greek word meaning foolish. The label soon came to be applied widely to people who were considered “high grades”—those who were not retarded seriously enough to be obvious to the casual observer and who had not been brain damaged by disease or injury. Morons were characterized as being intellectually dull, socially inadequate, and morally deficient. Priddy wrote:
High Grade Morons of the Anti-Social Class
Each day (working) in the custodial care of delinquent high-grade moron girls and women of good physical strength and health impresses me with the gravity of the responsibility which the…management of institutions for the feeble-minded assume in keeping these people…indefinitely to enforce morality in act or rather to restrain them from overt acts of immorality. If they are to be kept from indulging in sexual immorality it means they are to be kept a lifetime in institutions under the strictest custody…This to any fair-minded thinker must appear to be a cruel and unjust degree of punishment for their weaknesses…Besides the humane aspect of it a large percent of the girls and women of this class should be earning their own living in work for which they are mentally and physically adequate, rather than to constitute lifetime burdens on the taxpayers of the State. If they are to be kept in institutions and supported at the expense of the State for the child-bearing period covering at least thirty years, to prevent them from bearing children to increase the population of mental and physical defectives and dependents…it certainly seems more humane and just to them to give them the benefit of a milder and less severe method of attaining the desired end…Therefore, every reasonable and fair-minded person must concede that the withdrawal of the right to propagate their kind could and should be given to society in such cases of females as have demonstrated their constitutional mental and moral inability to use the right of child-bearing as a blessing to humanity rather than a curse.
Priddy goes on to state that many women were being classified as feeble-minded primarily on the basis of their sexual behavior rather than evidence of impaired mental function. In Priddy’s eyes at least, “moral deficiency” had become synonymous with “mental deficiency.”
…the admission of female morons to this institution has consisted for the most part of those who would formerly have found their way into the red-light district and become dangerous to society…If the present tendency to place and keep under custodial care in State institutions all females who have become incorrigibly immoral it will soon become a burden much greater than the State can carry. These women are never reformed in heart and mind because they are defectives from the standpoint of intellect and moral conception and should always have the supervision by officers of the law and properly appointed custodians.
Priddy continued his comments with a discussion of sterilization. He revealed that sterilization had evidently already become a practice at the Colony, at least in his operating room.
No one could be more opposed to a drastic and far-reaching law providing for the sterilization of mental defectives without careful safe-guard…(however) I view it as the only solution of the problem of the custodial care of them by the State…Within the last seven years between seventy-five and a hundred young women patients in this institution have had operations for pelvic diseases which rendered them sterile, and, after long observation, discipline and training, the most of them have been paroled in good families and have earned their living and led happy and useful lives, and I cannot recall that a single one has ever returned to the institution or against whom complaint has been made by officers of the law as to immorality. Many of them have married hard-working men of a slightly higher mental grade and have conducted themselves properly as married women. The paroling of unsterilized, physically attractive young women from the institution (to the) best of families is not without danger… it is not infrequent for them to be returned to the institution pregnant despite the best of care which was given them. The operation (sterilization), when carefully performed by a skillful operator, is as free from danger to life as any minor surgical operation can be, and it in no way effects the general health and normal functioning of any woman…
The superintendents of the four State hospitals and the Colony have been appointed a committee by the General State Hospital Board to draft a bill to be presented in the coming General Assembly for a law authorizing the sterilization of such patients as may be found capable of earning their own living and of being released under proper custodial care, without danger to themselves and the public. It is to be hoped that with the best legal talent to draft such a bill, it can come within constitutional limits and enacted into a law.
The fact that Albert Priddy had diagnosed so many cases of pelvic disease, and that the surgery he performed in these cases so often rendered his patients sterile, is difficult to accept as a coincidence. It seems evident that the medical diagnosis of pelvic disorder allowed Priddy to intervene in the reproductive potentials of these women. He was able to do, in the name of disease, what he could not as yet legally do in the name of eugenics.
Priddy had included similar statements concerning pelvic diseases and sterilization in previous reports. His didactic account in 1923, however, is even more remarkable in light of the fact that one of his earlier “therapeutic” sterilizations had resulted in Mallory v. Priddy.
In November of 1917, A. S. Priddy received a letter concerning one of the residents of his institution. Although the mechanics and grammar of the writing lacked precision and polish, the message and intent was quite direct and forceful. The writer of the letter, George Mallory of Richmond, accused Albert Priddy of breaking up his family. In his rough and imperfect, but forceful, language, Mallory threatened to cause trouble for Priddy unless his daughter was returned to him unharmed. He argued that his daughter was not feeble-minded and had no need to be in Priddy’s institution. He also pointed out that he knew there was no legal basis for sterilization (“no law for such treatment”) in Virginia. Mallory was fearful that his daughter would be sexually sterilized if she remained under Priddy’s control much longer.
Mallory’s anxiety had a very real foundation; Dr. Priddy had already sterilized George Mallory’s wife and another one of his daughters. His letter to Priddy crackled with anger and desperation.
Priddy’s response was instant and vehement. Accusing Mallory of threatening him, he informed him that if he dared to write another letter of that kind, he would have him arrested and committed to the Lynchburg institution. Priddy claimed that he had performed surgery on Mallory’s wife and daughter at their request and because it was indicated as treatment for diseases they had. He closed his note by repeating that if he received further threats from Mallory he would have him “arrested in a few hours.”
Mallory, however, may not have been a man of grammar, but he was not a man to be taken lightly. He sued. Priddy’s own letter was presented as evidence against him to the jury in the case of Mallory v. Priddy. The case helped to illustrate clearly the kinds of social policies and practices that contributed to the passage of Virginia’s involuntary sterilization law. It was also indicative of the kinds of “pelvic diseases” that Priddy encountered so frequently at the Colony, most of which seemed to have resulted in sterilization.
Paul Lombardo’s scholarly examination of the case of Mallory v. Priddy includes the following facts which help to explain the exchange of letters between the two men and the subsequent court case.
On a balmy September evening in 1916, George Mallory was away from his Richmond home working in a sawmill. While two family friends were visiting in the Mallory house, police officers entered and charged Mrs. Mallory with running a brothel. They arrested her, her nine children and the two male visitors.
The younger children were placed with the Children’s Home Society.
