America has certainly not been behindhand in her efforts to raise the condition of idiots. In 1818 an attempt was made to instruct them at the Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb at Hartford. It is said they were taught to communicate by the sign language.
To George Sumner the credit is due of having called attention powerfully to the subject in 1845. He had recently visited Paris, and gave a description of the idiot schools there. Dr. Woodward and Dr. Backus shortly after took up the question; the latter became in that year a senator of New York, and in 1846 introduced a Bill providing an idiot asylum or school. It was five years, however, before one was opened. This was at Albany, as an experiment; but it was eventually established at Syracuse, as the New York Asylum for Idiots. In 1855 a new building was erected in New York, the number provided for being 150. The first to superintend the institution was Dr. Hervey B. Wilbur. Accommodation was subsequently made for 225. In 1875 the average attendance at this school was 210; of these 180 were supported by the State, the remainder paying altogether or in part. The expenditure was 45,407 dollars; the cost per head for board and instruction being 200 dollars.
At the same period that New York took the initiative (1846), a commission was appointed by the Massachusetts Legislature to inquire into the condition of the idiot population of this state, and to report as to what was necessary to be done. The report being favourable to action, a wing in the Blind Institution at South Boston was appropriated to an idiot training school. This was in October, 1848. In 1850 this school underwent a transformation, being incorporated as the "Massachusetts School for Idiotic and Feeble-minded Youth," and placed under the charge of the well-known Dr. S. G. Howe, the instructor of Laura Bridgman. "We are happy to say," he observes in a report of this school, "that in its experience there have been hardly any so low as to be beyond the reach of some elevating influence, none, or next to none, so fixed in their degradation as to be unrecoverable."
Dr. H. B. Wilbur states that no provision is made for a large proportion of idiots in America; the present training institutions being quite inadequate to the applications made. The consequence is that many are placed in jails or almshouses. Recommendations have been made that these custodian cases should have either special asylums provided for them, or separate departments connected with lunatic asylums or training idiot institutions. It is calculated that there must be fully 38,000 idiots in the United States.