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Photo of Iowa Soldiers' Orphans' Home licensed for use by CC BY-SA 3.0
In July 1934, psychologist Harold Skeels evaluated two toddlers at the Iowa Soldiers' Orphans' Home in Davenport, Iowa, a Dickensian Civil War–era facility that was both a residence for abandoned children and the state's central adoption facility. Skeels had been tasked to use intelligence quotient (IQ) tests to identify the “imbeciles,” “morons,” and “idiots” among the hordes of children at the home and shunt them to institutions for the “feebleminded.” (This review, like the book at hand, will use the terminology of the era.)
As infants, the two toddlers under evaluation—13-month-old CD and 17-month-old BD—had been taken by the state from their mothers, a prostitute and an inmate in an insane asylum, respectively, and placed at the Davenport home, where they were “scarcely touched, never held, rarely spoken to,” as Marilyn Brookwood, the author of the excellent The Orphans of Davenport, writes. When Skeels performed an IQ test, the girls scored 46 and 35. (An individual score of 90 to 109 was considered average intelligence.)
Skeels...