It has only been in the past 15 years or so that pediatric surgeons have been using anesthesia on any infants because they also thought that they "felt no pain," so don't get too excited about what people thought about in the MR/DD field 50 years ago - they thought the same thing about "normal" babies until just recently. Check out the following article that was in the New York Times as "recently" as 1992:
P.S. Do you know what the rate of abuse is in the community as compared to institutional facilities? Neither does anyone else, because you can't keep track of people as easily when they are so geographically disparate.
This is NOT a pitch for institutionalizing people by any stretch, it's a pitch for using the intellectual part of your brain as well as the emotional part. Read all of the introduction in which Motts states that he is quoting what is on the plaque at the Ladd School, rather than anything he might personally believe.
You are saying you keep people in bathtubs full of ice and ice water for many hours, sometimes days? Even though people die after an hour or so because that's what human bodies do after that amount of exposure? I don't know everything about everything, but I do know that being in ice/ice water for multiple hours will kill a person. If you don't know that and you are doing this, either you are fairly unaware of what is happening in your facility or you must have one hell of a mortality rate. :-)
I also thought it was wood. Very interesting place. You did spectacularly well with your lighting, given how much I am sure was here when you arrived. :-)
Hey! Dude! Is that a ghost in the middle of the picture or what? Could it be a ghost? I have heard there are ghosts there. Could that be a ghost? Do you see ghosts all the time? Aren't ghosts great? Do you see a lot of ghosts? Aren't you afraid of ghosts? Or what? Dude!