Recalling a Trip: Looking Back With a Disability Pioneer

Pictured: Dr. Gunnar Dybwad
Photo Credit: The Minnesota Governor's Council on Developmental Disabilities

By Rick Rader, MD, Editor-in-chief, HELEN

The history of the disability rights movement chronicles the contribution of early pioneer advocates and luminaries. Among those who are standouts was Dr. Gunnar Dybwad, an early proponent of the self-advocacy movement and social model of disability. For him, disability accommodations weren’t a question of medical treatment, but a matter of civil rights. 

In a 1988 interview with the Minnesota Governor’s Council on Developmental Disabilities, Dybwad talked about the dismal conditions he witnessed at a state-run institution in Tennessee at the end of the 1950s. 

HELEN is proud to share an excerpt from this interview  that offers a glimpse of how far we’ve come in the hopes that with this knowledge we’ll never witness such atrocities again. 

Readers of HELEN need to know about Dybwad, his work, his legacy, and his enduring message of both human and civil rights. 

"At the close of the 1950s, Governor Clement of Tennessee came to the end of his tenure and one day told his staff that he would like to have a nice state building named after him. Somebody suggested that Cloverbottom, the state institution near Nashville, needed a new building for severely, multiply handicapped patients. The idea appealed to the Governor and he instructed the staff to spare no money.

Shortly after the building was completed I visited there and the superintendent, a well-known psychiatrist with experience in other institutions, proudly took me to the new building. It was filled with cribs made on three sides of the best Tennessee marble, with an aluminum wire mesh front that opened.

 The crib stood high on four steel legs so the staff did not have to bend over. (And all that was needed was another marble slab on top to change the crib into a tomb). But then the psychiatrist showed me the main feature: He called an attendant who came with a hydraulic jack on wheels, quickly lifted the rubber mattress with the patient on it, and rolled the jack to the middle of the large dormitory. There was a gangway there with low walls from which streams of water could be turned on so that as the jack rolled through, the patient was bathed, untouched by human hands. The psychiatrist smiled with satisfaction, turned to me and said, 'This is our 3-minute car wash!'"

Thanks to Hal Baker, Public Advocate at the Arc of Tennessee for sharing this with HELEN.