ABSTRACT
Development in England was comparatively slow. A small ‘School for Idiots’ was started in Bath in 1846 by the Misses White, but this took only four patients. The real beginning of the work in England dates from 1847, when an ‘asylum for idiots’ was founded at Park House, Highgate, under the patronage of the Duke of Cambridge and the Duchess of Gloucester. In 1864, a similar institution, the Starcross Asylum, opened at Exeter, and four years later, the foundation stone of the Northern Counties Asylum for Idiots and Imbeciles was laid at Lancaster. The Charity Organisation Society, founded in 1868 for the coordination of charitable effort of all kinds, and the suppression of mendicity, was a body of some power and prestige. A man of outstanding ability and wide interests, Galton was to have a far-reaching influence not only in the eugenic field, but also in the now rapidly-developing fields of psychology and sociology.
