ABSTRACT
THE Oxford Dictionary defines treatment as ‘a mode of dealing with a person or thing’; it is perhaps in this sense that the word is particularly applicable in the institutional care of subnormal patients. Yet in a hospital setting ‘treatment’ more usually has a medical connotation; the fact that a person is in hospital implies that he is there because he is ‘ill’, and the use of the term ‘patient’ to refer to the inmates of all hospitals whether general, psychiatric, geriatric or subnormality, reinforces this idea. But as we have suggested earlier, the subnormal patient, like the senile patient or the tractable psychotic, may be less in need of medical treatment per se than of physical or social care.
