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Israel is another country which has had a substantial immigration of an unskilled working population coming from countries with different languages and primitive socio-cultural conditions. Israel's large-scale efforts to deal with this situation provide significant materials for studies on the relationship of mental retardation to socio-economic and cultural deprivation.

Attention should also be called in this context to an excellent recent study by Charles Meisgeier on the problem of minority groups in Texas, under the title "The Doubly Disadvantaged -- A Study of Socio-Cultural Determinants in Mental Retardation." (8) His data regarding the Latin American minority group are particularly valuable. He states "If we think of the Negro and Latin American population of Texas as states within a state -- and this is not too fanciful since they are groups of significant size, concentrated in certain sections and separated by barriers, -- we have a picture of a significant segment of our national territory and population characterized by gross deprivation and disadvantaged in every area -- physical, medical, economic, educational, social and political."

Much as is the case with the Spanish worker in Switzerland, Meisgeier documents the great problems faced by this population due to their inability to speak English, their lack of knowledge of the social and cultural resources, in particular also the health and welfare agencies, and their inability to communicate adequately once they have been specifically directed to such an agency.

The foregoing examples related to cultural and socio-economic deprivation resulting in mental retardation of a mild degree. Comments are now in order on the first one of the common assumptions about mental retardation in the primitive world quoted by Dr. Edgerton, namely that the profoundly retarded are typically killed, an assumption for which he found no conclusive support. What needs to be pointed out here is that the desirability of killing profoundly retarded individuals is a question which is being raised in the United States periodically to this very day, and actual instances of such individuals having been killed by members of their family have been reported from all sections of the country. Furthermore, there are strong indications that some physicians will directly or indirectly cause the death of an infant who in their opinion is destined to be grossly retarded. It is significant that a major television series entitled "The Defenders," dealing with simulated court cases from the current American scene, began years ago with a drama in which a physician deliberately killed an infant born with mongolism in order to relieve the parents of this burden. While the story had the case brought to court and the physician convicted, the author strongly implied that it was unfortunate the law had to take this course.

A recent major article in The Atlantic (9) , written in part by the father of a new born child with mongolism, in part by a professor of theology, unequivocally recommends that all such children be killed at birth. The theology professor flatly stated that a child with Down's syndrome (mongolism) "is not a person," and that therefore the killing in such a case was justified, while "there is far more reason for real guilt in keeping alive a Down's or other kind of idiot.." The June issue printed a number of letters disagreeing with the article but also one letter from a mother bitterly complaining that her doctor had rushed her two-day old infant, born with mongolism, to an emergency operation when she felt that he should not have "bothered." Similarly a psychiatric journal (10) recently quoted a psychiatrist superintendent of a state institution for the mentally retarded as calling profoundly retarded individuals "sub-human" and "human vegetables" and implying that they had no right to live.

(10) Conditioning the Retarded May be Inhumane Procedure. Frontiers of Hospital Psychiatry, 5,5, January 1968.

The point to be made here is simply that what Dr. Edgerton reported as the actions of primitive men is replicated still today under the most advanced condition of so-called civilization.

In this connection it is well to recall, in order to put matters in a broader perspective, that until only a few years ago a large number of states in the U.S.A. had statutory provisions denying medical and surgical treatment under the crippled children's legislation to any child "not of sound mind." A recent book entitled Dehumanization and the Institutional Career (11) provides further documentation of "civilized" man's inhumanity to man in dealing with the retarded.