On Tuesday, November 27, 1945, Mrs. Constance Rhodes received a personal letter from Dr. Arthur Whitney, superintendent of the Elwyn Training School for Mental Defectives in Media, Pennsylvania, letting her know that her seven-year-old son, Roger, “can not be granted admission to Elwyn because we accept only the distinctly trainable children, with IQ’s above 50.” Whitney added any child with an “IQ of 50 at the age of seven will probably have an IQ of 30 at the age of fourteen.” Roger’s rejection by the Elwyn School demonstrates both the malleability and authority of measurement testing in postwar America for the identification of mental deficiency. I suggest that Dr. Whitney attempted to stabilize the diagnostic boundaries of mental deficiency through the establishment of new admission policies based on measurement testing. The administrators at Elwyn, however, grossly overestimated the stability of the IQ test as a measurement tool upon which the classification and diagnosis of mental abnormality rested. This presentation engages with the history of medicine and disability scholarship to show that, yes, diagnoses and designations can be, have been, and are oppressive but that upon closer examination these constructions are simultaneously unstable, permeable, and full of gaps. If we shift to focus on the enterable qualities of these designations at the Elwyn School, we see that families and students were an essential, and operative, part of the production of mental deficiency.
