DeJarnette Sanitarium, Eugenics,Staunton

AP reports... Gov. Tim Kaine will be on hand for the groundbreaking on a new psychiatric hospital that continues a long Virginia tradition.

For about 200 years, lunatics were sent to Staunton. (Now they come on their own). The Western Lunatic Asylum opened in Staunton in 1828 as the official repository.
Dr. Francis T. Stribling was one of the first superintendent's of the Western Lunatic Asylum.
Dr. Joseph S. DeJarnette was superintendent of the renamed Western State Hospital from 1906-43. DeJarnette advocated legal sterilizations of those unable to support themselves because of a mental condition and those who were “syphilitic, epileptic, imbeciles and drunkards.”
In 1972, in order to serve children with severe emotional disorders, the facility was renamed the DeJarnette Center. A new children’s psychiatric hospital was constructed on the Western State Hospital campus across U.S. 250 from the former DeJarnette Center in 1996.
The new facility was named the Commonwealth Center for Children and Adolescents by state officials in 2001, after the General Assembly refused to use Dr. DeJarnette’s name because of his discredited history. DeJarnette Sanitarium (1932-96) now sits vacant on the Frontier Culture Museum property. See more here
From On High posted this today
See some pics here
Additional here
From...The Horrifying American Roots of Nazi Eugenics
In 1934, as Germany’s sterilizations were accelerating beyond 5,000 per month, the California eugenics leader C. M. Goethe upon returning from Germany ebulliently bragged to a key colleague, “You will be interested to know, that your work has played a powerful part in shaping the opinions of the group of intellectuals who are behind Hitler in this epoch-making program. Everywhere I sensed that their opinions have been tremendously stimulated by American thought.…I want you, my dear friend, to carry this thought with you for the rest of your life, that you have really jolted into action a great government of 60 million people.”

That same year, ten years, after Virginia passed its sterilization act, Joseph DeJarnette, superintendent of Virginia’s Western State Hospital, observed in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, “The Germans are beating us at our own game.”