History from the Dark Side

In “And Neither Have I Wings to Fly”: Labelled and Locked Up in Canada’s Oldest Institution, Toronto writer Thelma Wheatley has given imaginative life to a largely forgotten chapter in Canadian history. Throughout the first half of the 20th century, spurred by eugenicist ideas popular throughout the western world, Canadian politicians, social workers, nurses, physicians and parents participated in the incarceration of thousands of children and adults labelled “mentally defective.” Many spent years of their young lives housed in inhumane conditions, separated from family, labouring without compensation in institutional kitchens, wards and laundries, and facing brutal treatment at the hands of staff. Some were sterilized without their knowledge or consent.

Not a purely academic treatment of eugenics, this book is part memoir, part treatise. Wheatley threads her larger narrative through the story of “Daisy Lumsden,” a teenage resident from 1959 to 1966 in the...