Doctors, Priests Fallible

The Boston Herald

Priests and doctors, they were trusted and obeyed. They knew best. Even adults deferred to them. The priest was God's representative on Earth. You knelt before him. You told him your sins. Yes, Father. No, Father.

And doctors always had all the answers, right?

“Put him in an institution. Forget you ever had him. It will be the best thing for you and your family,'' a doctor told Marian Burke in 1965 when she gave birth to her son, Chris, who was born with Down syndrome.

He grew up to be an actor and star of the TV series ``Life Goes On.'' His mother didn't listen to the doctor, but thousands of other parents did.

Generations to come will have to struggle to understand the mindset of ``before,'' when priests and doctors were never questioned, when they stood on some giant pedestal far above everyone else. Priests and doctors were untouchable then.

Retired Judge Robert A. Barton got it right when he told a reporter Monday that had the Rev. Paul Shanley been tried 11 years ago, he'd have walked out of that courtroom a free man. This week the now defrocked priest was convicted of the rape of a child over a period of years.

It has taken a long time to face the unthinkable. But we have finally come to a shift: The doctor is questioned. The priest has been deposed.

Two days after a now 27-year-old man drove the final nail in the coffin of blind trust afforded Catholic priests, ``60 Minutes'' exposed another deceit. Thousands of children born in the 1950s and '60s with defects - cleft palates, cerebral palsy, epilepsy - and committed to Sonoma State Hospital in California were experimented on by researchers working under the auspices of the federal government.

Neither the Shanley conviction nor the ``60 Minutes'' expose was a revelation - not after the Revs. James Porter and John Geoghan. And not after the radiation experiments at the Walter E. Fernald State School here in Massachusetts.

Yet both are needed reminders that what society believes today - about abortion, about stem-cell research, about morals - may be the how-could-they-have-thought-that-way disbeliefs of tomorrow. 

Karen Alves was 10 when her parents, on the advice of doctors, committed her 3-year-old brother Mark to Sonoma State Hospital. ``In the '50s cerebral palsied children were considered to be developmentally disabled,'' Alves told ``60 Minutes.'' But she never believed Mark was mentally impaired.

He was 6 when he died. Thirty-three years later she tried to find out why. It took her 12 years, court orders and studying thousands of documents to learn that the federal government experimented on these kids. Her brother was Specimen No. 8732.

“He ran extremely high fevers that none of us here right now would live through,'' Alves said. “Swollen eyes, seizures - those things can fit in with radiation poisoning.’'

And after his death, they removed his brain without consent.

Doctors told her mother he'd be better off in an institution. And the mother deferred to the doctors.

Mothers deferred to priests, too. But not any more. The world may not be as innocent today. But the innocent are better protected.