Kathryn Hetler

Born in 1906 as the last of five daughters, Kathryn Hetler was one of the early residents of the "Eastern Pennsylvania State Institution for the Feeble-Minded and Epileptic," located just outside of Philadelphia. Because she was listed as living with her mother, sister, and grandmother during the census in April 1920, she was probably admitted later that year.

It was supposed to be a better, more humane way to care for mentally and physically disabled individuals than to house them in insane hospitals, almshouses, county-care hospitals, reformatories, and prisons.

However, from today's perspective, it was a special kind of hell.

Within four years of its opening in 1908, the institution "was already overcrowded and under pressure to admit immigrants, orphans, and criminals."

Residents, in keeping with contemporary trends, were treated as "undesirables" -- a burden on a country that needed to expunge them if it wanted to engineer a better future. In his 1918 report to the PA legislature, the chief physician quoted Henry H. Goddard, a leading eugenicist, who'd said:

"Every feeble-minded person is a potential criminal. The general public, although more convinced today than ever before that it is a good thing to segregate the idiot or the distinct imbecile, they have not as yet been convinced as to the proper treatment of the defective delinquent...." [Source]

The coming decades would discredit eugenics, but conditions did not improve at the institution. In 1977, a U.S. Court ruled that the institution violated patients' constitutional rights. In 1981, Time magazine reported that the institute "had a history of being understaffed, dirty and violent." [Source] In 1983, nine employees were indicted on charges ranging from slapping and beating patients, including those in wheelchairs.

The institution was ultimately closed in 1987, but by that point, Kathryn Hetler had long since been gone. She died in February 1921, when she was 14 years-old, of endocarditis -- a bacterial infection of the blood that spreads to the inner lining of the heart. She had been in the institute for less than a year.
It is normally a rare and only "potentially" fatal infection [Source}, but given conditions at the institution, I can't help but feel it was the result of a very deliberate form of negligence. To her contemporaries, Kathryn's death may have been a small price to pay for the "refinement" of the American gene pool. But to me, her death is an indictment of that time period.

As the great-great-great-granddaughter of Anna Maria Boyer, Kathryn would be my fifth-cousin, 3x removed. She is buried with her parents James and Lillian in the Old Rosemont Cemetery in Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania.