Medicine: Human Warehouse

By name and locale, Willowbrook State School seems a pleasant enough place: a teaching institution on a 400-acre bucolic tract on Staten Island in New York Harbor. Actually, Willowbrook, the world's largest institution for the mentally retarded, is a school in name only. It is instead a grim repository for those whom society has abandoned. What sets Willowbrook apart from similar facilities in other states is sudden exposure. Parents, legislators and newsmen have recently made headlines by attacking the system that allows such a place to exist. In the process, they have won...