Henry H. Goddard

Henry Herbert Goddard (August 14, 1866 – June 18, 1957) was a prominent American psychologist and eugenicist during the early 20th century. He is known especially for his 1912 work The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness, which he himself came to regard as flawed, and for being the first to translate the Binet intelligence test into English during 1908 and distributing an estimated 22,000 copies of the translated test across the United States. He also introduced the term "moron" for clinical use.

He was the main advocate for the use of intelligence testing in societal institutions including hospitals, schools, the legal system and the military. He helped develop the new topic of clinical psychology, during 1911 helped to write the first U.S. law requiring that blind, deaf and mentally retarded children be provided special education within public school systems, and during 1914 became the first American psychologist to testify in court that subnormal intelligence should limit the criminal responsibility of defendants.

Goddard was born in East Vassalboro, Maine, the fifth and youngest child and only son of farmer Henry Clay Goddard and his wife Sarah Winslow Goddard, who were devout Quakers. (Two of his sisters died in infancy.) His father was gored by a bull when the younger Goddard was a small child, and eventually lost his farm and had to work as a farmhand; he died of his lingering injuries when the boy was nine years old. The younger Goddard went to live with his married sister for a brief time, but during 1877 was enrolled at the Oak Grove Seminary [1], a boarding school in Vassalboro.

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