Alex Green, a lecturer at Harvard’s Kennedy School, will describe how the early 20th century’s leading figure on intellectual and developmental disabilities, Dr. Walter E. Fernald, discovered that he had made a series of fundamental, terrible mistakes that were harming the very people he had sought to serve. Dr. Fernald spent the rest of his life advocating for new and better approaches.
Green, a writer, scholar and author of “A Perfect Turmoil: Walter E. Fernald and the Struggle to Care for America’s Disabled” (Bellevue Literary Press, 2025), will explain how he uncovered details of Dr. Fernald’s life and why it matters. The book won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography earlier this year.
Green developed the first graduate course on disability policy at the University of Massachusetts and worked on legislation to create a disability-led human rights commission to investigate Massachusetts institutions for disabled persons. His work led to reform, including the unsealing of millions of documents on the state’s history of institutionalizing disabled individuals.
