Scandal from old Baltimore’s high society: asylum inmates turned into slaves for the wealthy
20th Century slavery of women and girls... let us not forget them and continue to fight against modern-day slavery, including sexual slavery, around the globe. 
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/medical_examiner/2014/03/baltimore_s_rosewood_scandal_wealthy_families_sprang_asylum_inmates_to_be.html
A Forgotten Scandal in Baltimore’s High Society
Crooked lawyers sprang inmates from an asylum to make them slaves.
By Jesse Bering
(excerpts)
....Like many overwhelmed psychiatric facilities built around the turn of the last century, Rosewood had been dogged by shameful accusations for a long time. The most scandalous—the one that sets Rosewood apart from other asylums—was made by Leo Kanner on May 13, 1937. Before a hushed gathering at the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in Pittsburgh, Kanner shared the shocking tale of “the Rosewood girls.” It’s not a story most people know about today, but it’s an important reminder of just how destructive an upper class with an unchecked sense of entitlement can be, and how vital it remains to safeguard the interests of those who can’t do so for themselves. It also forces us to revisit an uncomfortable moment in our nation’s history when the practice of eugenics—human breeding for socially desirable attributes, such as intelligence—was viewed by even the most progressive human rights advocates as humane and ethical.
Kanner, a prominent Austrian-born physician who headed up the child psychiatry unit at Johns Hopkins University, was an advocate for the “feebleminded.” He’s mostly remembered today as the discoverer of autism. (For a while, autism was known as “Kanner syndrome.”) Remarkably, the cluster of symptoms that he was able to piece together from just a small sample of autistic children more than 70 years ago is still routinely used for diagnostic purposes. It was while researching the history of autism for another story, in fact, that I stumbled upon a passing reference to Kanner’s role as the main whistleblower in the Rosewood case...
... What was the nature of this evil? For more than 20 years, some of Baltimore’s wealthiest and most established families had been helping themselves to the institutionalized patients at Rosewood. They’d been “adopting” these mentally challenged girls and women only to turn them into their own private slaves.
It’s unclear from Kanner’s report just whose brainchild it was to steal these patients away from their cloistered lives at Rosewood, but I suspect a money-hungry wolf was at its center. The notorious Harry B. Wolf, Esq., to be precise. Wolf was a prodigious trial attorney—he racked up an average of 1,000 cases a year, nearly all of them successful—who seems to have had his hands in just about everything else in Baltimore. Real estate deals, hotel investments, even a successful ferry service company operating on the Eastern Shore. By the age of 28, he was already a former U.S. congressman. During the Great Depression, Wolf drove a Rolls Royce and lived in a sunny corner mansion in one of the area’s toniest neighborhoods.... Much More
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