Those They Called Idiots: The Idea of the Disabled Mind from 1700 to the Present Day

Description

Those They Called Idiots traces the little-known lives of people with learning disabilities from the communities of eighteenth-century England to the nineteenth-century asylum, to care in today’s society. Using evidence from civil and criminal courtrooms, joke books, slang dictionaries, novels, art, and caricature, it explores the explosive intermingling of ideas about intelligence and race, while bringing into sharp focus the lives of people often seen as the most marginalized in society. Cover Title Page Copyright Page Contents Introduction Part One: Idiocy and Imbecility in the Eighteenth Century, c. 1700–1812 1. Poor Foolish Lads and Weak Easy Girls: Legal Ideas of Idiocy 2. Billy-noodles and Bird-wits: Cultural Ideas of Idiocy 3. Idiots Abroad: Racial Ideas of Idiocy Part Two: New Ways of Thinking, c. 1812–70 4. Medical Challenge: New Ideas in the Courtroom 5. Pity and Loathing: New Cultural Thinking 6. Colonies, Anthropologists and Asylums: Race and Intelligence 7. Into the Idiot Asylum: The Great Incarceration Part Three: From Eugenics to Care in the Community, 1870 to the Present Day 8. After Darwin: Mental Deficiency, Eugenics and Psychology, 1870–1939 9. Back to the Community? From 1939 to the Present References Selected Secondary Reading Acknowledgements Photo Acknowledgements Index