Table Of ContentThose They called IdIoTs
THOSE THEY CA LLED
I D I O T S
The idea of the disabled mind
from 1700 to the present day
Simon Jarrett
ReakT Ion Books
For Dianne and, of course, for Hana
Published by
Reaktion Books Ltd
Unit 32, Waterside
44–48 Wharf Road
London n1 7ux, uk
www.reaktionbooks.co.uk
First published 2020
Copyright © Simon Jarrett 2020
All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the
prior permission of the publishers
Printed and bound in Great Britain
by TJ Books Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British
Library
isBn 978 1 78914 301 0
CONTENTS
Introduction 7
PaRt one: Idiocy and Imbecility in the Eighteenth
Century, c. 1700–1812
1 Poor Foolish Lads and Weak Easy Girls:
Legal Ideas of Idiocy 23
2 Billy-noodles and Bird-wits: Cultural Ideas
of Idiocy 54
3 Idiots Abroad: Racial Ideas of Idiocy 89
PaRt two: New Ways of Thinking, c. 1812–70
4 Medical Challenge: New Ideas in the
Courtroom 123
5 Pity and Loathing: New Cultural Thinking 152
6 Colonies, Anthropologists and Asylums:
Race and Intelligence 183
7 Into the Idiot Asylum: The Great Incarceration 216
PaRt thRee: From Eugenics to Care in the
Community, 1870 to the Present Day
8 After Darwin: Mental Deficiency, Eugenics and
Psychology, 1870–1939 245
9 Back to the Community? From 1939 to the
Present 276
RefeRences 309
selected secondaRy Reading 340
acknowledgements 343
Photo acknowledgements 345
index 347
Introduction
As a young nursing assistant in the 1980s, I began work at a
small, all-male ‘mental handicap hospital’ in southern
England. Many of its elderly male patients had been admitted
as children, in the 1920s and ’30s. At the end of my first shift, I
read through the file of G, an elderly patient who, dressed in the
remnants of a battered suit, helped around the ward during the
day. The file contained the notes of his admission in 1924, aged
six, which began: ‘G is a bat-eared cretin.’ I recoiled at the harsh
and degrading language used to describe such a young child. I
would later learn that he was, in fact, being described in the
correct, clinical language of his time. This language had made
a journey, perhaps not a lengthy one, from authoritative medical
terminology to street-level abuse during G’s sixty-year sojourn
on these wards. Other things had changed in that time also.
There had been the General Strike, the Great Depression, the
rise of Fascism, the Second World War, the Holocaust, the birth
of the nhs, the end of the British Empire, the Cold War, the
Swinging Sixties, the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War
and Thatcherism. Yet in all that time, as G grew from a boy into
a man and now approached the end of his life, things for him had
changed very little. Along with the other men (or ‘boys’ as they
were known in the town), his hair had perhaps got longer, his
girth thicker, his jumpers brighter and the wards a little less
spartan. Yet as the world had changed outside he had followed
7
those they called idiots
the same routines, eaten the same three stodgy meals a day, gone
to bed at 7.30 each night, got up at 6.30 each morning, and
passed the time each day. He would die at some point having
lived a strange Peter Pan sort of existence, never allowed to grow,
hope or see beyond the immediacy of this unending daily rou-
tine. He came into the world ‘a bat-eared cretin’, and was never
allowed to be anything else. Why?
There were many more questions as I worked over the
ensuing decades with people whom I first knew as people
with mental handicaps, then people with learning disabilities/
difficulties, then as the intellectually disabled, and who, at other
times, had been known as mentally subnormal, defectives,
morons, cretins, feeble-minded, mentally retarded, idiots and
many other terms. Why did the name keep changing? Who were
these people? Who decided that they were these people? Why,
if not ill, were they managed and treated by doctors? Had they
always lived in asylums, or had there been another time, when
they had lived in another way, or perhaps not been ‘them’ at all?
Almost as intriguing as their history was the lack of historical
curiosity shown by most of the army of professionals employed
in the modern state to work with them. For many, these people
did not really have a history. They were an unchanging, uni-
versal phenomenon over time. ‘Treatment’ methods and public
policy constantly changed, but this was because the past was
always wrong; the present was always putting it right.
Inside or outside the asylum, this group seemed to live in a
strange parallel world. The general rules of Western moderni ty
– freedom to live as you choose, earn money, enjoy rights – seemed
not to apply to them. They were of this world, but not in it. I came
to know many people labelled intellectually disabled as indi-
viduals, as hopeful, striving human beings, often with the same
preoccupations and aspirations as me. Unlike me, however, they
were only seen as human in certain ways, and somehow not
accorded full human status. Their preoccupations and aspirations
would go, largely, unheard. Who were they? Where did they
come from? What was their story?
8
Introduction
Such questions and enquiries led to this book. I wanted to
understand what happened in the past to those people we today
call people with intellectual disabilities. What sort of lives did
they lead? How were they seen by others? How did they see
themselves? There were other questions too. Why have the words
we have used to describe them changed so often, and what did
these changes signify? Is it the same sorts of people we talk about
when we use these different terms, or does society’s view of what,
and who, merits exclusion on the grounds of mental capacity
change over time? I hoped that these enquiries would lead to a
better understanding of the status of intellectually disabled people
in society today.
I found that most historical enquiry focused either on the
immediate past of ‘care in the community’ or on the asylum
period from the mid-nineteenth century, implying that people
with intellectual disabilities had achieved historical focus only
when they became objects of the institution. But how did they
live before there were asylums? Were they an accepted part of
their communities, or were they ostracized? They must surely
have been there, known, talked about, with their families, in their
communities, living their daily lives in some way. Some thing
must then have changed for them to come to be seen no longer
as people who could live their lives in those communities and
families, but as people who should live separately, ‘cared for’
by professionals behind the high walls of the asylum. There had
clearly been a transformation through the eighteenth century
and into the nineteenth, much of it in people’s minds, from com-
munities that had among them those they called idiots, to the
opening of the world’s first specialist idiot asylum at Earls wood,
Surrey, in 1855, managed by the famous Dr John Langdon Down
(the ‘discoverer’ of what he called ‘Mongolian imbecility’, which
today is known as Down syndrome). What was this road, this
journey of a mentality, that led to Dr Down’s idiot asylum? And
then there was another journey, another social transformation,
when after 140 years of incarceration people came back out of
the idiot and imbecile asylums, mental deficiency colonies and
9
