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