This article traces and summarises historiographical trends in the history of learning disability. It identifies three major waves of historical approaches beginning with a medicalised analysis which emerged in the early 20th century. This presented a story of medical progress which began with the asylum movement of the 19th century and represented ‘idiots’ as creatures of the asylum and objects of the medicalised gaze. In the 1990s a new social history challenged these assumptions, focusing on the iniquities of institutionalisation and the eugenics period, while attempting to give a voice to people with learning disabilities and their families in their own history. A cultural history movement later emerged to challenge the idea of learning disability as a fixed universal concept over time. It argued that the idea of learning disability (in all its different linguistic iterations) is contingent on time and place, and a product of the culture within which it is framed. Not all work fits neatly into one of these categories, sometimes they overlap and sometimes they cannot be easily categorised. Nevertheless, these broad frames of reference within the historiography of learning disability do point to wider social, cultural and political concerns, which are worth holding in mind as we consider how the ‘work’ of history can and does act to inform attitudes, policy‐making and change. The authors describe the encouraging recent emergence of historian activists who seek to write and define their own history, and who may constitute a fourth wave in the historiography of learning disability.
A conception of the idiotic mind was used to substantiate late 19th-century theories of mental evolution. A new school of animal/comparative psychologists attempted from the 1870s to demonstrate that evolution was a mental as well as a physical process. This intellectual enterprise necessitated the closure, or narrowing, of the ‘consciousness gap’ between human and animal species. A concept of a quasi-non-conscious human mind, set against conscious intention and ability in higher animals, provided an explanatory framework for the human–animal continuum and the evolution of consciousness. The article addresses a significant lacuna in the historiographies of intellectual disability, animal science, and evolutionary psychology, where the application of a conception of human idiocy to advance theories of consciousness evolution has not hitherto been explored. These ideas retain contemporary resonance in ethology and cognitive psychology, and in the theory of ‘speciesism’, outlined by Peter Singer in Animal Liberation (1975), which claims that equal consideration of interests is not arbitrarily restricted to members of the human species, and advocates euthanasia of intellectually disabled human infants. Speciesism remains at the core of animal rights activism today. The article also explores the influence of the idea of the semi-evolved idiot mind in late-Victorian anthropology and neuroscience. These ideas operated in a separate intellectual sphere to eugenic thought. They were (and remain) deeply influential, and were at the heart of the idea of the moral idiot or imbecile, targeted in the 1913 Mental Deficiency Act, as well as in 20th-century animal and human consciousness theory.
This paper critically examines the term 'community' as applied to people with intellectual disabilities over time and aims to describe its shifting conceptualisation from the eighteenth century to the present day. Unpublished documentary sources from Old Bailey criminal trials in the eighteenth century, the Earlswood Idiot asylum in the mid-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century government reports have been used to explore historical changes in the concept of community. The word community is historically contingent both in its past and present uses. Its meaning has been adapted to strengthen and justify professional claims to own, treat and manage people with intellectual disabilities. Inclusion and community acceptance were normative in the eighteenth century. In later medicalized institutionalization programmes the meaning of community was subverted to endorse and vindicate professional claims. It has been further adapted since deinstitutionalization to support contemporary claims for the social model of community inclusion. Today's language of inclusion emanates from these historical conceptual shifts, masking a set of unconscious assumptions and meanings attached to the status of intellectually disabled people. The modern concept of community is based on an assumption that people with intellectual disabilities have always been excluded. In the collective memory, it has been forgotten that they were, before the asylum, natural members of community embedded within social, economic, and familial networks. It is communities themselves that must adapt and remodel rather than trying to remodel those people they originally excluded.
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