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

Sensitive and sweeping, this is a history of 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.

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 dic...