The History of Mental Retardation

February 25, 2006 9:37 PM

Where can I learn more about the history of society's treatment of people with mental retardation?

Out of general interest and spurred on by recent discussion on MetaFilter, I am interested in reading about how society historically has treated people with mental retardation.

Questions like were they shunned? pitied? was infanticide prevalent?

The Wikipedia article on mental retardation was an interesting starting point, especially concerning the word cretin, but I was hoping for more information and I am by no means limiting my interest to western world.

posted by toftflin to Society & Culture (13 answers total)

Foucault's Madness and Civilization might be both a starting and ending point.
posted by allen.spaulding at 9:41 PM on February 25, 2006

Second Foucault, albeit secondhand. A friend of mine has been telling me about him and some of his writing on institutions like hospitals and schools.

Also, I came across this while putting together this post, but didn't include it.
posted by weston at 10:04 PM on February 25, 2006

You might be interested in this or this.
posted by Count Ziggurat at 10:05 PM on February 25, 2006

It's not "historical" per se, but the book "I, Claudius" goes into a lot of detail about how the main character, who was born with a slight physical deformity, is written off because his family believes he is slow-witted. Ultimately, this is the only reason he survives.

Great read anyway.

Hope I didn't give too much of the plot away by that.
posted by Brittanie at 12:12 AM on February 26, 2006

It's specifically about the Victorian period, but I came across a book called Mental Disability in Victorian England during related studies which is absolutely fascinating.
posted by greycap at 2:13 AM on February 26, 2006

Try the wikipedia page on developmental disabilities - there are quite a few resources linked throughout the article.

(Disclaimer: I rewrote the article just recently - does this count as self-linking? Your question prompted me to sign up for MeFi after quite a while of lurking - thanks!)
posted by goo at 2:51 AM on February 26, 2006

Michael Berube wrote an excellent essay about his son, James, who has Down's. The whole thing's worth reading, but a specific historical discussion takes place on pages 10--13 and makes for a good overview. He later expanded it into a book containing a great deal more of the sort of background you're looking for. He's a great writer, and I couldn't recommend him more highly.
posted by melissa may at 4:12 AM on February 26, 2006

For information on retardation and intelligence testing in the U. S., Leila Zenderland's book Measuring Minds is a detailed but very readable history; it also includes some interesting linguistic points, like the introduction of the word "moron" as a connotation-free scientific term for people with a certain measured degree of intelligence, and the quick corruption of meaning by use in popular culture.
posted by nonane at 6:23 AM on February 26, 2006

I was really interested to read Breeding Better Vermonters: The Eugenics Program in the Green Mountain State by Nancy Gallagher [my review] which talks about the Eugenics movement in the US in the 20's-30's, Vermont in specific. It's a fascinating book because it looks at how mental retardation was looked at as a bit of a public health crisis and the cause of all sorts of social ills like poverty, and so people tried to solve it in a public health way, through involuntary sterilization. This is a bit modern-day, but has some background on the history of dealing with societies with members with metal illnesses.
posted by jessamyn at 7:17 AM on February 26, 2006

Foucault's Madness and Civilization might be both a starting and ending point.

Yikes. Its all about representations in literature and very irrelevant to actual clinical humans.
posted by StickyCarpet at 10:50 AM on February 26, 2006

Here is a bibliography of papers about 19th and early 20th century treatments of mental retardation.

You might find it interesting to look at John Langdon Down's work. Here is an article with some quotes from one of his publications. It should be noted that Down was dedicating himself to work in a way that was very unpopular, in that he tried various therapies for his patients to improve them as opposed to insututionalization and isolation, which was the later standard "treatment".
posted by plinth at 11:10 AM on February 26, 2006

Also, here is a publication from the Down syndrom Information Network - that has a pretty good bibliography as well.
posted by plinth at 11:22 AM on February 26, 2006

What kind of time frame are you looking at? Things change for better, and for worse depending on time, place and society. The early part of the 20th century was pretty bad in the USA for those with DD, in general. We in the field are still dealing with repercussions from that within the population, even though at the moment things are historically pretty good (at least where I am at). The DD population tends to get more, and consistent govt. funding than, say, mental illness. Although in recent years things have been tightening up a fair bit because of budget concerns in general.
posted by edgeways at 1:58 PM on February 26, 2006