Pity, disgust, fear, cure, and prevention--all are words that Americans have used to make sense of what today we call intellectual disability. Inventing the Feeble Mind explores the history of this disability from its several identifications over the past 200 years: idiocy, imbecility, feeblemindedness, mental defect, mental deficiency, mental retardation, and most recently intellectual disability. Using institutional records, private correspondence, personal memories, and rare photographs, James Trent argues that the economic vulnerability of intellectually disabled people (and often their families), more than the claims made for their intellectual and social limitations, has shaped meaning, services, and policies in United States history.

Excerpt from Idiocy: And Its Treatment by the Physiological Method Idiots have been educated in all times by the devotion of kind-hearted and intelligent persons, and with the best means they could borrow from ordinary schools; until the progress Of physiology Opened the possibility Of the adaptation of its principles to the general training of children. But other elements were mature. The right of all to education was acknowledged, if not yet fulfilled with the imperfect means at command; the deaf and the blind were already instructed by special methods; and several children, marked by nature, accident, or crime, with the characters Of idiocy, had been subjected to physiological and psychological experiments. Can idiots be educated, treated, improved, cured? To put the question was to solve it. There is a sort Of mysterious upheaval Of mankind in the way new things spring up, which commands our awe. At a given hour, anything wanted by the race makes its appearance simultaneously from so many quarters, that the title Of a single individual to discovery is always contested, and seems clearly to belong to God manifested through man. The origin of the methodical treatment of idiots. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

This collection explores the historical origins of our modern concepts of intellectual or learning disability. The essays, from some of the leading historians of ideas of intellectual disability, focus on British and European material from the Middle Ages to the late-nineteenth century and extend across legal, educational, literary, religious, philosophical and psychiatric histories. They investigate how precursor concepts and discourses were shaped by and interacted with their particular social, cultural and intellectual environments, eventually giving rise to contemporary ideas. Intellectual disability is essential reading for scholars interested in the history of intelligence, intellectual disability and related concepts, as well as in disability history generally.