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

Traces the little-known lives of people with learning disabilities over 300 years

The Idiot traces the little-known lives of people with learning disabilities from the communities of eighteenth-century England to the nineteenth-century asylum and care in today’s society. Using evidence from civil and criminal court-rooms, joke books, slang dictionaries, novels, art and caricature, it explores the explosive intermingling of ideas about intelligence and race, while bringing into sharp focus the lives of people often seen as the most marginalised in society.