From Idiocy to Mental Deficiency is the first book devoted to the social history of people with learning disabilities in Britain. Approaches to learning disabilities have changed dramatically in recent years. The implementation of 'Care in the Community', the campaign for disabled rights and the debate over the education of children with special needs have combined to make this one of the most controversial areas in social policy today.
The nine original research essays collected here cover the social history of learning disability from the Middle Ages through the establishment of the National Health Service. They will not only contribute to a neglected field of social and medical history but also illuminate and inform current debates.
The information presented here will have a profound impact on how professionals in mental health, psychiatric nursing, social work and disabled rights understand learning disability and society's responses to it over the course of history.
Notes on the contributors vii 1 Contexts and perspectives 1(21) Anne Digby 2 Mental handicap in medieval and early modern England: Criteria, measurement and care 22(22) Richard Neugebauer 3 Idiocy, the family and the community in early modern north-east England 44(21) Peter Rushton 4 Identifying and providing for the mentally disabled in early modern London 65(28) Jonathan Andrews 5 The psychopolitics of learning and disability in seventeenth-century thought 93(25) C.F. Goodey 6 `Childlike in his innocence: Lay attitudes to `idiots and `imbeciles in Victorian England 118(16) David Wright 7 The changing dynamic of institutional care: The Western Counties Idiot Asylum, 1864-1914 134(27) David Gladstone 8 Institutional provision for the feeble-minded in Edwardian England: Sandlebridge and the scientific morality of permanent care 161(23) Mark Jackson 9 Girls, deficiency and delinquency 184(23) Pamela Cox 10 Family, community, and state: The micro-politics of mental deficiency 207(24) Mathew Thomson Index 231
David Wright is Wellcome Lecturer in the History of Medicine at the University of Nottingham., Anne Digby is Professor of Social History at Oxford Brookes University.
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