Abstract
Perhaps it goes without saying that the title of this excellent new history is important. The book is a chronological review of the “idea” of intellectual disability. This is not to say that the book is a dry recitation of legal and medical definitions. However, the story it tells is one of how the meaning of a term evolves in ways that both reflect and create the application of that term. As the author frames his basic premise, “Intellectual disability is an idea, one which changes over time and which has an overweening impact on those whose lives are lived within the definitional walls it places around them” (Jarrett, 2020, p. 16).
Focusing mainly on developments in Europe, and England specifically, this account of what it has meant to be judged to have an intellectual disability keeps returning to a set of central questions. When citizens over the last 300 years or so chose to refer to someone as an “idiot” or an “imbecile,” how did they make that decision? What behaviors or attitudes prompted the label, and once used, what was the import of that labeling? Who was doing the labeling in the first place? Finally, and most central to this critical history, how did the usage of those terms and labels change over time? In mounting his answers to those questions, Jarrett (2020) has produced an accessible yet scholarly text that must be added to the short list of essential histories of intellectual disability.
Divided into three sections, the book efficiently moves through roughly three centuries of public and professional discourse about those judged to be deficient in mental acuity by those with the power to enforce those judgments. It is a ground that over the last 20 to 30 years has finally started to be covered in a growing historiography of scholarly analysis, where prior decades had seen only occasional treatments of varying quality. However, Jarrett’s (2020) account does more than simply plow through the same material as earlier historians. The most outstanding feature of his research is a creative use of primary sources from all levels of English society that yields new and provocative insights about how people came to view intellectual disability differently over time. This creativity is perhaps best put to use in the first section of the book, focusing on discourse in the 1700s. Jarrett (2020) persuasively argues that the life of the so-called “idiot” and “imbecile” in this period was not so much one of exclusion and abuse as it was tolerance, amusement, and occasionally even something approaching acceptance. Drawing on dictionaries of slang, joke books, court records, paintings, drawings, poetry, and other residue of daily life, the author portrays a kind of community presence that would soon come under attack by the powers that be in the 19th century. By the end of the 1700s, Jarrett (2020) concludes, “idiots themselves were generally [seen as] harmless, if strange, and the natural place for them to function was within their families and communities, under the informal protection of family members, friendship groups and neighbourly networks” (p. 50). This is not to say that life was easy by any means for someone thought to be imbecilic or foolish, but their presence was expected; their disability was “not necessarily seen as a barrier to belonging” (p. 87).
Things changed in the 19th century. The second section of the book takes an extended look at how the idea of “idiocy” became increasingly contested by lawyers and doctors, battling for control over the suddenly problematic population of “defectives.” For the most part, this section does not dwell on the daily abuses and neglect that accompanied the rise of larger and larger public asylums. Those are described and critiqued, but almost assumed, rather than repeated. Instead, the focus is more on the rise of professional discourse that both encouraged and even demanded that outcome. Jarrett (2020) is especially strong in this section in his analysis of the steadily strengthened intersectionality of race and disability. As in America, the 19th century in England was one where the concept of racial inferiority was explained by the idea of intellectual disability, and equally, intellectual disability became defined in racial terminology (e.g., “mongolian idiocy”). People of color and those identified as mentally deficient “found themselves locked together in an unwelcome embrace” (p. 196) while simultaneously subjected to the rising demand for social control.
The final section of the book juxtaposes the notorious extremes of eugenics ideology and practice with the more recent and still unfolding push for community acceptance and participation. As is true throughout the book, the general focus is on British developments with occasional glances at the parallels in American history. For an American audience, this is part of the book’s usefulness. The persistent tendency toward American exceptionalism often threatens our ability to put both our misdeeds and our achievements into an international context. America did not invent institutions for those with intellectual disabilities, nor did it stand alone in its move away from congregate settings in the last half of the 20th century. Approaching disability through a larger global context can only deepen our understanding of where we are and how we got here.
The book ends with a timely critique of how community integration should not be considered some sort of gift to the disabled community and their families. Rather than a return to a begrudging tolerance of preinstitutional community presence, the new expectation should be of community belonging and membership. In Great Britain, as in America, the need is for adaptation in a spirit of welcome and reception, rather than supervision and control. This book is an excellent summary of how we came to face that choice.
