Those They Called Idiots

“Jarrett is a mesmerizing historian. He has an ear for tender, and sometimes even funny, stories about people with learning disabilities, while never shying away from the shocking abuse and casual indignities they experienced in the past and continue to be subjected to today. Jarrett overturns many assumptions about the history of disabled people and their interactions with different communities. His book is a history of medicine, science, law, philosophy, and psychology. Most of all, though, it is a history of lived experience. Jarrett’s story is not only a nuanced analysis of the lives of ‘idiots’ from 1700 to the present; it is also a tribute to their struggles, needs, and desires.”

“Jarrett’s elegant and provocative book brings into focus for the first time the history of people with intellectual disabilities over three centuries. Drawing on a fascinating set of sources, Jarrett traces the ‘idiot’s’ journey from community life to institutionalization and back again, and in the process uncovers the richness and variety of lives lived by people with intellectual impairments in the past. This is a history marked by cruel stereotyping and harmful policies underpinned by the pseudoscience of eugenics, but it is also a history of love, protection, and integration. This humane history teaches us how society can adapt to accommodate all its members.”

"Jarrett’s Those They Called Idiots is a major rethinking of intellectual disability, from eugenics and the views of institutional authorities of the late nineteenth century to the thoughts and practice of our modern society. Jarrett examines new sources to argue that, while recognized as different in the social structures of a preindustrial or transitional age, there have always been accommodations for the ‘idiot.' Thus our present view of mental incapacity is in fact a continuation of a longstanding awareness of how those with intellectual disabilities can be integrated into society."