lklk
Idiocy: A Cultural History
by Patrick McDonagh
lklk
gh
“At times, Idiocy reads like the history of a natural disaster or the build-up to war: we know the story will lead somehow from the fool as a happy innocent to the segregation, sterilisation and demonisation of generations of people with cognitive disabilities, but McDonagh makes that process fascinating and complex. Far from being a niche history of limited interest, McDonagh's careful and eclectic scholarship makes the case for idiocy as a crucial subject for readers interested in literature, medicine, psychology, gender, family, property, inheritance, romanticism, rationality, sensation fiction, technology, institution-building, religion, crime and civil society.” THE (Times Higher Education)
fgf
Liverpool University Press
Seeing as Patrick is such an expert on the subject, he was kind enough (or just plain foolish?) to put together an idiot’s guide to…idiocy!
8 Things You Didn’t Know About Idiocy
by Patrick McDonagh
1. You’re an idiot? Then you’re a private person, and not a public one who got to run the polis and all – at least, that’s what it meant in Greek. When the word came into English in the 12th or 13th century, it was used to single out knights who held land as “tenants” of the king but who didn’t seem up to managing their land and responsibilities. So they were declared idiots, and all their land and money was taken away from them. But you needed something to lose to be formally found an idiot. If you were a peasant (and who wasn’t?!?) you were pretty much an idiot anyway.
2. “Imbecility in females is a great enhancement of their personal charms,” at least as far as most men were concerned, said Jane Austen. If male “idiot” characters in novels and plays have no money, the women have no discretion. They’re always getting themselves in trouble with guys….
3. Maybe women are not as smart as men for bodily reasons – maybe their physiology itself was imbecilic! That was Bernard de Mandeville’s theory. Thanks to the “imbecility of the Contexture of Spirits in Women,” he wrote in 1711, “One Hours intense Thinking wastes the Spirits more in a Woman, than six in a Man.”
4. So what caused “idiocy”? American physician and activist Samuel Gridley Howe, who wrote On the Causes of Idiocy in the 1840s, figured he knew: “Where there was so much suffering there must have been sin.” And one of the big sins was – gasp! – masturbation. It was a “monster so hideous in mien, so disgusting in feature, altogether so beastly and loathsome, that, in very shame and cowardice, it hides its ugly head by day, and, vampyre-like, sucks the very life-blood from its victims by night.” Golly! His peers in the UK weren’t so convinced by the masturbation theory – at least, they didn’t talk about it much…
5. Fancy a drink? Oops – that’s another sin. Studying 359 “idiots,” Howe identified 99 as the children of confirmed drunkards – and, he notes, the parents of most of the others were probably boozers too. So, he figured, “directly and indirectly, alcohol is productive of a great proportion of the idiocy which now burdens the commonwealth.” Again, the Brits weren’t as convinced – but then they did like their pints.
6. All this worry about sin would eventually catch up to those Brits, too. The 1913 Mental Deficiency Act included ‘moral imbecility,’ the “drugs and sex and rock and roll” category. Too much drugs & sex & music-hall entertainment and you could find yourself being carted off to the asylum.
7. Whatever you do, don’t look! The ‘maternal impressions theory’ said that if a pregnant woman were frightened by something unusual, she might eventually give birth to another unusual something. As late as 1904, the American physician Martin Barr described a boy “born … with a thick growth of reddish hair on back and chest,” whose “mother, during pregnancy, was chased by a cow.” He had another example from his practice, too: “A woman three months pregnant attending a circus was much frightened by a ‘freak’ exhibited under the name of ‘What is it?’ Her child – an idiot girl – born at full term, presented a most extraordinary Calibanish appearance,” he wrote. Of course, being a modern scientist, Barr didn’t call these maternal impressions so much as a “latent neurosis” just waiting for a chance to show off.
8. When John Langdon Down was coming up with a name for a condition he had discovered in the early 1860s, he didn’t call it Down’s Syndrome. That name appeared in the 1960s. Down called it Mongolism because he thought that folks with this condition really were exhibiting an evolutionary regression to a lower-than-Anglo-Saxon form of human, the Mongol. Of course, he also identified Negroid, Malay, and Caucasoid idiots, but they didn’t catch on like the Mongols. Down used this finding to claim that all humans came from the same branch of primate ancestor, and thus it was wrong to enslave others – this was the monogenist argument, as opposed to the polygenist position that said, “Hmmm, these people seem to have evolved from different kinds of apes than those we came from. Maybe it’s OK to make them our slaves.” In reality, the condition, also known as Trisomy 21, is caused by an extra 21st chromosome.
lklk
http://www.patrickmcdonagh.net/
My writing room looks onto a Montreal street of brick row houses, flat roofs, wooden cornices, the sky. I love the light and sense of space.
In addition to bloody matters, the conference explored other weighty issues. For example, the Ink vs Electron panel (above), moderated by our own Michael Blair, was about the very future of THE BOOK as we know it: Is the e-book the inevitable future? If so, what form will it take? Is the Kindle the equivalent of the clay tablet? What are the implications for writers, publishers, libraries, book stores, readers, collectors? How do authors sign an e-book? How will the industry deal with piracy?
