TBR Pile Review: Those They Called Idiots, by Simon Jarrett

Those They Called Idiots 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 marginalized in society. 

My Review

This should be called ‘Books I’m reading for a work project about the history of neurodiversity’ pile review but that would make the title longer than it already is. I got this book in August on the recommendation of a colleague at The Faraway CIC, Jo, who is one of our non-executive directors, as a place to start on my heritage project. Yes, I know a book with 307 pages (not including extensive notes and bibliography) shouldn’t take me three months to read, but I have been working on said project, and this book covers the later centuries. I’ve read the last hundred pages this evening, and I went back over the first third of the book in October to add notes, so some of it I’ve read twice!

Given that I’ve been reading for work, it’s actually been a real pleasure to read this book. The author uses the resources available to discover and discuss the lives of people with learning disabilities in the last three centuries, using court reports, doctors and scientists writings and in the later years, survivors’ testimony. The place of people with LD in society has gone through major changes as social attitudes have changed and their treatment has been more of less barbaric depending on what people without LDs believed about them.

There’s a strong connection made by the author between the way Euro-Western societies classified and treated ‘idiots’ and ‘imbeciles’ and the way they treated non-European, Indigenous peoples in colonised countries. The ‘logic’ of Enlightenment classification and the stratification of peoples into the savage, idiotic type, the barbarian imbecilic type and the civilised fully mentally capable type of humans, with associated ‘races’, is sickening yet unsurprising. Got to justify stealing other people’s land and denigrating their cultures somehow, and under the law idiots weren’t considered capable of managing their own property or understanding contracts. So the laws were universalised and any culture that didn’t cultivate or ‘improve’ the land was considered ‘idiotic’ and thus in need of guardianship.

Just as colonised peoples were oppressed and marginalised in their own lands, so those with learning disabilities were increasingly marginalised and institutionalised as they became subjects for scientific investigation. From being integrated members of their communities, ‘idiots’, ‘imbeciles’ and ‘lunatics’ were slowly siphoned into workhouses and asylums, until it became the norm for doctors to tell parents to hand over their disabled child and forget about them. In the later twentieth century, people started fighting for the rights of their children and relatives, and abuse scandals put pressure on the governments of the day until eventually people were released. Partly because Maggie Thatcher was a neo-liberal who wanted small government (it’s cheaper), and partly because enough fuss was made that there wasn’t much other choice. Unfortunately, the ATUs are a reincarnation of the asylums, and people are being abused and killed, indefinitely detained for being mentally ill, Autistic, or having a learning disability.

While the book ends with hope – for those in communities – the author highlights the conditional nature of their lives and the threat of reinstitutionalisation.

The writing and structure is easy to follow and provides a lot of information in a way that is digestible and interesting. I found this book fascinating and very helpful in my project and recommend it to everyone interested in the history of disability.