Those They Called Idiots

The Idea of the Disabled Mind from 1700 to the Present Day

Simon Jarrett

Reaktion Books 2020

Hb, 352pp, £25, ISBN 9781789143010

During the last chapter of his excellent new history, Simon Jarrett writes that in mid-20thcentury Britain, those we would now call intellectually disabled “could truly lay claim to the title of out-group of all out-groups, the most surveilled, controlled and incarcerated population in the land”.

What Jarrett explains in this book is how this came to be and what lessons that past may offer us for the future.

Such a history certainly fits with a fortean interest in the strange and the untypical. What challenges our modern sensibilities is that it’s not historical events that are being described here as anomalous – but people.

The search for the “patient voice” is often undertaken by medical historians – but what to do when their voice is absent from the historical record? Beginning his study in the early 1700s, legal records provide Jarrett’s first source, often describing wrangles over the person and the property of those judged non compos mentis. But these disputes are key to Jarrett’s argument: responsibilities of care were matters for family and community at the time, not incarceration in medicalised institutions.

In a deft use of available resources, Jarrett draws upon joke books and slang dictionaries to further his argument: yes, jokes were made about “idiots” but for Jarrett the fact that they were suggests they had a recognisable, visible presence in society to be the butt of jokes.

For Jarrett, their change into a more problematic social type came about in the late 18th and early 19th centuries as travel diaries and later more “scientific” accounts of “natives” started to feed back into British society. As a sliding scale of intelligence came to be constructed (with the white man at the top and the dark-skinned “savage” at the bottom), the intellectually disabled found themselves inserted into this schema as well. By the 1860s, hierarchical racial comparisons were at the root of notions that “abnormal” (white) adults were atavistic “throwbacks”.

Social changes in the early 1800s as to what made a “useful” member of British society (whether from radicals or conservatives) would also impact upon notions of their rightful place in the world.

By the end of the 19th century, with “idiots” falling under the purview of new medical professionals, that place in the world became increasingly seen as outside “normal” society and in specialist asylums.

Jarrett traces his story to the present day, steering a course through the rise (and fall) of eugenic thinking and developments in psychology, through the closure of the asylums and the introduction of “care in the community” treatment.

The history he tells is a complex one, drawing as it does on changing social, cultural, medical and religious contexts; but Jarrett’s superbly clear, jargonfree prose makes the difficult and emotive topics he covers understandable and relatable. This is a book very much alive to the sensitivity of its topic but one careful not to damn the past by the standards of the present.

At a time when troubling aspects of our past are being reassessed, this is a work that certainly feels part of those conversations. It also suggests that the past, despite its many traumas, may even be able to offer hopeful and positive suggestions on how societies can adapt to all their members.

Ross MacFarlane

★★★★

But What Are We Really Afraid Of?

Adam Roberts

Elliott & Thompson 2020

Hb, 288pp, £14.99, ISBN 9781783964741

The literal “end of the world”, in the sense of the ultimate demise of planet Earth, lies billions of years in the future – but that’s not what this book is about. Instead, Adam Roberts focuses on humanity’s perennial obsession with its own end. From the Norse legend of Ragnarök to the climate emergency of today, this always seems to be alarmingly imminent.

From an analytical point of view, there are three aspects to any particular end-of-world scenario: its scientific plausibility, its place in the popular imagination and its relation to the broader culture of its time. Roberts, a professor of English Literature with a sideline in science fiction, is strong on the second and third of these, but can sound glib and superficial when he’s talking about science.

In fact he’s at his best when dealing with products of pure imagination, such as the zombie apocalypse or the biblical book of Revelation. Both of these, when he picks them apart, say more about the political conflicts and societal insecurities of their day than anything that might happen in the future.

The book’s blurb describes it as “thought-provoking” – which I agree with, but not in an entirely complimentary way. I kept thinking of fascinating topics I wanted the author to delve into far more deeply than he does. For example, he barely mentions the looming threat of nuclear annihilation that dominated world affairs for the first 30-odd years of my life, or (going from the sublime to the ridiculous) the elaborate nuttiness of the 2012 phenomenon, which engrossed and entertained so many of us just a few years ago.

I was also disappointed by the lack of a clear distinction between fictional themes that are outright impossible (like zombies) and those that are merely improbable, such as an AI takeover or alien invasion. Stephen Hawking, for one, was genuinely concerned about both these eventualities in his later years, and I would have liked to see them discussed from a scientific as well as a pop-culture perspective.

These are missed opportunities – but it’s not a bad book, and when Roberts takes the time to explore a topic in depth the result can be very insightful. The chapter on pandemics, for example, was written during the Covid-19 crisis. He makes the excellent point that, while any real-world plague may only kill a fraction of the population, the various political, social and economic stresses that come with it could still spell the end of civilisation as we know it.

Andrew May

★★★