Inventing the Feeble Mind
A History of Mental Retardation in the United States
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3146743 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Gerald N Grob |
| Year | 1996 |
| Volume | 26 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 721 |
| Publication date | 1996-01-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | REVIEW |
| Review of | Inventing the Feeble Mind: A History of Intellectual Disability in the United States, James W Trent, 2017 |
| Venue | The Journal of Interdisciplinary History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0022-1953 • E-ISSN: 1530-9169 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/205076 |
| OpenAlex | W2325404630 |
| Language | EN |
Half-wits, dunces, dullards, idiots: though often teased and tormented, the feeble-minded were once a part of the community, cared for and protected by family and community members. But in the 1840s, a group of American physicians and reformers began to view mental retardation as a social problem requiring public intervention, which often meant institutionalization. This study uses public documents, private letters, investigative reports and rare photographs to explore the changing perceptions of feeble minds over the past 150 years. Trent contends that the economic vulnerability of mentally retarded people (and their families), more than the claims made for their intellectual or social limitations, has determined their institutional treatment. He finds that superintendents, social welfare agents, IQ testers, and sterilizers have utilized psychological and medical paradigms that insure their own social privilege and professional legitimacy. More than simply moving from care to control, state schools have become places where care is an integral part of control. In analyzing the current policy of deinstitutionalization, Trent concludes that it has been more successful in dispersing disabled citizens than in integrating them into American communities
Criminology · Political science · Disability Rights and Representation · Historical Psychiatry and Medical Practices · Psychology
Constructionist Social Problems Theory
Perspectives on the Meaning of “Disability”
From Comparison to Indices
The politics of community
Bodily Practices as Vehicles for Dehumanization in an Institution for Mental Defectives
The Reclamation of Anna Agnew
Big data, small kids
Unfolding recognition
Change in Disability Classification
Addressing Alcohol and Drug Addiction Among People With Mental Retardation in Nonaddiction Settings
There Is Something About Julia
History from the inside
Low mentality” and “criminal tendencies”
The personal archive as historical record1
Public attention for private concerns
From diminished men to conditionally masculine
Sexual surveillance and control in a community-based intellectual disability service
How student teachers (don’t) talk about race
Beyond the far too incessant schism
Creating the continuum
Seeking transparency
Off the map
Places of social poverty and service dependency of people with intellectual disabilities
Conceptual foundations of IQ testing
People with intellectual disabilities on probation
Democratizing Disability Inquiry
Not Immune
End-of-Life Care Policies for People With an Intellectual Disability
Understanding the Special Olympics Debate From Lifeworld and System Perspectives
Sexual Assault and Women With Cognitive Disabilities
Tools for Analyzing Policy "on the Books" and Policy "on the Streets
Confronting “Hereditary” Disease
Exploring Constructs of Intellectual Disability and Personhood in Haryana and Delhi
Making lovely nonsense out of everything’
Treating the ‘idiot’ child in early 20th‐century Ontario
The enforcement of normalcy in schools and the disablement of families
Disability, Eugenics and the Current Ideology of Segregation
Beyond the Medical Model
Shifting boundaries between the normal and the pathological
Madness as disability
Teacher discourse, peer relations, significant disability
No time for nostalgia
The Right to a College Education? The G.I. Bill, Public Law 16, and Disabled Veterans
Learning to Walk Slow
American Pediatrics and the Transition from Mental Health to Illness Since the 1960s
The Scientific and the Social in Implementing Atkins v. Virginia
Disabling Incarceration
Cognitive Ableism and Disability Studies
At Home with Down Syndrome and Gender
Negotiating Mutuality and Agency in Care-giving Relationships with Women with Intellectual Disabilities
Preparation of Social Workers to Support People with Developmental Disabilities
She Is Hostile to Our Ways”
The Two Percent Solution
Intellectual Disability in Carlisle Floyd’s Of Mice and Men
The Archaeology of Mental Illness from the Afflicted and Caretaker Perspective
Animal Magnetism and Curriculum History
Epilogues and Prefaces
Idiocy and Object-Attentive Reading in The Sound and the Fury
Printing Parasites
Conceptualizing community
Developing an understanding of the literature relating to the moral development of people with intellectual disabilities
The development of community care for people with learning difficulties 1913 to 1946
The parent trap
Social Justice Implications of the Organism Metaphor
"Reaching Beyond the "Moron
Moving Out
Scandals of abuse
From savage to citizen
Disability Protests
The Science of Human Worth
The Logic of Deferral
Understanding curriculum as normalizing text
William Louis Poteat
Bad Samaritan
Early Educational Exclusion
Eugenics, Medical Education, and the Public Health Service
Idiocy in Virginia, 1616-1860
The Cultural Logic of Euthanasia
Social Influence and the Autism Epidemic
For a Sociology of Expertise
Toward a positive psychology of mental retardation
Disability in Theory
Introduction
Eugenics in the Americas
Staging the Orient
A faith in humanness
Turning Private Concerns into Public Issues
My brain's running slow today – The preference for “things ontologies” in research and everyday discourse on human thinking
Constitutional Therapy and Clinical Racial Hygiene in Weimar and Nazi Germany
Whose Life Story Is It? Self-Reflexive Life Story Research with People with Intellectual Disabilities
Rethinking Mental Retardation
The group home as moral laboratory
Othering intellectual disability
The Great Ape Project and Disability Rights
William James, Sciences of Mind, and Anti-Imperial Discourse
Making up people” 1 globally. Die Institutionalisierung globaler Personenkategorien am Beispiel Indigener Völker und Menschen mit Behinderungen
The narrative of special education in Sweden
Is the Deviance Concept Still Relevant to Sociology
| Highly cited | No |
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