Research Catalog

Title

Inventing the feeble mind : a history of mental retardation in the United States, 1840-1990 / James W. Trent.

Author

Trent, James W., Jr., 1948-

Publication

Berkeley : University of California Press, c1994.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

xii, 356 p. : ill.; 24 cm.

Summary

• .
• For the next century and a half, social science and medical professionals constructed meanings of mental retardation, at the same time incarcerating hundreds of thousands of Americans in institutions and "special" schools. James W. Trent uses public documents, private letters, investigative reports, and rare photographs to explore our changing perceptions of "feeble minds."
• From local family matter to state and social problem, constructions of mental retardation represent a history of ideas, techniques, and tools. 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.
• Half-wits, dunces, dullards, and idiots: though often teased and tormented, the feebleminded were once a part of the community, cared for and protected by family and community members. But in the decade of the 1840s, a group of American physicians and reformers began to view mental retardation as a social problem requiring public intervention.
• He finds that the focus on technical and usually psychomedical interpretations of mental retardation has led to a general ignorance of the maldistribution of resources, status, and power so evident in the lives of the retarded. Superintendents, social welfare agents, IQ testers, and sterlizers have utilized these psychological and medical paradigms to insure their own social privilege and professional legitimacy. Rather than simply moving "from care to control," state schools have made care an effective and integral part of control.
• In analyzing the current policy of deinstitutionalization, Trent concludes it has been more successful in dispersing disabled citizens than in integrating them into American communities. Inventing the Feeble Mind powerfully shatters conventional understandings of mental retardation. It is essential reading for social workers, psychologists, historians, sociologists, educators, and all parents and relatives of mentally retarded people.

Series Statement

Medicine and society ; 6

Uniform Title

Medicine and society ; 6.

Subject

• Institutionalization > history
• Intellectual Disability > history
• Intellectual disability > United States > History
• People with mental disabilities > History. > United States
• People with mental disabilities > United States > History
• Social Conditions > history
• United States

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (p. 303-345) and index.

Contents

1. Idiots in America -- 2. Edward Seguin and the Irony of Physiological Education -- 3. The Burden of the Feebleminded -- 4. Living and Working in the Institution, 1890-1920 -- 5. The Menace of the Feebleminded -- 6. Sterilization, Parole, and Routinization -- 7. The Remaking of Mental Retardation: Of War, Angels, Parents, and Politicians -- Epilogue: On Suffering Fools Gladly.

ISBN

0520082435 (alk. paper)

LCCN

93032239

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries