Inventing The Feeble Mind : A History Of Intellectual Disability In The United States Paperback

James Trent

Pity, disgust, fear, cure, and prevention-all are words that Americans have used to make sense of what today we call intellectual disability. Inventing the Feeble Mind explores the history of this disability from its several identifications over the past 200 years: idiocy, imbecility, feeblemindedness, mental defect, mental deficiency, mental retardation, and most recently intellectual disability. Using institutional records, private correspondence, personal memories, and rare photographs, James Trent argues that the economic vulnerability of intellectually disabled people (and often their families), more than the claims made for their intellectual and social limitations, has shaped meaning, services, and policies in United States history.

English

Oxford University Press Inc

15 January 2017

392

James W. Trent Jr. is author of Inventing the Feeble Mind: A History of Mental Retardation in the United States (1994) that won the 1995 Hervey B. Wilbur Award of the American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities. He coedited Mental Retardation in America: An Historical Reader (2004), and authored The Manliest Man: Samuel G. Howe and the Contours of 19th Century American Reform (2012).

Trents thorough examination of the history of intellectual disability in the United States has become a key text for anyone interested in this topic. Though not a historian, Trent has completed thorough archival research and interviewed contemporary witnesses to create a comprehensive, though accessible, introduction to a history that shines a light on the best and worst of the human condition. * Daniel Werges, H-Net Reviews *