Since its emergence as a discipline, disability studies scholarship has tended to focus on physical disability. While research on mental health has been increasing, there is a significant need within the field for more work on intellectual disability (known in the United Kingdom as learning disability). Simon Jarrett's Those They Called Idiots: The Idea of the Disabled Mind from 1700 to the Present Day makes a welcome contribution to the existing scholarship. Furthermore, while it is not clear from the title, Jarrett's focus is primarily on British history and culture, making the book relevant for scholars working in British studies. Jarrett demonstrates the centrality of theories of intellectual disability to the development of such diverse disciplines as law, literature, art history, the social sciences, and political and economic philosophies. A particularly timely aspect of this book is Jarrett's discussion of the interdependence of discourses of race, empire, and intellectual disability. His attention to intellectual disability produces fresh interpretations of familiar texts by such authors as Charles Dickens, William Godwin, John Stuart Mill, and Charles Darwin.

The history that Jarrett recounts challenges the presumed universality of the category of intellectual disability, revealing shifts in definitions over three centuries. Even the desire to classify individuals according to perceived mental capacity arises from the taxonomic ways of thinking that predominated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Because definitions fluctuated, Jarrett makes a somewhat controversial choice to employ period terminology. While this results in the use of terms that are currently considered stigmatizing, his purpose is to emphasize the fact that not only have the descriptors changed but the categories themselves have also shifted. In other words, there is no exact contemporary equivalent for the figure who in the eighteenth century would have been categorized as an idiot.

In his quest to undercover the historical traces of people who have frequently been denied the opportunity to tell their stories in their own voices, Jarrett examines an impressive variety of period sources, including court proceedings, law and public policy documents, dictionaries, literary works, works of art, and scientific writings. Surprisingly, medical writings do not enter the conversation until late in the book; but as Jarrett's sources demonstrate, the medical model, which still dominates mainstream thinking on intellectual disability, was a product of the nineteenth century, and medical authority was rarely invoked in eighteenth-century discussions of the topic.

The book is organized into three sections, each covering a significant period in the history of intellectual disability. Part one covers the time before intellectual disability was medicalized, from approximately 1700 to 1812. In the first chapter, Jarrett examines the legal status of intellectually disabled people; his main argument is that, for the most part, they were integrated into their communities, with the law intervening in their lives only when communal networks failed or when their ability to manage property or finances was in dispute. In chapter 2, Jarrett contextualizes legal definitions within the larger arena of linguistic and artistic representation, tracing the development of “idiot” tropes in a variety of genres, from slang to caricature. One of the defining traits of this character type was a lack of corporeal and emotional control; this view of intellectual disability arose just as self-control was emerging as an important signifier of the rational and the civilized. This argument leads into chapter 3, in which Jarrett looks both intellectually disabled and nonwhite people as others to the European norm and examines the intertwining of discourses on race and disability.

Part two covers 1812 to 1870. The chapters in this section are parallel to those in part one, with a chapter detailing the growth of medical jurisprudence, a chapter tracing the transformation of the “idiot” character into an object of pity and disgust, and a chapter on the intersection of disability and race. This last chapter is particularly compelling: Jarrett deals with the mutually constitutive ways in which categories of race and intellectual ability were constructed in the context of evolutionary theory. In an additional chapter in this section, Jarrett examines the rise of the asylum. The notions of citizenship that arose in the wake of the French and American revolutions were dependent on the ability to understand and participate in a social contract, something that intellectually disabled people were perceived as incapable of doing. The asylum was seen as an enlightened response to what was considered a social problem. Consequently, many disabled people were deprived of their liberty and rights.

Part three opens with a chapter on the rise of eugenics, from 1870 until the start of World War II. In the final chapter, covering from 1939 to the present, Jarrett discusses the culmination of eugenic science in the horrors of the Nazi extermination program. He then moves on to discuss a period of institutional neglect and abuse that led to civil rights advocacy in the mid-twentieth century. Jarrett ends with the transition to care in the community, beginning in the 1980s and continuing to the present day. Jarrett warns readers not to become complacent, as access to communities today can be conditional and mediated by bureaucratic institutions. He challenges readers to rethink simplistic narratives of linear progress by suggesting that we could learn from eighteenth-century ways of accommodating and including those with intellectual disabilities.

Those They Called Idiots is an excellent resource for scholars of both disability and British studies. The only disappointment is that more attention is not given to the intersection of intellectual disability, gender, and sexuality; this demonstrates the need for continued research in the field. While, at times, the portrayal of eighteenth-century communities seems somewhat romanticized, Jarrett's discussion of the period before disability became a medical matter does the important work of denaturalizing the pathologization of intellectual disability, calling for alternative, and more humane, ways of conceptualizing it.