Inventing the Feeble Mind ─ A History of Intellectual Disability in the United States

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.

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).