Feeble-minded  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation, search

Related e

Wikipedia
Wiktionary
Shop


Featured:

The earliest recorded use of the term in the English language dates from 1534 when it appears in one of the first English translations of the old testament in the biblical injunction to "Comforte the feble mynded".

A Times editorial of November 1834 describes the long serving former Prime Minister Lord Liverpool as a "feeble-minded pedant of office".

However, from the latter half of the nineteenth-century the term feeble-minded acquired a much more precise meaning as a type of "mental deficiency". Mental deficiency itself was an umbrella term which encompassed all degrees of educational and social deficiency. Within the concept of mental deficiency there was a hierarchy of disability ranging from idiocy, at the most severe end of the scale, to imbecility, at the median point, and to feeblemindedness at the highest end which was conceived of as a form of high grade mental deficiency. The invention of this ranking system of mental deficiency has been credited to Sir Charles Trevelyan in 1876, In addition, wild card terms outside of the established hierarchy of mental deficiency, such as idiot savant may have been used as connotations for those who were thought to fall somewhere under the autistic spectrum.

The British government's Royal Commission on the Care and Control of the Feeble-Minded (1904-1908), in its Report in 1908 defined the feeble-minded as:

persons who may be capable of earning a living under favourable circumstances, but are incapable from mental defect, existing from birth or from an early age: (1) of competing on equal terms with their normal fellows, or (2) of managing themselves and their affairs with ordinary prudence.

Despite being pejorative, the term was considered, along with idiot and moron, to be a relatively precise psychiatric label in its day.

The American psychologist Henry H. Goddard, creator of the term moron, was director of the Vineland Training School (originally the Vineland Training School for Backward and Feeble-minded Children) at Vineland, New Jersey. Goddard was known for postulating most effectively that "feeble-mindedness" was a hereditary trait, most likely caused by a single recessive gene. This led Goddard to ring eugenic alarm bells in his 1912 work, The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness, about those in the population who carried the recessive trait despite outward appearances of normality.

In the first half of the 20th century, "feeble-mindedness, in any of its grades" was a common criterion for compulsory sterilization in many U.S. states. In the 1927 case Buck v. Bell, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes closed the 8-1 majority opinion upholding the sterilization of Carrie Buck, who along with her mother and daughter was labeled "feeble-minded", with the infamous phrase, "Three generations of imbeciles are enough."

Jack London's 1914 story, "Told in the Drooling Ward," describes inmates at a California institution for the "feeble-minded." Such an institution existed (the California Home for the Care and Training of Feeble-minded Children, now the Sonoma Developmental Center) close to the Jack London Ranch in Glen Ellen, California. The story is a narrative told from the point of view of a self-styled "high-grade feeb".

Dim-witted

Being a dimwit; stupid; foolish; simple.


See also





Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Feeble-minded" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

Personal tools