Blockheads, roundheads, pointy heads: Intellectual disability and the brain before modern medicine
- 1 January 2005
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Wiley in Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences
- Vol. 41 (2) , 165-183
- https://doi.org/10.1002/jhbs.20081
Abstract
Recent work on the conceptual history of intellectual disability has pointed to a discontinuity in the seventeenth century, identifying the concept as essentially modern in a more radical sense than mental illness or physical disability. However, Galenist accounts of intellectual impairment were clearly connected (via anatomy) to neurology, which could be taken as prima facie evidence that Galenism shares with modern medicine one of its basic explanatory approaches to intellectual disability. Close textual examination does not bear out this counter‐claim, at least as far as the conceptual apparatus itself is concerned. However, it does reveal a degree of continuity in the medical mind‐set as discourses of monstrosity were transposed from the domain of anatomy to that of post‐Cartesian psychology.Keywords
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