“Foolishness” in Early Modern Medicine and the Concept of Intellectual Disability

Abstract

The texts by Paracelsus, Felix Platter and Thomas Willis under consideration here have two things in common, despite their separate historical and cultural settings. First, they describe people who seem to relate both to their own world and to the external world in problematical ways which the authors variously call stultitia, fatuitas or stupiditas: “foolishness”. My translation is intentionally imprecise and will, I hope, restrain the reader from jumping to the conclusion that it signifies any clinical concept recognizable in modern medicine; it is, rather, an algebraic x whose content needs further investigation. The second common factor is that these are precisely the texts which some commentators do indeed believe to contain “early” diagnoses of a modern concept of intellectual disability (“mental retardation”, “learning disability” etc.). This belief, of axiomatic status, presupposes that some such concept has existed across different historical periods in a more or less mutually recognizable form, and therefore that “foolishness”, in the medical writers discussed here, just is, if primitively, our “intellectual disability”. However “foolishness” needs closer examination, which I attempt to provide here.