Abstract
Summing up historians' approaches to the history of mental illness, David Wright quotes Roy Porter's statement that "madness continues to exercise its magic, but mindlessness holds no mystique" (p. 3). While there is a wealth of literature on lunacy, mental disabilities present from birth—termed "idiocy" and "imbecility" in the nineteenth century—have received much less attention. Wright addresses this imbalance in his social history of the Earlswood Asylum, England's first charitable asylum for mentally disabled children and adults, which included mostly cases from the "deserving" poor, but also some paying middle-class patients. His case study of Earlswood makes important contributions to the growing history of disabilities as well as to debates on Victorian asylums and social welfare.
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