Those
They Called Idiots traces the little-known lives of people with
learning disabilities from the communities of eighteenth-century England to
the nineteenth-century asylum and care in today's society. Using evidence
from civil and criminal court-rooms, joke books, slang dictionaries, novels,
art and caricature, it explores the explosive intermingling of ideas about
intelligence and race, while bringing into sharp focus the lives of people
often seen as the most marginalized in society.