Changing depictions of disease

Historically, descriptions of people with what has variably been referred to as mental deficiency, mental handicap or learning difficulties have been heavily laced with racial imagery. ¹ In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for example, when mental deficiency initially became seen as a pressing social problem, racial metaphors and analogies were routinely employed to capture the pathological and deviant nature of defectives. In the same way that different races were construed by many anthropologists as having degenerated from the Caucasian pinnacle, mental defectives were frequently portrayed as the primitive products of a process of atavistic degeneration from a mental and physical norm. ² As the perpetrators of crime, the receptacles of disease and the propagators of mental and physical weaknesses, such degenerates were portrayed not only as the root cause of many social problems but also as an unremitting menace to the future health and wealth of the nation – as an explicit threat to the pursuit of racial purity and pre-eminence. ³