ABSTRACT
The label of pioneer has been pinned notably on Paracelsus, Felix Platter and Thomas Willis, but can only be justified if the symptoms of “foolishness” and “stupidity” in their work bear some relation to those of modern “intellectual disability.” Cranefield describes intellectual disability as a pioneering diagnosis of cretinism; but this label arrived only in eighteenth-century medicine, which regarded Alpine peasants in their entirety as “little better than senseless beasts.” The symptoms Platter lists are physical and behavioural as much as intellectual. What unites the seemingly disparate list of people in which these people “born foolish” are embedded is the arousal of wonder in the onlooker. Dull-brained children can later become capable and teachable. A hot fever can suddenly cure adults previously assumed to be foolish. The praeternatural, with its intimation of origins beyond nature, was imported into natural history, with the result that certain human-looking creatures became increasingly seen as classifiable in some non-human or interstitial category.
