New Books In Medicine

David Wright‘s 2011 book Downs: The History of a Disability (Oxford University Press, 2011), offers readers a history that stretches far beyond the strictly defined genetic disorder that is its namesake. Wright shows us how the condition that came to be known as Down’s syndrome has as much to do with the social history of what was called ‘idiocy’ in Early Modern times and reform movements to integrate the disabled beginning in the 1960s as it does with the rise of asylums or the disputed discovery of “trisomie vingt-et-un.” Even the legacy of the condition’s name is a telling narrative about the modernization of medicine, from the use of the term ‘mongoloid’ to justify the (progressive for the time) anthropological theory of racial reversion to debates over whether to rename the disease in honor of John Langdon Down or place it within a more rigid taxonomy of congenital mental disorders. On their own, all of these stories are compelling windows into differ