The history of the history of learning disability

The article traces and summarises historiographical trends in the history of learning disabilities. It identifies three significant waves of historical approaches beginning with a medicalised analysis that emerged in the early 20th century. This presented a story of medical progress which began with the asylum movement of the 19th century and represented ‘idiots’ as creatures of the asylum and objects of the medicalised gaze. In the 1990s, a new social history challenged these assumptions, focusing on the iniquities of institutionalisation and the eugenics period while attempting to voice people with learning disabilities and their families in their own account. A cultural history movement later emerged to challenge the idea of learning disability as a fixed universal concept over time. It argued that the concept of learning disability (in all its different linguistic iterations) is contingent on time and place and a product of the culture within which it is framed. Not all work fits neatly into one of these categories. Sometimes they overlap, and occasionally they cannot be easily categorised. Nevertheless, these broad frames of reference within the historiography of learning disability do point to more general social, cultural and political concerns, which are worth holding in mind as we consider how the ‘work’ of history can and does act to inform attitudes, policy‐making and change.