David J. Wright

This collection examines the origins of asylum as a mechanism for the treatment of insanity. Taking a global view, it considers the socioeconomic & theoretical factors which have shaped the modern notion of madness & the need for confinement of those deemed to be insane.

Using the National Asylum for Idiots, Earlswood as a case-study, this work looks into the emergence of 'idiot' asylums in Victorian England. Wright examines the social history of institutionalisation.

"When the CBC organized a national contest to identify the greatest Canadian of all time, few were surprised when the father of Medicare, Tommy Douglas, won by a large margin: Medicare is central to Canadian identity. Yet focusing on Douglas and his fight for social justice obscures other important aspects of the construction of Canada's national health insurance--especially its longstanding dependence on immigrant doctors. Foreign Practices reconsiders the early history of Medicare through the stories of foreign-trained doctors who entered the country in the three decades after the Second World War. By making strategic use of oral history, analyzing contemporary medical debates, and reconstructing doctors' life histories, Sasha Mullally and David Wright demonstrate that foreign doctors arrived by the hundreds at a pivotal moment for health care services. Just as Medicare was launched, Canada began to prioritize "highly skilled manpower" when admitting newcomers, a novel policy that drew thousands of professionals from around the world. Doctors from India and Iran, Haiti and Hong Kong, and Romania and the Republic of South Africa would fundamentally transform the medical landscape of the country. Charting the fascinating history of physician immigration to Canada, and the ethical debates it provoked, Foreign Practices places the Canadian experience within a wider context of global migration after the Second World War."--

From Idiocy to Mental Deficiency is the first book devoted to the social history of people with learning disabilities in Britain. Approaches to learning difficulties have changed dramatically in recent years. The implementation of 'Care in the Community', the campaign for disabled rights, and the debate over the education of children with special needs have combined to make this one of the most controversial areas in social policy today. The nine original research essays collected here cover the social history of learning disability from the Middle Ages through to the establishment of the National Health Service. Together with the useful general introduction to the volume, they not only contribute to a neglected field of social and medical history; they also illuminate and inform current debates. The research presented here will have a profound impact on how professionals in mental health, psychiatric nursing, social work, and disabled rights understand learning disability and society's responses to it over the course of history.

Attitude toward traditional marriage among the youth in the city of Jakarta.

For 150 years, Down's Syndrome has constituted the archetypal mental disability, easily recognizable by distinct facial anomalies and physical stigmata. This book looks at the care and treatment of Down's sufferers from Medieval Europe to the present day. In a narrow medical sense, Down's syndrome is a common disorder caused by the presence of all or part of an extra 21st chromosome. It is named after John Langdon-Down, the British asylum medical superintendent who described the syndrome as Mongolism in a series of lectures in 1866. In 1959, the disorder was identified as a chromosome 21 trisomy by the French pediatrician and geneticist Jerome Lejeune and has since been known as Down's Syndrome (in the English-speaking world) or Trisomy 21 (in many European countries). But children and adults born with this chromosomal abnormality have an important collective history beyond their evident importance to the history of medical science. Here the author looks at the care and treatment of Down's sufferer, described for much of history as 'idiots', from Medieval Europe to the present day. The discovery of the genetic basis of the condition and the profound changes in attitudes, care, and early identification of Down's in the genetic era, reflects the fascinating medical and social history of the disorder.