The book is an invaluable resource for historians, students and practitioners in the field of learning disability and deserves to be widely read. It is that rare phenomenon; a scholarly book that is also both readable and useful. Local Population Studies This is a detailed and scholarly work, meticulous both in its attention to detail, and in its mastery of the wider context ... also very engaging and highly readable. Wright succeeds in helping bring the history of learning disability from the periphery into the mainstream. This is no mean feat. Local Population Studies This is an important and timely book. It brings to prominence an under-researched and neglected area of social life - the history of learning disability. Local Population Studies This important monograph provides a comprehensive summary of his contribution to this expanding historiography and gives a useful critique of current thinking on mental illness and mental disability issues. Wright seamlessly develops this narrative around the history of a unique institution in its Victorian heyday ... thoughtful and comprehensive study. Medical History Exemplary study ... this is a wonderfully detailed study. One of its virtues is that it shows how tenuous disciplinary lines can be. To try to classify this work as institutional history, history of medicine, social history etc. would be to do a disservice to a volume that covers all these areas. English Historical Review
Review
"David Wright's book is both careful and intelligent. It is careful in the collection of evidence...and in the unostentatious and unforced use of these materials to recount and analyze the Earlswood story. ... The book's intelligence is in Wright's refusal to be confined by the weight of material he has at his disposal. ...each identifiable voice of parent, sibling, or idiot child finds a place in the index, alongside authorities, founders, and historians. This is history from the bottom up. Not the least benefit of this valuable monograph is its ability to bring to the fore the lived reality of its subject, within the assurance of a sound and scholarly thesis."--American Historical Review
"...an innovative work of medical history that draws creatively upon the tools of interdisciplinary scholarship to make a provocative set of arguments about the fate of the developmentally disabled in Victorian Britain."--Journal of Interdisciplinary History
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