| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Methods/Theory

Mathew Thomson. The Problem of Mental Deficiency: Eugenics, Democracy, and Social Policy in Britain c. 1870–1959. (Oxford Historical Monographs.) New York: Clarendon Press Oxford University. 1998. Pp. ix, 351. $90.00.

Mathew Thomson's careful study of the handling of mental deficiency in Britain contributes significantly to our understanding of British social policy and at the same time explores how a sociomedical issue is shaped by demographic, economic, and cultural factors. He concentrates on the events that led to the passage of the Mental Deficiency Act of 1913 and carries the story up to the 1959 Mental Health Act. Historians have generally considered the history of mental deficiency as an episode in the history of eugenics, but Thomson's monograph convincingly argues that this narrow treatment overlooks its value in understanding the history of psychiatry and, more important, the history of social policy and its political dimension. The multi-leveled study raises a number of important questions about the biases in historical accounts in the history of medicine that focus more on the history of curing than caring and on the attention paid to individual institutions at the expense of examining the interaction of public and volunteer efforts. In a refreshingly intelligent move, Thomson takes his subject past the sterile epistemological impasse occasioned by debates over the "construction" of mental deficiency by noting that "any social problem is necessarily socially, politically, ideologically, and linguistically constituted, yet also that there is a social reality of individuals within society who have special needs and different abilities" (p. 9). . . .

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