RESUMO
Western medicine has a long history of accounting for behaviour by reducing the body to ultimate explanatory entities. In pre-modern medicine these were invisible "animal spirits" circulating the body. In modern medicine, they are "genes". Both raise questions. The psychological phenotype is defined by human consensus, varying according to time and place, while the genotype's DNA exists in a realm of material reality. There are deep philosophical and methodological problems in linking one realm to the other. Nyhan's original application of the phenotype-genotype pairing merely claimed that the two realms could be matched because of their common susceptibility to statistical treatment. His behavioural example was "stereotypy". It has since extended to include such things as "social cognition" in Turner's syndrome (Skuse), thus revealing increasingly clearly that the two realms are fundamentally and ontologically separate. The problems are not merely epistemological but ethical, since the looseness of psychological categories involves a blurring of the boundaries between behavioural phenotype and social stereotype. The latter may then be underwritten as "real" by being associated, spuriously, with the empirically demonstrable reality of genetic material.
Assuntos
Genótipo , Deficiência Intelectual/história , Transtornos Mentais/história , Fenótipo , Filosofia Médica/história , Transtornos do Comportamento Social/história , Síndrome de Turner/história , História do Século XIX , História do Século XX , HumanosRESUMO
Recent work on the conceptual history of intellectual disability has pointed to a discontinuity in the seventeenth century, identifying the concept as essentially modern in a more radical sense than mental illness or physical disability. However, Galenist accounts of intellectual impairment were clearly connected (via anatomy) to neurology, which could be taken as prima facie evidence that Galenism shares with modern medicine one of its basic explanatory approaches to intellectual disability. Close textual examination does not bear out this counter-claim, at least as far as the conceptual apparatus itself is concerned. However, it does reveal a degree of continuity in the medical mind-set as discourses of monstrosity were transposed from the domain of anatomy to that of post-Cartesian psychology.
Assuntos
Deficiência Intelectual/história , Neurologia/história , Frenologia/história , Anatomia/história , Encéfalo/patologia , História do Século XV , História do Século XVI , História do Século XVII , História do Século XVIII , História Medieval , Humanos , Deficiência Intelectual/patologia , Inteligência , Transtornos Mentais/história , Teoria Psicológica , Crânio/patologiaRESUMO
History seems to show us that any definition of intellectual disability (ID) including our current one has no timeless, certain validity, and that definitions are made only in ethical contexts. It is difficult to find a terra firma on which to discuss this sceptical claim alongside the claim to certain knowledge assumed in genetics and much of bioethics. Perhaps a transhistorical basis can be found instead in the motives of people constructing ID, and in the substratum of unconditionality in human relationships.
Assuntos
Deficiência Intelectual/genética , Biologia Molecular/ética , Pesquisa , Projeto Genoma Humano , HumanosRESUMO
This article investigates the historical sources for the idea of the "changeling" or substitute child as an explanation for congenital intellectual disability. Pre-modern sources for this idea are elite and theological as much as popular and folkloric, nor do they refer to intellectual disability in any sense recognizable to us. Rather, both the concept of intellectual disability and the notion of a transhistorical changeling myth emerge from the historical core of modern psychology.