The obsolete medical termsMongolian idiocy, Mongolism, and Mongoloid were used to refer to a specific type of mental deficiency associated with the genetic disorder now referred to as Down syndrome. The obsolete term for a person with this syndrome was Mongolian idiot. In the 21st century, these terms are unacceptable, no longer in common use, and largely forgotten because of their offensive and misleading implications about those with the disorder. The terminology change was brought about both by scientific and medical experts as well as people of Asian ancestry, including those from Mongolia. The stand-alone term idiot itself has a similar history of meaning and connotation change.
While the term idiot in modern use is not technical and simply means a stupid or foolish person, it was formerly a technical term in legal and psychiatric contexts for some kinds of profound intellectual disability where the mental age is two years or less. The term was gradually replaced by the term profound mental retardation, which has itself since experienced euphemism evolution and been replaced by other terms. Along with terms like moron, imbecile, and cretin, idiot is archaic in those technical uses and has become offensive in those contexts.
History
English physician John Langdon Down first characterized the syndrome that now bears his name as a separate form of mental disability in 1862, and in a more widely published report in 1866. Due to his perception that children with Down syndrome shared facial similarities with the populations that Johann Friedrich Blumenbach described as the "Mongolian race", Down used the term mongoloid. Mongolism and its Pathology was the title used by W. Bertram Hill for a published study in 1908. The term mongolism was used by psychiatrist and geneticistLionel Penrose as late as 1961.
Racial pseudoscience
The incorrect connotations of the term were popularized by British physician F. G. Crookshank in his pseudoscientific book The Mongol in our Midst first published in 1924.
Rejection
In 1961, a group of genetic experts wrote a joint letter to the medical journalThe Lancet which read: In 1965, the World Health Organization resolved to abandon the term at the request of the Mongolian People's Republic. Despite several decades of inaction and resistance, the term thereafter began to fade from use, in favor of the term such as Down's Syndrome, Down syndrome and Trisomy 21 disorder. However, as late as 1980, Stephen Jay Gould reported in the book The Panda's Thumb that the term "mongolism" still remained in common use in the United States, despite its being "defamatory" and "wrong on all counts". In the 21st century, these and all related obsolete medical terms for the syndrome are considered unacceptable in the English-speaking world, are no longer in common use, and have been largely forgotten.
