Mongolian idiocy

 This article is about an outdated medical term for Down syndrome.
   For the modern country in east-central Asia, see Mongolia.
   For the empire which existed during the 13th and 14th centuries, see Mongol Empire.

The term Mongolian idiocy and similar terms have been used to refer to a specific type of mental deficiency associated with the genetic disorder now more commonly referred to as Down syndrome. The use of these terms has largely been abandoned because of their offensive and misleading implications about those with the disorder.

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.<ref name="HickeyHickey2012">,

 Medical Update for Children With Down Syndrome for the Pediatrician and Family Practitioner, 
 Advances in Pediatrics, 
 2012,
 Vol. 59(Issue: 1),
 pp. 137–157,
 DOI: 10.1016/j.yapd.2012.04.006,
 
 
 
 Full text,</ref><ref>Down, JLH, 
 Observations on an ethnic classification of idiots, 
 Clinical Lecture Reports, London Hospital, 
 1866,
 Vol. 3,
 pp. 259–62,
 
 
 
 
 Full text,</ref><ref name="Ward1998">Ward, 
  
 John Langdon Down, 1828-1896: A Caring Pioneer. online version, 
  
 Royal Society of Medicine Press, 
 1998, 
  
  
 ISBN 978-1853153747,</ref> 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.<ref name=Rubin2013>{{{last}}}, 
 Howard Reisner, 
  
 Essentials of Rubin's Pathology. online version, 
  
 Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, 
 2013, 
  
  
 ISBN 978-1-4511-8132-6, 
  
  
  
 Pages: 129–131,</ref><ref name="Ward1999" />  Mongolism and its Pathology was the title used by W. Bertram Hill for a published study in 1908<ref name="Osler1909">{{{last}}}, 
 Sir William Osler, 
  
 The Quarterly Journal of Medicine. online version, 
  
 Oxford University Press, 
 1909,</ref> and the term mongolism was used by psychiatrist and geneticist Lionel Penrose as late as 1961.

The connotations of the term were popularized ^{(December 2018)}

by British physician F. G. Crookshank in his pseudo-scientific book The Mongol in our Midst first published in 1924.

In 1961, a prestigious group of genetic experts wrote a joint letter to the medical journal The Lancet which read:

The World Health Organization (WHO) resolved to abandon the term in 1965 at the request of the Mongolian People's Republic.<ref name="Howard1979">Howard-Jones, Norman,

 On the diagnostic term "Down's disease", 
 Medical History, 
 1979,
 Vol. 23(Issue: 1),
 pp. 102–04,
 DOI: 10.1017/s0025727300051048,
 PMID: 153994,
 PMC: 1082401,</ref> 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. Stephen Jay Gould reported in 1980 that the term "mongolism" still remained in common use in the United States, despite its being "defamatory" and "wrong on all counts".<ref>Gould, Stephen Jay, 
  
 The panda's thumb : more reflections in natural history. online version, 
  
 Norton, 
  
  
  
 ISBN 9780393013801, 
  
  
  
 Pages: 168,</ref>  In the 21st century, all the older terms are considered unacceptable in the English-speaking world, are no longer in common use, and have been largely forgotten.<ref name="fifty">Rodríguez-Hernández, M. Luisa, 
 Fifty years of evolution of the term Down's syndrome, 
 Lancet, 
 
 Vol. 378(Issue: 9789),
 pp. 402,
 DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(11)61212-9,
 PMID: 21803206,</ref>

References

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