This instinct on the part of European authorities to prove all other races inferior was widespread, if not universal. In England, in 1866 the eminent physician John Langdon Haydon Down (1828–96) first described the condition that we now know as Down’s syndrome in a paper called “Observations on an Ethnic Classification of Idiots,” but he referred to it as “Mongolism” and its victims as “Mongoloid idiots” in the belief that they were suffering an innate regression to an inferior, Asiatic type. Down believed, and no one seems to have doubted him, that idiocy and ethnicity were conjoined
...more
