The Body: A Guide for Occupants

by Bill Bryson

Davis’s fundamental ambition was to prove that dark-skinned people were created separately from light-skinned people. He was convinced that a person’s intellect and moral compass were indelibly written in the curves and apertures of the skull and that these were exclusively products of race and class. People with “cephalic peculiarities” should be treated “not as criminals but as dangerous idiots,” he suggested. In 1878, at the age of seventy-seven, he married a woman fifty years his junior. What her cranium was like is unknown. 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