Ancient people not nice to those with intellectual disabilities

[rainforests1]

I can't find anything about it online, but, according to my brother, thousands of years ago they would leave a person with an intellectual disability and let them die. Is this cruel?

 

[Clueless Git]

Well, I wasn't here to see anything thousands of years ago. Nor was your brother.

You don't have to go back far in history to get an idea though ...

There's plenty of records of Bedlams having open days for people to come mock the mentaly disabled.

Todd Browning's film 'Freaks' was actualy banned in the 1940's (I think it was) for the 'crime' of depicting the physicaly deformed as 'human'.

 

[Calliegirl]

It depends on the culture.
Europeans no doubt were cruel to anyone considered weak or beneath them, for whatever reason. Native Americans considered every tribe member to be family and treated them that way, disabled or not. There is a Lakota saying "Mitakuye Oyasin"; meaning all are related or all my relations (this includes animals and other things in nature as well).

 

[rainforests1]

Native Americans considered every tribe member to be family and treated them that way, disabled or not.

They also scalped and had many battles throughout history. It's the group I have most respect for, but they also had faults. Personally I think food supply would be more important than anything. Many societies had a lot of starvation over the years during the hunting and gathering time period and early agricultural societies so I think that would play a big role as to how they treated some people.

 

[Second Summer]

I think in Norway 1000 years ago or so, before Christianity, they left "faulty" newborns to die in the woods, at least partly due to superstition. They thought their real infants had been taken away by a mythological figure, Huldra, and replaced with one of hers, hence why it was "faulty".

 

[flyingsnail]

This would vary by culture and I don't think its much different than how cultures deal with the elderly which, like people with disabilities, often can't properly take care of themselves. But a lot of today's "intellectual disabilities" are really just constructs of our culture so asking what other cultures did about them doesn't make much senses because they simply didn't exist in the culture.