Most laws made "idiocy" a disqualification, although, even under the best of circumstances, idiocy was often hard to determine.
As in earlier centuries, idiocy was once more linked to criminality and poverty.
However, finishing the book, one can only reflect on the utter pointlessness and idiocy of humanity repeatedly going to war.
Because so many voters were illiterate, an inability to read and write was never taken as evidence of idiocy.
It is almost an idiocy to be bold enough to try it.
This final period marked a rupture in the treatment of idiocy, both in terms of space and organization from asylums to schools and from alienists to psychologists.
Idiocy was a condition present at birth or developed in the early stages of life, he wrote.
Given the scope of discourses across which idiocy has been constructed there is certainly a need to reinforce the analytical unity of a comparative analysis such as this.