The history of policies affecting individuals with intellectual disabilities has received attention from social historians interested in gender and family, from the emerging discipline of disability studies, and from scholars interested in the evolving role of eugenic arguments and medical genetics in American life. That history has received less systematic study from the community of policy analysts and scholars traditionally concerned with welfare, poverty, and public health. This is unfortunate because the history of policies affecting intellectual disability offers at least three significant lessons.

Normally we do not think of living organisms as machines or as relays in complex, tightly coupled technological systems. Nonetheless, in recent years this is precisely the manner in which many environmental historians have come to approach the study of certain organisms and their natural or anthropogenic environments. Over the millennia and across the globe, humans have so manipulated certain organisms that they have come to exist solely as parts of technological systems or industrialized chains of production and consumption. Technological artifacts are, of course, only nature refashioned: nonetheless, modern industrialized societies tend to view themselves as gradually distancing themselves from, replacing, or, in some instances, even killing nature with their advanced technologies and gadgetries, when actually they are only refashioning their inseparable relationship to it.