Primary and Secondary Amentia

and by different people but the dichotomy is in each case essentially the same, the fundamental idea behind it being that the mental impairment of every defective is either due to hereditary (germinal) abnormality or else acquired in the course of the life of the individual either before, during or after birth. It was not unnatural that the earliest attempts at classifying defectives employed the same terms which are in general use in medicine and distinguished between congenital and acquired idiocy. That is to say, they distinguished between those cases who were affected before birth and those who acquired a disease afterwards. The position was complicated by certain French physicians who used the term idiocy to signify congenital and imbecility to signify acquired defect. In 1877 Ireland C) proposed a grouping based on pathological considerations and gave the name " genetous idiocy "