Historical fascination with the so-called “idiot savant” is shameful

On November 25, 1915, the remarkable story of an 11-year-old boy with exceptional mathematical skills was published in the American newspaper The Review. He could memorize all the numbers of the train carriages that passed at 30 mph, add them up, and give the right total sum while perched on a hill near a set of railroad tracks. The case was noteworthy not only because he could read numbers on a moving vehicle and calculate large numbers, but also because he was hardly able to eat without assistance or recognize faces. His mathematical achievements were all the more remarkable when his alleged arrested development was contrasted with his numerical proficiency. The author of the piece questioned, “How can you account for it?”. The response came in the form of a medical designation: the boy was an “idiot savant,” as that term was defined in 19th-century medicine. Despite having severe mental impairment that impacted both his motor and social skills, he had a remarkable talent.

One hundred years after The Review reported on the gifted child’s mathematical prowess, psychological research on savantism or “savant syndrome” is still motivated by the desire to comprehend “how they do it.”. The savant phenomenon is described as “a rare condition in which persons with various developmental disorders, including autistic disorder, have an amazing ability and talent” by the SSM Health Treffert Centre in Wisconsin, which bears the name of Darold Treffert (1933-2020), one of the foremost authorities in the field. Nowadays, savantism is mostly understood through the lens of neurodivergence because of the strong correlation between savantism and autism: approximately 10% of individuals with autism have some savant skills, whereas savantism without autism is much less common.

For instance, psychological research by Simon Baron-Cohen and Michael Lombardo has concentrated on the neurological underpinnings of “systemizing,” whereby individuals with autism diagnoses possess extraordinary mathematical or musical abilities; these individuals are known as “hypersystemisers,” or particularly adept at recognizing “laws, rules, and/or regularities.”. According to theory, their brain’s systemizing processes are “tuned to very high levels,” which enables them to learn rules and pay close attention. They are also thought to be extremely sensitive to sensory input.

However, the “idiot savant” was a paradox in the past (autism was only recognized as a diagnostic category in 1943), as there was no common understanding of how such extraordinary musical and numerical abilities could coexist with their complete opposite: profound disability. How could someone be both a “genius” and an “idiot,” to use 19th-century terminology? The savant was viewed as a monstrous creature at worst and as otherworldly at best in the context of intelligence at the time.

According to historian Patrick McDonagh, “idiocy” was a medical term that was widely used despite its extreme ambiguity. Maybe in part because it was a boundary-defying category that served a crucial social-symbolic purpose: it provided a standard by which contemporary people could measure their own intelligence and reason, thereby bolstering their assertions of social authority and respect. Additionally, it meant that individuals such as the 11-year-old boy who had a fascination with numbers but was still regarded as an “idiot” in the medical jargon of the time created a contradiction that still has consequences today.

In the 1860s, Edouard Séguin (1812-80), a French physician and educational reformer, came up with the term “idiot savant.”. In his investigation into the educational status of so-called “feeble-minded children” in the US (where he obtained naturalization), Séguin discovered a specific kind of child who appeared to be exceptionally skilled in one area despite having severe mental impairment. Séguin claimed that these “idiot savants” were unique to the upper classes, who were already distinguished by their extravagant spending and lack of meaningful social contributions. According to Séguin, the idiot savant was the physical representation of this uselessness. He described them as “men abnormally developed in one direction … but idiotic in every other respect.”. He wrote:.

We almost exclusively have musical, mathematical, architectural, and other types of idiot savants from this [wealthier] class; they are a useless protrusion of a single faculty, accompanied by a wo[e]ful general impotence.

Séguin’s disparaging remarks demonstrated a wider critical attitude towards the aristocracy, who were perceived as effete, weak, and hypochondriacal, and went beyond medical observations during a period when the middle classes were struggling with the fear of social degeneration. These stereotypes of the class were reinforced by the idiot savant, who claimed that their talents, no matter how advanced, were worthless.

However, Séguin’s viewpoint was far from universal. Medical professionals such as John Langdon Down in England maintained that there were “idiot savants” in every social class and that their extraordinary talent could (and ought to) be developed so that they could use their expertise to benefit society. James Henry Pullen, who was 15 when he arrived at the Earlswood Asylum in Surrey in 1850, was one of the savants in Langdon Down’s care. Unschooled and mostly deaf, Pullen’s vocabulary was extremely limited; his family had taught him what little he could write or speak. Despite his lack of carpentry training and his early experience building ships out of small pieces of firewood, he demonstrated a passion for drawing and carving. After arriving at Earlswood, he was assigned to the carpenter’s shop. He became an accomplished carpenter very quickly. Though his real passion was creating enormous models of actual and fictional ships, he also constructed furniture for the asylum. According to his caretaker, Pullen “could build exquisite model ships from drawings, and carve with a great deal of skill, but yet could not understand a sentence – who had to have it dissected for him.”. Pullen worked at Earlswood for 66 years, during which time his ships received multiple awards and recognition from around the world, including that of Edward, Prince of Wales, who encouraged him to keep creating art by sending him ivory tusks.

Her kind manners and cheerful disposition, which complemented the modest ideals of the era, were commended by her caregivers.

Langdon Down felt that people like Pullen could become more self-sufficient and valuable to society by honing their skills. The education of people with intellectual disabilities in the 19th century was, in fact, motivated by these ideas. In a time when there was a strong belief in the meritocratic order of society, the creation of the “idiot savant” medical category became crucial in discussions about rights and responsibilities. It was used to legitimize social difference and to moralize it by citing the need to be charitable, much like many other labels used to pathologize behavior, such as the “homosexual” and the “juvenile delinquent.”. Pullen’s story serves as an example of how a person’s lived experience can be influenced by the coexistence of institutional advantages, social recognition, and personal talent.

One example of this dynamic is the case of a young, gifted woman who lives permanently at the famous mental health facility La Salpêtrière in Paris; her name has been lost to history. Those who shared their daily lives with her enjoyed her “musical memory and voice,” which she had since she was born blind and both physically and intellectually disabled. In the asylum choir, she was in charge of adjusting the voices of the other participants. Her caregivers commended her kind manners and joyful disposition, which aligned with the modest ideals of the era: one should not boast about one’s birthright but rather accept it gracefully and apply it for the benefit of society. The modern composers Giacomo Meyerbeer, Franz Liszt, and Jean-Antoine-Just Géraldy all paid her a personal visit and commended her exceptional talent because of how well-known her abilities were. The asylum director clarified that if she hadn’t been so reliant on others to take care of her, her talent would have merited a high social standing.

In the latter part of the 1800s, one of the main topics of discussion in the human sciences was the nature of genius. Genius became an ambiguous quality in the framework of the theory of degeneration, which moved from natural history to evolutionary theory and asserted that civilization was in decline because undesirable traits were being passed down. This theory suggested that genius could either ensure progress or further contribute to the decline of society. Comprehending the definition of genius and its emergence became a critical issue with societal ramifications. Less positively, genius had historically been linked to madness in some way, which raised yet another question: was genius a pathology? Were people with extraordinary abilities truly insane? What did that mean for the men who were in charge of society’s advancement, who were frequently categorized as geniuses? Is genius something that came naturally or the result of an individual’s hard work? Could it be harnessed and cultivated for the greater good?

Each of these issues was represented by three different writers: British sexologist Havelock Ellis, British eugenicist Francis Galton, and Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso. Galton argued that genius was an innate trait that developed apart from education using statistical analysis. Genius was passed down, which is why scientists produced other scientists. The idea of eugenics, which gained traction in the early 20th century among intellectuals who believed that promoting reproduction among individuals with exceptional traits beneficial to the rest of society could create a better society (or “race”) of people, was significantly impacted by his hereditarian conception of genius.

The patient’s seemingly natural talent was demonstrated by the fact that his father, grandfather, and brother were all drummers.

But Lombroso, who is well-known for his work on criminal anthropology and the development of criminal “types” based only on physical characteristics, maintained that genius was a disease that was comparable to insanity. Lombroso saw genius as a pearl, the product of a morbid transformation that yielded something lovely. However, the discovery that it was present in criminals validated its ultimately ill nature. Ellis, seeking a compromise, suggested that genius was a genetic characteristic linked to idiocy (as opposed to madness), in which one faculty was overdeveloped at the expense of the remaining abilities necessary for the body and mind to function normally. Ellis used the excessive clumsiness that geniuses frequently appeared to display as an example. However, Ellis contended that the “idiot savant” rather than the lunatic was the key to comprehending the true nature of talent, placing genius on par with idiocy.

Doctors, meanwhile, argued over whether savants were born with talent or not. Some gave examples of multiple family members exhibiting the same skill, such as a man who lived at the Salpêtrière permanently and had the chance to pick up a drum and play with remarkable skill despite never having played an instrument. Further investigation revealed that all of the other men in his family were proficient drummers; the fact that the patient’s father, grandfather, and brother had all played the instrument was evidence of his seemingly natural talent. Leaning into the patient’s paradox, other doctors pointed out that the patient’s ability was pathological, but they also emphasized its commendable exceptionalism, arguing that its appearance was random, even freakish.

The problem of precocity was connected to the study of genius. In the 19th and 20th centuries, two distinct “types” of age—chronic and mental—became significant as research on child development expanded and the IQ test—which quantified intelligence—became a more widely used instrument for classifying children. The former was used to describe how time naturally passes for every person, along with the physical changes and growth that come with it. Mental age, on the other hand, represented the various stages of mental development and the various abilities and behaviors that the majority of people attained at a comparable time. A correlation between the two was necessary for proper development, and any departure from the norm was considered pathological. The difference between a person’s natural age and mental age was the root cause of both precocity and idiocy.

The child prodigy was a prime example of precocity. Precocious children have been documented since the 18th century. Mozart and Christian Heinrich Heineken, a gifted child known as “the infant scholar of Lübeck,” were two and three years old when they were able to read various biblical canons and speak fluent German by the age of one. However, Andrea Graus has demonstrated that the idea of the child prodigy did not become a more common cultural phenomenon until the middle of the 19th century. These kids gained attention from both the scientific community and the general public as a result of their association with the rise of the entertainment industry and developmental psychology. In keeping with a culture of spectacle that attracted large crowds to see “freaks” of nature, parents and managers soon realized the financial gain they could derive from such kids and began touring them both domestically and abroad. Large audiences were drawn to the performances of children such as the Polish-born chess player Samuel Reshevsky (1911–92), the Spanish pianist Pepito Arriola (1895–1954), and the Italian “mental calculator” Vito Mangiamele (1827–97). However, these children also came under scientific scrutiny as psychologists attempted to figure out how such talent could manifest at such a young age. Their response was that they possessed an extraordinary memory instead of any creative talent. The child prodigy represented a dichotomy between mechanistic underdevelopment and genius, which was also the case with the idiot savant, whose representatives were frequently ridiculed for their stupidity.

Wiggins’ Blackness was specifically mentioned in one of the theories offered to explain his skill.

Historians have questioned whether Wiggins’ genius was truly unique, though. Although the shows highlighted his improvisational abilities and early ability to mimic songs as examples of his natural talent, historians point out that Wiggins took piano lessons and was accompanied by a teacher who helped him practice both his own and other people’s compositions. Those who knew Wiggins also noted that he was “frantically delighted or bewitched, if you please, over the music he is making or hearing” rather than being a moron.

Wiggins achieved a level of fame that few people could match during his time. His talent enthralled people. Wiggins “fe[eling] his way through the mazes of the most complex music” in a superhuman manner, as if he were touched by God, according to a 1912 chronicler for The Seattle Star. Others called it monstrous, though. In a letter to The Daily Alta California in 1869, American author Mark Twain implied that he believed him to be nearly demonically possessed.

I guess all the education in the world couldn’t teach a man to do this amazing thing, but this blind, uneducated idiot of nineteen does it effortlessly. Some archangel, expelled from upper Heaven like another Satan, lives in this rough coffin. The other party is the one who performs these amazing feats and plays this amazing music, not Blind Tom.

Regardless, there was a sense of tension surrounding the (impossible) presence of this blind Black man with extraordinary talent who used the third person to refer to himself and gave strange applause when performing. Attempts to explain away phenomena that did not fit the status quo, like Twain’s, to attribute Wiggins’s talent to something else were tactics in a society that valued social status over an individual’s natural talent.

It’s interesting to note that Wiggins’ Blackness was explicitly mentioned in one of the theories offered to explain his skill. Because of the widespread belief that children, idiots, and Black people all demonstrated an easy appreciation of music despite their savage, uncivilized natures, rhythm was understood in the middle of the 19th century to be corporeal rather than intellectual, and to be more associated with impulse and sensuality than with reason. Using musical talent as a means of sustaining ideas of fundamental difference, white Americans contended in blatantly racist terms that Black people had an “innate musicality.”. Similar to this, Séguin said that “their taste is of the popular or coloured kind” and advocated for the use of music as a teaching tool that could arouse the senses and help idiots focus their attention. A Black disabled man named Wiggins supported these racially biased beliefs on two different levels.

The understanding of the human mind and the naturalization of social difference have been complicated by talented intellectually disabled people since the Enlightenment, when it was believed that the intellectual order mirrored the social order. When it comes to mathematical aptitude, this is especially noticeable. Outside of academic institutions, arithmetic was viewed as a specialized skill with limited intellectual standing, primarily used in the commercial sector. However, as commercialization grew, arithmetic gained importance and was widely regarded as a sign of the strength of reason. Renowned mathematicians known for their extraordinary skills, such as Nathaniel Bowditch in the US and Carl Friedrich Gauss in Europe, came to represent Enlightenment brilliance.

However, other people from the 18th century, such as Thomas Fuller, an African slave in Virginia, and Jedediah Buxton in England, were both illiterate but possessed remarkable mathematical abilities. Such individuals presented a threat to social order while also providing insight into the workings of the mind to Enlightenment men of science. The response relied on the science of mind to explain that savant-like skill indicated an exceptionally developed faculty of memory and was not a true marker of reason. How could men like Buxton and Fuller be icons of reason if they were incapable of carrying on a conversation? According to the prevailing developmental theory, memory was one of the earliest (and thus less developed) faculties to emerge. Therefore, these scientists legitimized social hierarchy by using cognitive difference.

Once again, these practices prevented people with intellectual disabilities from being creative.

The 19th century saw a shift in medical science toward an anatomo-clinical model, which led to a growing reliance on the body—more especially, the brain and nervous system—to explain mental phenomena. The idea that idiocy is the result of brain abnormalities or lesions has evolved. According to phrenological theories that held that the brain was divided into distinct sections, each of which represented a unique quality or ability that could be measured by studying the skull, doctors hypothesized that the idiot savant’s talent resulted from brain protrusions and an uneven growth of the organ of the mind. Autopsies were performed on the brains of idiot savants whenever possible in order to determine whether the cerebral tissue could provide additional insight into their surprising talent. Given that the idiot savant’s talent resulted from unequal development, some doctors hypothesized that if they improved the rest of their brain functions to restore a more balanced state of mind, they would lose their unique skill.

The ability to be creative was once again denied to people with intellectual disabilities by these practices, which either explained away their abilities as superior imitation skills or attributed them to a brain or mental illness. The American neurologist Frederick Peterson declared in 1896 that “there is no spontaneous invention” and that “the idiot savants are mere copyists in music, modeling, designing, or painting.”. Naturally, imitation and repetition are essential to the development of any skill, but Peterson and other men used these behaviors to deny savants their creativity. Given the close connection between creativity and the soul, Peterson and his kind served to further the notion that savants were not completely human.

Leo Kanner, an Austrian-American psychologist, defined autism in a seminal 1943 paper as a condition marked by a preference for routines and environments that remain constant, a fixation with objects, and repetitive behaviors (such as writing the same word repeatedly or shaking their head side to side). Children who could identify composers and squirm in delight at their music by the age of one and a half, count to 100 by the age of two, sing a large repertoire before the age of three, and by the age of eight, possess an exceptional memory feat of spelling and math completion were among the atypical cases Kanner covered in his paper. These kids, according to Kanner, had a natural gift and a distinct perspective on the world from birth. Kanner’s portrayal of autistic children allowed for creativity and individuality at a time when theories regarding intellectual disability were becoming more open to psychoanalytical and social interpretations, all the while supporting the notion that their brains were genetically and neurologically wired differently.

Even now, savantism still captivates us. Savantism’s rarity and precocity garner attention even today, when we use the more inclusive category of neurodivergence rather than pathology. We are in awe of Stephen Wiltshire’s ability to sketch expansive cityscapes from memory or of Leslie Lemke’s ability to perform a difficult musical composition after only one listen. However, marvelling has also been criticized as an example of othering. Although Rain Man (1988) was inspired by Kim Peek’s remarkable memory, the neurodivergent community has sharply criticized the movie for its depiction of Peek’s avatar, Raymond Babbitt, as an infantilized incompetent.

Even though the neurological framework in which we understand savants has evolved, they remain a rare curio.

The disability community, for its part, is upset that the overrepresentation of exceptionally talented autistic people in society perpetuates negative stereotypes that make less talented disabled people invisible. Examining savantism through a historical lens is instructive because it shows how we have conceptualized and regulated notions of who is capable of creativity in various ways over time. Upon reflection, it is clear that the medical discourse surrounding savantism was primarily about politics and power (less) rather than health or even the sciences of the mind.

While we no longer label naive savants as monstrous, it is still unclear how far we have truly come. We continue to stumble over the notion of extraordinary, unanticipated talent that renders such individuals fascinating and inexplicable. Even though the neurological framework in which we understand savants has evolved, they remain a rare curio. Disability scholars like Joseph N. Straus and Marion Quirici point out that we perpetuate social perceptions that portray disabled people as “Others” simply by posing the question of how exceptional talent can coexist with disability.

However, there are two sides to the argument. A popular narrative that views genius as innate has emerged from psychological studies that understand talent as intrinsic to neurodivergent conditions like autism spectrum disorder. As a result, people talk about disabled savants with such awe and admiration that they are referred to as “supercrips”—people who overcome their disability through their mysterious inborn talent. However, disabled people are still viewed as “not like us” in this purportedly positive perspective. It enforces the need to be “more than” in order to be accepted, and Otherworldly is still Other. These stories of triumph, as many disability advocates contend, reinforce the notion that a disability is a bad thing while blocking the discomfiting subversive agency that disabled people can access simply by existing. The idea of the “idiot savant” serves as a reminder that we still have a ways to go in understanding neurological complexity and that we need to improve our ability to recognize, understand, and accept difference.