Idiot

In 1800s and early 1900s law and medicine, idiot was a defined category for profound intellectual disability. Experts ranked idiocy as the most severe grade, with imbecile and feeble-minded naming milder ones.

Courts could appoint someone to manage an idiot's property, and states opened special institutions. New York's Asylum for Idiots was renamed in 1891 the Syracuse State Institution for Feeble-Minded Children. The word later dropped out of official use and is now offensive; read it in records as a classification of its time.