Countway's Center for the History of Medicine
invites you to attend the final lecture of the Spring 2025
Colloquium on the History of Psychiatry and Medicine

with Amy S.F. Lutz, Ph.D., Senior Lecturer, History and Sociology of Science Department, University of Pennsylvania

In her book, Chasing The Intact Mind: How the Severely Autistic and Intellectually Disabled Were Excluded from the Debates That Affect Them Most (Oxford University Press, 2023), Amy S.F. Lutz traces the history of the intact mind concept, providing a historical analysis and describing how the concept has come to inform current debates at the heart of intellectual and developmental disability practice and policy in the United States, including battles over sheltered workshops, legal guardianship, and facilitated communication. In this talk, Lutz argues that marginalizing those with severe disability reproduces historic patterns of discrimination that yoked human worth to intelligence, and that it is only by making space for the impaired mind that we can resolve these ongoing clashes--as well as even larger questions of personhood, dependency, and care.

Amy S. F. Lutz, Ph.D., is a historian of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. She has written about severe autism for many platforms, including The Atlantic, Slate, Spectrum, and Psychology Today, as well as in books: We Walk: Life with Severe Autism and Each Day I Like It Better: Autism, ECT, and the Treatment of Our Most Impaired Children. She is vice president of the National Council on Severe Autism and lives outside Philadelphia

1:00 P.M.—2:30 P.M. Eastern U.S. time
This is an online event. No RSVP required.
Please use the following Zoom link:
https://harvard.zoom.us/j/94337617055?pwd=M0pqNEFZQXVzRXluQ0llalVBRjB0UT09
Passcode: 471501 Meeting ID 943 3761 7055

For more information, contact David G. Satin, MD, Colloquium Director

Co-sponsored by the Department of Postgraduate and Continuing Education, McLean Hospital, and the Center for the History of Medicine, Countway Library, Harvard Longwood Campus