My Auntie Fiona (in the picture above) has Down’s Syndrome and will be celebrating her 60th birthday this year, but when she was born in 1954 her life expectancy was only 20, having a baby with Downs was seen as a tragedy for the family and many people growing up with Downs were institutionalised. My grandparents’ attitude was very different, and enlightened for the time. They integrated her completely into their family and social life and she grew up much loved by all of their friends as well as all of her family. That’s why I was fascinated to read Downs: the history of a disability by David Wright, to see just how unusual this was at the time.

This is such a readable, interesting and engaging book. It is indeed a history of the disease and chapters on Downs in the late 1800s were fascinating, as were the photos John Langdon Down took of his patients of the time. It follows attitudes to learning difficulties in general, and people with Downs in particular, from then until the present day, including chapters on the dark periods of the mid twentieth century where compulsory sterilisation was common in many countries (which shockingly went on until the 1970s in some) and of course the appalling Nazi experiments and killing of people with Downs in the 1930s and 1940s.

It goes on to deal sensitively with the closing down of large institutions in the 1980s, which was a shock to some families. My own experience was my grandparents being quite fearful about Fiona moving from the excellent, loving and fully integrated into the community large home she had chosen to live in, to a small house in the community, which thankfully turned out to a be a very successful move.

Finally it deals with the difficult decisions couples now make on whether to have a termination after amniocentesis shows that the baby they are carrying will have Downs.

This is a really thoughtfully written book and one which makes me proud of my grandparents and the way they brought Fiona up in the 1950s, and extremely glad that so much has changed for the better for people with Downs in the period since. And an early Happy 60th birthday to my Auntie Fiona!