The Mongol in our Midst

The Mongol in Our Midst: A Study of Man and His Three Faces is a pseudo-scientific book by the British physician F. G. Crookshank which was popular in the 1920s and 1930s. Consonant with the scientific racism prevalent in its time, this work advanced the now-discredited idea that so-called "Mongolian imbecility" (a form of mental retardation now known as Down syndrome), was an atavistic throwback to, and/or the result of rape in the wake of invasions of Europe by, members of supposedly more primitive Mongoloid race, such as the Huns, Avars or the Mongols themselves, and by way of Ashkenazic Jews claimed to have interbred with the steppe tribe of the Khazars. Finding success with a popular audience, The Mongol in Our Midst was expanded from its 123-page first edition in 1924 to over 500 pages by its third edition in 1931. The third edition included responses to critics and expanded anthropological and clinical material, speculations and arguments.

In The Mongol in Our Midst, Crookshank argued that "Mongolian imbecility," thought at the time to affect whites only, was the result of the distant racial history of the patient's Caucasian parents, each of whom must also carry Mongol traits. That Caucasians bore this racial history was either the result of those individuals sharing a common Mongoloid ancestor, or of all Caucasians having distant Mongoloid ancestry. "Mongolian imbeciles," then, were atavistic throwbacks to that Mongoloid heritage, the modern emergence of which Crookshank believed was due to their incomplete development in the womb. As a consequence, Crookshank deemed "Mongolian imbeciles . . . a race apart. For better or for worse, they are not quite as are other men and women around them." Crookshank considered his English patients "Mongol expatriates."

In support of his thesis, Crookshank relied on physical traits and behaviors he dubbed the "Mongolian stigmata," among which he included small earlobes, protruding anuses, and small genitals in both sexes, traits he deemed common to both "Mongolian imbeciles" and members of what he termed the Mongoloid race, which included Chinese and Japanese, as well as Mongols. The Mongol in Our Midst cited the cross-legged sitting posture of some "Mongolian imbeciles" as further evidence of his thesis, since the Buddha is often depicted in statues sitting cross-legged.

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