How were people with Down Syndrome treated in the Middle Ages?

Inresite

Does down syndrome existing during middle age? If so, how were people with Down Syndrome treated in the Middle Ages?

[deleted]

Inresite In Sweden they would be in danger of being diagnosed as a Bortbyting, a replaced person. The concept was based on the fact that people believed in trolls. Trolls was considered a kind of anti humans. They are ugly, greedy, stupid and everything else we do not want to be.

People really believed in trolls. There is even a case when a man was sentenced to death for having sex with a female troll. He confessed and was executed.

Trolls, being in all aspects inferior to humans, were of course jealous on humans for their beautiful children. Occasionally trolls used their abilities to do magic, a magician is still called an artist of trolling because trolla means doing magic, to enter a human house to exchange their troll children for a human child.

Luigi Bros Italiano

Inresite If you believed that a child was a Bortbyting, maybe because it suffered from Down’s syndrome, there was to ways to manage the situation:

Call the church bells. Call them non stop day and night. While humans rejoice over the sound of church bells trolls hate the sound. If the trolls figure out why the bells are ringing they might return the human child and take back their own. Unfortunately trolls are very stupid. They may not understand what is going on
If you cause some pain to your Bortbyting so that it screams the troll parents might by touch by compassion and take their child back and return your child. The problem is just that trolls are not well known for compassion.
Anyway: You could always try. No one have died from sitting on burning coal for an hour or two. People with Down Syndrom were likely to have at least some marks from burning coal.