History of Disability

In this paper, my aim is to elaborate disability movement praxis so that transnational struggles for justice over the production of impairment emerging from the Global South can be represented within the transnational frame of disability politics. The paper seeks to explore the potential of deepening socio-political understandings of impairment as a means to radically democratize disability movement politics at the transnational scale to encompass pluralist, yet subaltern, collective claims for justice. I am guided by the question: if impairment is the place that makes visible invisible debts, can the global disability rights movement begin a process of re-identification to open the boundaries of disability justice claims and develop a strategic orientation which recognizes those collective justice claims for geopolitically produced impairments?

In the fall of 2002 British police began an investigation into a late term abortion. The foetus was aborted after seven months, well into the third trimester of pregnancy, because it had a cleft lip. Under British law abortion after the six-month mark is illegal. There is an exception to the law, however, in cases where the child would have a ‘serious handicap.’ Although many would agree that a cleft lip, and/or palate, is not a serious handicap under the current system in Britain it is left to individual doctors to decide whether a handicap is serious enough to warrant a late-term abortion. The aforementioned investigation not only ignited heated emotional debate, but also highlighted the lack of public education, and academic discourse on cleft lip and/or palates. The most common facial birth defect Clefts can range in aesthetic severity, and often have a number of associated problems, which can include feeding, hearing, and speech. Although historically having a cleft lip drastically affected a person’s quality of life, current medical technology enables most people affected by clefts to live perfectly ‘normal’ lives. Today, however, the same medical technologies that are helping repair clefts are also causing a new set of medical and ethical issues. Health care costs and increased parental role in medical care, in combination with new early detection technology, have forced parents, doctors and governments to make increasingly difficult decisions. This essay will detail the events of the recent British court case, and highlight the liminal status of cleft lip and palate patients in the proceedings. Specifically, this chapter seeks to elucidate select ethical issues associated with cleft lip and/or palates with the hope of stimulating greater academic discourse, and scholarship on the subject.

Challenging how we think about race and disability "Slavery relied on the ever-present humanity of the enslaved. By suggesting a framework of disability, Hunt-Kennedy presents a conceptual shift that centers the human, while showing how the conditions of slavery undermined the abilities of Africans. Required reading for Caribbean scholars and scholars around the globe interested in slavery."-SASHA TURNER, author of Contested Bodies: Pregnancy, Childrearing, and Slavery in Jamaica

Long before the English became involved in the African slave trade, they imagined Africans as deformed beings. The English drew on pre-existing European ideas about monstrosity and deformity to argue that Africans were a monstrous race, suspended between human and animal, and as such only fit for servitude. Joining blackness to disability transformed English ideas about defective bodies and minds. It also influenced understandings of race and ability even as it shaped the embodied reality of people enslaved in the British Caribbean. Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy provides a three-pronged analysis of disability in the context of Atlantic slavery. First, she examines the connections of enslavement and representations of disability and the parallel development of English anti-black racism. From there, she moves from realms of representation to reality in order to illuminate the physical, emotional, and psychological impairments inflicted by slavery and endured by the enslaved. Finally, she looks at slave law as a system of enforced disablement. Audacious and powerful, Between Fitness and Death is a groundbreaking journey into the entwined histories of racism and ableism.

SUMMARY WRITING THE HISTORY OF FATNESS AND THINNESS IN GRAECO-ROMAN ANTIQUITY Fatness and thinness has been a much underexploited topic in the study of classical Antiquity. After carefully analyzing the Greek and Roman vocabulary to denote the matter, I catalogue information on concrete instances of persons who were considered to have suffered from overweight, or emaciation. On a second level, I deal with popular mentality regarding overweight or thinness. Thirdly, medical and/or philosophical theory regarding weight problems are studied. In this, the moral discourse linking obesity with gluttony or weakness and avarice with underweight will be studied. I will also ask whether changed Christian attitudes towards the body and bodily functions lead to new concepts regarding the matter. For these different levels of questions, I take into account concepts of disability history, asking whether the obviously impairing factors of excess weight or the opposite of it lead to social disfunctionality, hindering people from important social functions and subjecting them to social stigma.

From Winston Black in The Medieval Review 15.06.24...

'In the concluding essay, "The Bright Side of the Knife: Dismemberment in Medieval Europe and the Modern Imagination," Lila Yawn clearly takes the most chances and has the most fun in exploring the topic of medieval wounds and wounding. After a review of graphic and supposedly "medieval" dismemberments in modern movies and literature, such as Monty Python and the Holy Grail, The Lord of the Rings trilogy, C.S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia, or Pulp Fiction, Yawn poses the simple question of "how medieval cutting up living bodies really was" (218). In response, she gives a whirlwind tour of nearly two millennia of images and descriptions of amputation, dismemberment, fragmentation, and mutilation from Cicero to Thomas Jefferson. In so doing she demonstrates, as many medieval apologists have already noted, that there is no greater amount or degree of dismemberment in the Middle Ages than before or after, but what leads moderns to equate "medieval" with "dismemberment" is the medieval tendency to celebrate dismemberment and put severed body parts on display, be they of the criminal or of the saint.'

The Medieval Review 15.06.24
Kirkham, Anne, and Cordelia Warr, eds. Wounds in the Middle Ages. The History of Medicine in Context. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2014. pp. xvi, 254. $124.95 (hardback). ISBN: 9781409465690 (hardback).
Reviewed by: Winston Black, Assumption College. black@assumption.edu
https://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/tmr/article/view/19219/25339

The Legitimate Strangeness. Preliminary Study on Disability and the Right to Being-there The article outlines the historical series of social configurations of disability that emerged in Europe between the end of the 19 th and the beginning of the 21 st century and have imprinted their mark on juridical culture. The reconstructive hypothesis is that for about a century the social question of disability has been articulated around a problem of being; in the course of a calendar little more than a hundred years, which has not yet been exhausted, the possibilities of the existence of disability have been repeatedly questioned. Thus, four configurations of disability are extracted, focusing, in sequence, on being, non-being, the right to be and the right to being-there.

La question que nous nous poserons aujourd'hui est celle des origines du handicap à l'époque médiévale. Les requérants, et leur interlocuteur, la chancellerie pontifi-cale, invoquent autant des explications naturelles, et, dirons-nous, rationnelles, de l'ori-gine d'une infirmité physique, qu'une interprétation fantasmatique divine liée au juge-ment de Dieu sur les hommes. Suite à la découverte des origines de l'infirmité médié-vale, nous nous questionnerons sur les origines cette fois du handicap, donc les consé-quences sociales liées à l'infirmité, entre capacité et représentation. Abstract: This article explores the origins of the notion of disability during the Middle Ages. Letters written to and by the papal chancery offer significant insight into the

A beautifully illustrated argument that reveals how notebooks were extraordinary paper machines that transformed knowledge on the page and in the mind.

Information is often characterized as facts that float effortlessly across time and space.  But before the nineteenth century, information was seen as a process that included a set of skills enacted through media on a daily basis. How, why, and where were these mediated facts and skills learned? Concentrating on the manuscripts created by students in Scotland between 1700 and 1830, Matthew Daniel Eddy argues that notebooks functioned as workshops where notekeepers learned to judge the accuracy, utility and morality of the data they encountered.  He explores how notekeepers transformed information gleaned from the arts and sciences into knowledge and shows that, in an age preoccupied with ‘enlightened’ values, the skills and materials required to make and use notebooks were not simply aids to reason—they were part of reason itself.

Covering a rich selection of material and visual media ranging from hand-stitched bindings to watercolored pictures, the book problematizes John Locke’s comparison of the mind to a blank piece of paper, the tabula rasa. Although one of the most recognizable metaphors of the British Enlightenment, scholars seldom consider why it was so successful for those who used it. Eddy makes a case for using the material culture of early modern manuscripts to expand the meaning of the metaphor in a way that offers a clearer understanding of the direct relationship that existed between thinking and notekeeping. Starting in the home, moving to schools, and then ending with universities, the book explores this argument by reconstructing the relationship between media and the mind from the bottom up. Eddy’s book is early awaited by those drawn to book history, manuscript culture, history of education, history of childhood, Scottish philosophy, and the Enlightenment broadly understood.

This short thought piece focuses on the novel contributions the authors of Lived Nation make to the study of the nation, and to the new history of experience. It discusses the historiographical origins of the new history of experience, especially in its links to the history of emotions, and the boundaries of this exciting new historical approach. It further points to promising innovations as other subfields start to implement this approach, specifically in the history of childhood and youth, and the history of disability.

"From 'defective children' to 'poor incurables'. Disability, child abandonment and assistance in Milan (Italy, 18th century)".
The paper studies the link between disability and child abandonment, and the evolution of welfare policy for foundlings affected with physical, sensory, mental impairments and chronic diseases, at the end of the 18th century, by using archival sources of charities of Milan. In about half of the cases, impaired children were admitted to the foundling Hospital (“Maggiore”) from six to fourteen – some were even older. Sometimes they were alone with no relatives. When some relatives were alive, they did not motivate deliveries to the Hospital with impairment, but with poverty: admission to an institution that would assist their child indefinitely could be – and not only for the impaired ones – an alternative to destitution and begging. The hospital administrators accepted such “old” foundlings as if they were infants, because their ‘incurability’ placed them in the same condition of dependency. The relationship between impaired foundlings and the Milanese administrators, with particular reference to episodes of insubordination, is reconstructed too.

Cet ouvrage reconstitue la genèse et le développement des politiques internationales du handicap au cours du XXe siècle. Il met au jour les premières actions développées au cours de l’entre-deux-guerres par les institutions intergouvernementales (OIT, SDN, OH) en faveur de certaines catégories d’infirmes (mutilés de guerre, accidentés du travail, aveugles), puis l’unification des politiques de réadaptation des « handicapés » sous l’égide de l’ONU après la Seconde Guerre mondiale.

This dissertation will ask whether the Scottish natural fool had a vital relationship with Stewart rulers because of their neurodiversity and will prove they had a vital yet changing dynamic during the period. The unique nature of the Scottish fool will be revealed as each chapter reconstructs the lives of neurodiverse natural fools like Thomas Nornee and La Jardiniere in Scotland then Britain between 1488 and 1649. Following a methodology inspired by figures like Irina Metzler and C.F Goodey, it will acknowledge that disability is not transhistorical but instead defined by its specific time and place, using such work alongside thorough primary research to create a historically sensitive framework for revealing the Scottish fool. The first chapter will thus analyse the contemporary understandings of neurodiversity and folly that allowed these neurodiverse figures to occupy socially acknowledged roles as court fools.

Malcoum Tate was born in the southeastern United States in 1954. No utterances or writing produced by Malcoum exist. Accounts left behind by family members and those people who have written about his life describe Malcoum as Pauline Wilkerson's "best child." His early life could be described as normal, if not exceptional. He got good grades, and his Baltimore schoolteachers described him as one of their "smartest" students. But Pauline knew Malcoum was "diff er ent from" his eight siblings "from the beginning" (Torrey 2008, 9). In 1970, when he was just sixteen years old, Malcoum began receiving messages from God. He dropped out of high school, started drinking alcohol, and "occasionally" smoked marijuana. Although Malcoum seemed harmless, one of his brothers recalled, "I was embarrassed by him because every one knew he was the crazy dude" (10). Malcoum received a psychiatric diagnosis in 1977. 1 For the next eleven years, Malcoum, who lived with his mother, his sister Lothell, and his sister's daughter, N'Zinga, continually cycled between home, jail, community, and psychiatric institutions. Heartache, frustration, and tensions-most of which centered on Malcoum-rose within the family, until on December 18, 1988, Lothell, Malcoum, and their mother drove to a dark and secluded stretch of a South Carolina highway, where Lothell shot her brother thirteen times while their mother waited in the nearby car. Lothell Tate later recalled "between sobs" that when she shot

lent articles underscore the relevance and importance of historical analyses for epistemological questions. Several also raise interesting historiographical issues. While each of the articles is devoted to rather specific questions, the authors have made the implications of their analyses for broader issues readily apparent. Best of all, the articles speak to issues raised by one another (particularly in the first section), making the work as a whole an excellent vehicle for discussion in graduate-level history and philosophy of biology courses.

"Lessons in Queer Voice” looks into the technique of “queer speech” as a cure for stuttering in early twentieth-century speech pathology. This essay provides a brief catalog of miscellaneous queer voices from the time period, as described in singing and speech manuals, as well as in fiction. At a moment when homosexuality was undergoing medicalization, and “queer” was increasingly applied as a pejorative in the realm of sexuality, it turns out that medicine was far from internally consistent: different specialties disagreed about what made a voice queer; within a given specialty, certain impairments were preferable to others, and might even be employed therapeutically; social stigma did not always align with medical discourse.

Το κείμενο εστιάζει στην πρώτη οργάνωση γονέων παιδιών με νοητική υστέρηση στην Ελλάδα, την Πανελλήνια Ένωση Γονέων και Κηδεμόνων Απροσαρμόστων Παίδων, και εξετάζει την πολιτισμική της ταυτότητα, την πολιτική της φυσιογνωμία και τη σχέση της με το κράτος. Υποστηρίζεται ότι στο δεύτερο μισό του 20ού αιώνα τέτοιες οργανώσεις, όχι μόνο στην Ελλάδα αλλά και σε άλλες χώρες της Ευρώπης και της βόρειας Αμερικής, συνέβαλαν στη μετατροπή της νοητικής υστέρησης από ιδιωτικό-οικογενειακό πρόβλημα σε δημόσιο, κοινωνικό και πολιτικό, ζήτημα. Παράλληλα, σκιαγραφούνται δύο όψεις της δημόσιας κοινωνικότητας στη μεταπολεμική Ελλάδα: αφενός, η σύνδεση των σωματειακών εννοιών συνάφειας με εξωσωματειακές πολιτισμικές κατηγορίες, και αφετέρου ο πολιτικός χαρακτήρας των εθελοντικών οργανώσεων, εφόσον αυτές είχαν δημόσια δράση και συμμετείχαν στην υλοποίηση δημόσιων πολιτικών.

Since the 1960s, the PanHellenic Union of Parents and Guardians of Unadjusted Children provided a framework for parents of children with mental retardation to search for and demand solutions to their problems. This chapter examines the cultural identity of the specific association, its political physiognomy and its relationship to the state. It argues that such associations, not just in Greece, but also in other countries of Europe and North America, contributed to the transformation of mental retardation from a private-family problem to a public, social and political, issue in the second part of the twentieth century. Moreover, the chapter highlights two aspects of public sociality produced in the Union: on the one hand, the link between associational concepts of affinity with extra-associational categories; on the other hand, the political character of the associational activity, as the latter unfolded in the public sphere and contributed to the materialisation of public policies.

Dorothy Page O.B.E. edited, for more than 25 years (from the 1960s, throughout the 1980s), a magazine from her home while in an iron lung; "Responaut" which had the tag, "by for and about respiratory aided and other gadget aided people". She wrote under the pen name of Ann Armstrong. In addition to editing the magazine she successfully brought up a family. Her husband remained loyal to her.

The magazine featured many progressive disabled people of the time including Megan Du Boisson (founder of DIG, the Disabled Income Group), Paul Hunt (one of the founders of UPIAS, the Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation) and Geoffrey Webb.

This essay fits in the tradition of writing fictional life stories according to the bioarchaeology of personhood model, with much attention for objects, care and anthropological comparison. As a starting point, it takes recent excavations at Ostia and environs. Ever since the nineteenth century, both writers and historians have tried to come closer to the voices of the past by writing faction. This is, however, the first attempt to bring disabled persons from the Roman period to life. The essay tries to do do justice to the multifaceted experiences of disabled people, who were never categorized as such in the ancient world.

Addiction Madness was thought out very well and will discuss about how the Western world has become a disability nation, why is x-raying so important especially pregnant women, will discuss what degenerative disease is, how I got myself of of disability, why it is important to know your blood type and factor, the courage of Dr. Alice Stewart who studied and her findings that x-ray radiation exposure can be passed on an unborn fetus causing the baby to be born with an autoimmune disease, when is exposure to radiation to much, will speak briefly upon the dawn of the x-rays or as I call in my paper x-beams, the history DES, will discuss my findings upon prescribed pain medication and abuse of them in the United States and other findings which will follow in the table of contents.

There are still many unanswered questions which may be answered by further research which I will be doing at a later date and writing books upon my findings and how I got myself off of prescribed medications and am now using God's healing foods along with alkaline pH water which Alkaline water helps balance the body's pH, which tends to be acidic because of our high acid food diet, stress and exposure to environmental toxins such as smog. Alkalize your body pH from acidic to alkaline pH, because cancer and many other illnesses cannot live in alkaline environments.

Also my findings are showing that our environment has a lot to do with what happens to our bodies and have research Dr. Alice Stewart and according to Gayle Greene (author) in 1943 who wrote: "The Woman Who Knew Too Much: Alice Stewart and the secrets of radiation" review by Choice Review, "Claiming radiation to be unsafe any dose."  Dr. Stewart's findings found exposure to low-level dose radiation was more serious than most scientists will admit.

The conception of sign language interpreters as communication professionals was formed in the 1960s, but there is no complete, authoritative treatment of the role which was formed centuries earlier. The common law is an ideal seat of inquiry for a study, as both the best-documented venue, and the birthplace of protocols that were ultimately applied throughout generalist interpreting practice. Through qualitative survey of foundational texts from Deaf studies and interpreting praxis, with legal commentary and newspaper accounts, this research lays out the first pedigree of sign language interpreting based in Anglo–American courts. Where possible, the problem of perpetually-recycled secondary material is resolved with greater attention to primary and contemporaneous citations. From the medieval practice of assigning curators for the management of property and tutors for the personal caretaking of deaf wards, through the first published description in the early modern period, the role of interpreter matured over the centuries as an intermediary who communicates effectively with a signing deaf party to enact their legal agency. The study is necessarily bounded by 1880, when deaf education policy attempted to ban the use of signs, thereby conflating interpreting issues with pedagogical battles. Symbolic interactionism, intercultural and communication accommodation theories unite with literature from Deaf studies, signed language interpreting, and disability legal history, to construct a novel approach to the main research questions:

1) What was the path for interpreters prior to organized institutions for deaf people?

2) How did legal developments create the role of sign language interpreter?

APA Citation:

Leahy, A. M. (2015). Interpreted Communication with Deaf Parties under Anglo–American Common Law to 1880. (Unpublished master's thesis). Southern Utah University, Cedar City, UT.

El trabajo presenta una analítica histórico-pedagógica sobre los modos en que la pedagogía delos niños anormales de principios del siglo xx produjo discontinuidades con los discursos, lasprácticas, las instituciones y las técnicas del destierro, el encierro, la expulsión y el aislamientoque se dirigieron sobre los inválidos, los menesterosos y los desgraciados desde el siglo xix enColombia, específicamente, en Bogotá y Antioquia.

There has been a growing debate within the broad field of postcolonial scholarship which seeks to challenge both its territorial boundaries with the advent of globalization and its limitations when applied to the realm of white-settler societies. The debate has been extremely fruitful in situating emerging scholarship that seeks to extend postcoloniality, its theoretical framing, and the internal processes of social categorization for peoples caught within the nation-state's territorial sphere. Unfortunately, disability and indigeneity remain largely absent from these fresh debates; or when included, are explored as singular fields of analytical inquiry with little intersectional dialogue. With this paper, I aim to extend these nascent debates by critically engaging with both disability and indigeneity as two interlocking sites of (post)colonial nation-state power. To explicate this argument, my analysis focuses on a key historical moment in the Australian experience – the formation of the colonial white-settler society of Australia in its early years (1901–1920s), comparing and contrasting the systems of administrative management of disability and indigeneity. In doing so, the paper reveals the deep materialities of white, able-bodied, masculine, (post)colonial settler rule that bring together disability and indigeneity via gender reproductive controls. The conclusion reflects on the transformative effects of managing transgressive bodies and minds under the white able-bodied settler state and the potential this opens to negotiate practices of solidarity.

My primary interest in this article is to reveal the complexity of neoliberal temporalities on the lives of disabled people forced to participate in workfare regimes to maintain access to social security measures and programming. Through drawing upon some of the contemporary debates arising within the social study of time, this article explicates what Jessop refers to as the sovereignty of time that has emerged with the global adoption of neoliberal workfare regimes. It is argued that the central role of temporality within the globalizing project of neoliberal workfare and the positioning of disability within these global macro-structural processes requires the sociological imagination to return to both time as a theme and time as a methodology.

This article is a study of the memoirs of three Canadian ex-servicemen who were blinded during the First and Second World Wars. It inquires autobiographical accounts as a source to understand disability both at an individual and a social level. I argue that autobiographies, as they reflect the individual experience of disability, also reveal concepts and prejudices concerning disability that are inherent to a society at a specific time. The authors hence can either challenge or confirm persistent ideas about disability. This paper is organized in three parts. In the first I present the autobiographies this study is based on, and summarize their main features. In the second I focus on the way blindness impacts individual’s identity. I shall argue that the loss of sight is experienced as life-changing event, a death-rebirth process that deeply affects the veterans as well as their entourage. Blindness enhance hence a process of re-definition of the self which encompasses, on the one hand, blind individuals’ perception of their own ‘exceptionality’ and, on the other, their desire for normality and social integration. In the last section I analyze how the three writers address Canadian society in order to challenge the existing ideas and prejudices about the blind. I argue that they deliberately choose to use autobiographical narratives as a device to point out and challenge common preconceptions about blindness.

And here another review of mine -- a rare case in which I considered it important to dedicate ten full pages to the review of one monograph. As in a research paper, I hope to offer some stimulating new thoughts on the relation between disabilities and monotheism, and on disabilities in the long term of western history. Also, I take the opportunity of recommending this exceptional electronic review, the collaboration with which I enjoyed a lot:

Resumen Durante las primeras décadas del franquismo la mayoría de las personas con discapacidad intelectual vivían ocultas en sus casas o recluidas en instituciones psiquiátricas. Las medidas aprobadas entonces por el régimen para hacer frente a los problemas asociados a la discapacidad no sirvieron para modificar esta situación de invisibilidad y exclusión. Fue en los sesenta cuando surgió un movimiento, encabezado por asociaciones de padres de afectados, que demandaba el reconocimiento de unos derechos sociales para estas personas y la puesta en marcha de políticas que los hicieran efectivos. En este trabajo analizamos la configuración de este movimiento asociativo, el efecto de su discurso en las políticas del tardofranquismo y su contribución a la integración social de estas personas.

This short thought piece focuses on the novel contributions the authors of Lived Nation make to the study of the nation, and to the new history of experience. It discusses the historiographical origins of the new history of experience, especially in its links to the history of emotions, and the boundaries of this exciting new historical approach. It further points to promising innovations as other subfields start to implement this approach, specifically in the history of childhood and youth, and the history of disability.

The medieval horse often existed in a liminal state between health and illness, defined by its (in)ability to work. The tradition of horse-care treatises stemming from the Jordanus Ruffus (d. 1256), knight-farrier to Emperor Frederick II, were particularly concerned with the occupational health of horses. However, fitness to work was not just a question of unimpaired physical ability. A low status, farm or industrial horse was defined by its strength, stamina, and unimpaired physical ability. Whereas, the occupational health of a high status, perhaps noble, horse might also be assessed according to its behaviour, appearance, and freedom from physical deformity.

My paper will show how horse-care treatises and health narratives used beauty and ugliness; submissive behaviour and rebellion alongside physical ability and impairment to assess a horse’s value and occupational health.