A History of Disability in Nineteenth-Century Scotland (review)

This book is a comprehensive study of all forms of damaged or impaired people in Scotland during the most momentous transformations of the industrial revolution and urbanization. It is emphatically not a study of the “disabled”: that category was not deployed in a wholesale way, and the greatly differing groups coming to public notice did not see themselves as part of a larger whole. Diversity is the great theme of the study, and Iain Hutchison thoroughly explores and illustrates the way in which there was neither a single group of disabled people nor a uniform response from the community or, above all, the welfare authorities. People with physical or mental difficulties emerge in the record in the nineteenth, as in earlier centuries, partly because being “disabled” signified inability to work, producing dependency on family, community, or poor law. In the worst circumstances, the burgeoning array of institutions would take these people in, usually for short periods, but in rare instances for the rest of their lives.

Although some of the reactions of the poor law officials, mistrusting the accounts of distress and accusing the families of exploiting the disability of one of their members, seem almost preindustrial, there were new developments in the nineteenth century, such as legislation stipulating that families had five years to establish a right to both settlement and relief (p. 38). Tolerance for troublesome individuals in smaller communities—such as “Daft Archie” of Dunfermline, whose picture is on the book’s cover, showing children making fun of him—is also reminiscent of earlier times (pp. 108–9). Hutchison demonstrates that although they were the characteristic feature of the nineteenth century, large institutions were unevenly developed and, moreover, used for different purposes. Institutes for the deaf or blind developed a distinctive policy of training for work, their whole regime devoted to their inmates’ economic self-sufficiency. Other institutions, such as those dealing with mental disabilities, seem less “modern”; despite changes in treatment, reports suggest that “restraint” remained a permanent feature (p. 214). The physically injured fell somewhere between these groups, with little followup after initial hospitalization or other medical treatment had returned them to society. The industrial revolution manufactured both physical injuries and the unemployabilility of the injured. Moreover, some regions of Scotland, such as the Orkney Islands, never developed their own institutions: the authorities there chose to spend the money instead on sending their problematic cases on the long trip (possibly by sea) to Edinburgh (p. 144). This provoked more starkly than in most cases the breakdown of inmates’ contacts with their families, something that was aggravated everywhere in Scotland by large-scale internal migration and emigration to the colonies. The strains on the family are the subject of a fine chapter (ch. 7). Yet families could make arrangements themselves, using private “asylums” such as Mrs. Young’s in Mussleburgh, where fewer than a dozen inmates, most of them women, lived more like guests than patients (pp. 227–28).

The picture that emerges is therefore far from simple or consistent and is reflected in many literary and journalistic accounts that mixed nostalgia for preindustrial village communities where the disabled could be integrated with scandalized newspaper revelations of urban neglect and abuse by officials and institutions. Hutchison’s useful study establishes that the authorities and the professionals certainly embraced Foucault’s new technologies of control but that they did so under varied circumstances in a society that was still largely rural and in which there was no unconditional acceptance of a public duty of assistance or care. It was almost as though there were too many “others” for a single system to arise.