Social Histories of Disability and Deformity (review)

This edited collection—an outcome of the conference Controlling Bodies: The Regulation of Conduct 1650-2000 held in June 2000 at the University of Glamorgan—stands among several influential projects of the past several years that have combined to make disability central to historical inquiry, indeed as dominant as the traditional categories of race, class, and gender.¹ As David M. Turner explains in his introduction, the contributions to this book position themselves at the intersection of three historiographical developments: (1) inquiry by social historians of medicine and by practitioners of body history into "how societies have conceptualized the normal and the pathological, and how these ideas have been used to uphold systems of power and authority and to stigmatize deviance"; (2) explorations, on one hand, by historians of early modern religion and morality into "relations between sin and disfigurement or physical abnormality," and, on the other, by historians of the modern period, who have "focused their attention on the development of 'disability' as a function of modernity and outlined the processes by which disabled and mentally deficient persons were subjected to institutional care and control"; and (3) the emergence of the "dynamic and politically aware 'new disability history,'" which has gone far to reveal "the experiences of an oppressed minority" and "the complex relationship between the biological and the social worlds" (quotes on p. 1).

The uniqueness of this collection stems not only from its variety of case studies, which, in two parts, "explore patterns of continuity and change" and combine to articulate "an agenda for future research in this vibrant area of scholarship" (pp. 1-2), but also from Turner's introductory synthesis and a provocative after-word by Sharon Snyder and David Mitchell. In Part 1, "Discipline and Deformity: The Medical and Moral World of Monstrosity," Kevin Stagg, David E. Shuttleton, Hal Gladfelder, and Suzanne Nunn "[examine] the social, cultural and political context in which deformed and disabled bodies were understood between the sixteenth and the early twentieth centuries" (p. 9). Among the subjects explored are early modern birth abnormalities, smallpox scarring and vaccination, and physical aberrations associated with homosexuality. Outstanding here is the essay by Nunn, who draws on the historiography of visual culture to frame a skillful interpretation of early-nineteenth-century graphic satires of vaccination.

In Part 2, "Controlling Disabled Bodies: Medicine, Politics, and Policy," Ann Borsay, François Buton, Ayça Alemdaro.gu, Sharon Morris, and Kirsty Muir "reexamine the cultural, medical and institutional factors that delineated disability in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, [as well as] discuss shifting approaches to the 'problem' of disability in the modern era and compare policies towards, and perceptions of, physical and mental impairment" (p. 11). Subjects explored here include orthopedics, education of the deaf, eugenics, and experiences of psychologically damaged military veterans. The essays by Borsay and Muir deserve a spotlight for their respective contributions to the history of disabled veterans. Cultural and social historians of military medicine will find much value in Borsay's dynamic focus on a "social brand of orthopaedics," one "quite distinct from its medical or surgical counterparts" (p. 97), and in Muir's engaging use of clinical evidence and oral testimonies in uncovering the personal experiences of Australian veterans.

In charting the complex trajectory of disability studies and articulating how its scholarship affords a "unique and divergent vantage point from the paradigms that sustain traditional study, management, and intervention" (p. 181), Snyder and Mitchell's afterword rightly underscores concern that "while the presence of anomalous bodies in many historical and cultural contexts has been recognized, scholarly analyses have tended to reduce these bodies to metaphors for other categories of difference such as race, class, gender and sexuality" (p. 12). A priority for future research, therefore, is very much in line with the approach adopted by Muir in her contribution to this volume...