Disability and History (review)

Recent years have seen the cross-disciplinary field of disability studies emerge as a major force in scholarship. It has come to influence nearly every major discipline and subdiscipline in the humanities and social sciences, promoting dialogue not only among scholars in these areas but also between them and the wider disability community. It has also helped to establish linkages between humanities/social science scholars and allied-health professionals who engage the social model of disability, which the editors of this volume define as "the vast web of social, political, economic, medical, and legal forces that create material and virtual barriers for individuals with physical or cognitive impairments" (p. 4). If there is any question about the forthcoming, if not already current, dominance of disability in historical inquiry—indeed, a dominance equal to those of the "traditional" categories of race, class, and gender—one need only consider this important collection alongside other recent "special issues" on disability published by Perspectives, The Public Historian, and Social History of Medicine, as well as the recently published collection Social Histories of Disability and Deformity, edited by David M. Turner and Kevin Stagg.¹

This collection complements those projects, but stands well apart from them due to its impressive regional scope, its disciplinary reach beyond the field of history, and its applicability to teaching and to the practice of public history. The introduction, offered by editors Teresa Meade and David Serlin, distills key definitions and arguments—particularly those relating to the medical and social models of disability—and contextualizes clearly the large and diverse collection of essays that follows. Twenty pieces in all variously retrieve from texts, images, and artifacts constantly shifting and socially constructed concepts of disability in a variety of places and periods, including colonial Botswana, interwar Northern Ireland, Weimar Germany, and early twentieth-century America. Outstanding contributions include Paul K. Longmore and Paul Steven Miller's study of the U.S. radical Randolph Bourne and his relationship to disability during the Progressive Era; Susan Burch and Ian Sutherland's examination of American disability history relative to American social, cultural, and political history; Katherine Sherwood's observations on teaching art and medicine within a disability studies framework; and Serlin's interview of Katherine Ott, a curator and historian at the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, which focuses on public understandings of disability, the politics of public memory related to disability, and the vital ways in which the full range of cultural media inform definitions and narratives of disability and the experiences of disabled people.

At the conclusion of their introduction, the editors correctly recognize a "paucity of non-Western and cross-cultural perspectives" in the volume. Nonetheless, their very vision of this collection goes far to set the trajectory for future scholarship beyond the stated boundaries, and especially in connection with material culture and visual culture. Historians have only begun to recover the experience of disability—indeed, to write disabled individuals into history, teach this history, and make this history public both physically (through "traditional" museum exhibitions) and virtually (through "new" exhibition methods made possible through the Internet and related information technology). This collection is an important contribution to this process. It is one that historians of medicine, and especially practitioners of medicine who are engaged in the field of history, would do well to examine critically and employ in their own efforts to recover disability through research, teaching, and service.