1st Edition
Social Histories of Disability and Deformity Bodies, Images and Experiences
Collecting together essays written by an international set of contributors, this book provides an important contribution to the emerging field of disability history. It explores changes in understandings of deformity and disability between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries, and reveal the ways in which different societies have conceptualised the normal and the pathological.
Through a variety of case studies including: early modern birth defects, homosexuality, smallpox scarring, vaccination, orthopaedics, deaf education, eugenics, mental deficiency, and the experiences of psychologically scarred military veterans, this book provides new perspectives on the history of physical, sensory and intellectual anomaly.
Examining changes over five centuries, it charts how disability was delineated from other forms of deformity and disfigurement by a clearer medical perspective. Essays shed light on the experiences of oppressed minorities often hidden from mainstream history, but also demonstrate the importance of discourses of disability and deformity as key cultural signifiers which disclose broader systems of power and authority, citizenship and exclusion.
The diverse nature of the material in this book will make it relevant to scholars interested in cultural, literary, social and political, as well as medical, history.
Contents
List of Figures
Preface
Notes on Contributors
Introduction: Approaching Anomalous Bodies
David M. Turner
Part One: Discipline and Deformity: The Medical and Moral World of Monstrosity
1. Representing Physical Difference: the Materiality of the Monstrous
Kevin Stagg
2. ‘When a disease it selfe doth Cromwel it’: The Rhetoric of Smallpox at the Restoration
David E. Shuttleton
3. Plague Spots
Hal Gladfelder
4. ‘Wonderful Effects!!!’ Graphic Satires of Vaccination in the first decade of the Nineteenth Century
Suzanne Nunn
Part Two: Controlling Disabled Bodies: Medicine, Politics and Policy
5. Disciplining Disabled Bodies: The Development of Orthopaedic Medicine in Britain, c.1800-1939
Anne Borsay
6. Making Deaf Children Talk: Changes in Educational Policy towards the Deaf in the French Third Republic
François Buton
7. Eugenics, Modernity and Nationalism
Ayça Alemdaroglu
8. ‘Human dregs at the bottom of our national vats’: The Inter-War Debate on Sterilization of the Mentally Deficient
Sharon Morris
9. ‘That bastard’s following me!’ Mentally ill Australian Veterans Struggling to Maintain Control
Kristy Muir
10. Afterword: Regulated Bodies: Disability Studies and the Controlling Professions
Sharon Snyder and David Mitchell
Biography
David M. Turner is Senior Lecturer in History at Swansea University. He formerly taught at the University of Glamorgan where he was director of the ‘Controlling Bodies: the Regulation of Conduct 1650–2000’ project. He has published widely on the social and cultural history of early modern Britain, including the monograph Fashioning Adultery: Gender, Sex and Civility in England 1660–1740 (Cambridge University Press, 2002). His current research focuses on the idea of the ‘body beautiful’ in the eighteenth century and connections between disability and criminality in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Kevin Stagg lectures in History at Cardiff University and recently contributed a Chapter on the body for Garthine Walker (ed.), Writing Early Modern History (Hodder Arnold, 2005). His research interests range from the body and disability in history to early modern print culture, transport and trade.
