Social Histories of Disability and Deformity

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.

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.