Victorians and Disabilities
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This is really interesting. Just a quick excerpt of a pretty lengthy discussion:
According to “Nineteenth-Century Disability,” the Victorian era laid the groundwork for a belief system still operating today known as the “medical model of disability,” which “sees disability as a personal tragedy that needs to be fixed or overcome through medical intervention.” Seeing disability through a tragic lens, however, sparked interest in the experiences of people with disabilities and made them more visible in the 1800s.
“The 19th century was the first to portray disability as the cause of individual suffering, and many disabled persons expressed their lived experiences in writing or art,” says Jaipreet Virdi-Dhesi, a researcher who contributes to “Nineteenth-Century Disability,” in an interview via email. “Harriet Martineau (1802-1876) was deaf since childhood and an invalid for a few years; she shared her experiences in several essays, including her ‘Letter for the Deaf,’ in which she suggests conquering the ‘struggle’ over the constraints of deafness required first acknowledging the limitations of a deaf person’s social surrounding. British missionary John Kitto (1804-1852), deaf since age 12, was self-educated and wrote several books on religion and his travel experiences. American painter William Dunlap (1776-1839) painted a series of self-portraits depicting the permanent blindness in his right eye.”
As people with disabilities started telling their stories in the public arena, they also were photographed in ways that suggests their disabilities were crucial to their identity, explains Virdi-Dhesi, who has a doctorate in the history of science from the University of Toronto.
“Disabled persons were captured in photographs with the objects of their disability clearly presented,” she says. “Scottish geologist James Hutton (1726-1797) is depicted in a mezzotint holding an ear trumpet to his ear. A black-and-white photograph of Elizabeth Margaretta Maria Gilbert (1826-1885), the founder of the Association for Promoting the General Welfare of the Blind, shows her wearing a cape and shaded glasses. And amateur painter William Agnew (1846-1941), who was born deaf and mute, painted several scenes illustrating Queen Victoria conversing in sign language with a subject. These examples push forth the notion that disability in the 19th century was not always perceived negatively, to be hidden, or as though disabled persons were living in misery.”
Ear trumpets were among the myriad inventions that came out of the persistent belief that, even with the help of political or social institutions, it was the disabled individual’s responsibility to strive to become more “normal.”
And in case you think this is just the distant past:
“The Americans with Disabilities Act is an enormous improvement for people with disabilities,” Bourrier says. “And medical technology has done a lot to improve the lives of people with disabilities in the 20th and 21st centuries. But I also think that in some ways, because the Victorians lived with so much disability, they might have had a more fluid and compassionate understanding of it. Today, if we’re able-bodied, we tend to think of disability as something that will never happen to us. But the truth is we’re all, scarily enough, one car accident away from becoming disabled. Victorians might have had a better understanding of the fragility of the body.”
Today, as it was then, money determines whether, say, a double amputee ends up using a skateboard to beg on the street or has access to the most advanced motorized wheelchairs or prosthetics. And we still celebrate narratives of overcoming and compensation—think of any sports drama like “The Karate Kid,” in which the title character goes on to win the karate tournament in spite of a seriously injuring his foot. Politicians that promote the idea of “pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps” are eager to cut public funding for disability checks and health care, because any challenge can be overcome with a can-do spirit, right? According to compensation stories like “Daredevil,” you might even have special powers that give you an advantage.
“We still have the overcoming and compensation narratives today, and they aren’t very helpful,” Bourrier says. “The more you look at the Victorian era in the present day, the more you see the way we regard people with disabilities today is not that different. What’s so interesting about the Americans with Disabilities Act is that it gives disability rights to people who have all sorts of conditions—like morbid obesity, clinical depression, ulcerative colitis, work injuries, or heart disease—that we wouldn’t necessarily traditionally see as a disability. It’s anything that impairs your day-to-day life. Most people eventually have a condition like that.”