Category Archives: Disability History Month

Disability History Month Snapshots: Fitting and Misfitting

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In the third of our posts for Disability History Month, Lena Ferriday writes about the novelist Dinah Craik.

In 1881, at the age of fifty-five and six years before her death, novelist Dinah Craik took a sixteen-day excursion around the Cornish coastline. Craik’s reflections on this experience, recorded in a published travel journal, bring to attention a range of narratives regarding differently abled bodies which converged at the nineteenth-century coast, which became seen as a space which emphasised a linear pathway from illness to health, which differently abled bodies did not conform to. This post highlights the way in which discourses of different abilities have historically relied on the fit, or misfit, between body and environment.

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Reflections on Disability History Month

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This Disability History Month, writes Dr. Andy Flack,we would do well to remember that the past is not always a foreign country.

Injustice, exploitation, and pain are happening today, and they can be stopped.  Indeed, Disability History Month (November-December), like the International Day of People with Disabilities (3 December) is a present danger to people living with disabilities.

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Disability History Month Snapshots: Sister Elizabeth Kenny

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In the second of our Disability History Month Snapshots, Dr. Stephen Mawdsley discusses Sister Elizabeth Kenny and the Transformation of Paralytic Polio Treatment in 1940s America.

Australian nurse Sister Elizabeth Kenny reformed polio treatment in America. Poliomyelitis (polio) is caused by a contagious viral disease that attacks the motor neurons of the spinal cord, which can lead to paralysis of the limbs and respiratory muscles and, in some cases, death. Until a safe and effective vaccine was licensed in 1955, many Americans lived in fear of recurring epidemics. Before the 1940s, most medical treatments for paralytic polio were rudimentary and based on limb immobilization and surgery. Such methods were expensive, painful, and often provided limited effectiveness. Continue reading →

Disability History Month Snapshots

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In the first of our snapshot posts for Disability History Month 2021, Dr. Andy Flack discusses the life of Julia Pastrana.

Julia Pastrana, a First Nations Mexican woman, was born in 1834. She died only twenty-five years later, having lived with a genetic condition known as hypertrichosis terminalis and which, in conjunction with other medical conditions, manifested as a series of physical characteristics – including the hyper production of hair and the swelling of lips and gums – which thoroughly inscribed her body with a gendered, racialized, and speciesist Otherness. This triad of perceptual lenses intersected in transformative ways. In popular discourse, Pastrana was thoroughly ‘freaked’, becoming known as the ‘Bear Woman’, the ‘Ape Woman’, or simply the ‘Nondescript’, and displayed across Europe and North America in the ultimate theatre of stigmatic staring: Even in afterlife, her body was embalmed, ‘freakish’ deviance captured to satiate the probing curiosities of mid-nineteenth-century scientific communities.

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