ABSTRACT
This chapter illuminates some key moments in the history of disability. It offers little more than a series of snapshots or moments in the history of disability, highlighting varying responses to impairment around the world at different times, together with some portraits of individual disabled people. Yet from the disability perspective, the way of life in pre-industrial, pre-capitalist times might have been more inclusive, for those who survived illness or injury. In agrarian societies, whether in medieval Europe or in rural parts of Africa or Asia today, disabled people experience a similar level of poverty or hardship as everyone else. Historian Anne Borsay concludes that the rights of disabled people were a low priority within the agenda for rebuilding post-war Britain. After the end of formal euthanasia, a phase of so-called 'wild euthanasia' took over, where disabled people, elderly people and 'antisocial elements' were killed in a less systematic way.
