ABSTRACT
The exhibition of the physical Other–in its broadest sense–has a long tradition. Due to a new understanding of leisure, venues like the dime museum, amusement parks, circuses and vaudeville bloomed–and the so-called freak show was at the heart of them all. Perhaps because of their individual talents that were so essential to the freak shows, the performers have been at the centre of popular and academic discussions of this particular form of entertainment. The freak show is a medium located between Performance Studies and Disability Studies, which, in this particular case, presents disability to audiences as a "scientific" oddity that amalgamates elements of human anatomy with exotic curiosities from history, geography, anthropology, archaeology, and sociology. In the nineteenth century, scientific practice began to rely heavily on comparison, a quantitative approach that was based on collected data. The definition of physical difference was at the heart of both anthropology and medicine.
