Introduction

Deformed, disabled or otherwise anomalous bodies have been subject to a variety of interpretations and responses throughout history: as omens or prodigies, visitations of sin, freaks and curiosities, as inducing mockery, embarrassment or compassion and as the subjects of disciplining, institutionalisation or charitable provision. How different societies have conceptualised the normal and the pathological, and how these ideas have been used to uphold systems of power and authority and stigmatise deviance, have become key concerns for social historians of medicine and practitioners of body history more generally. Building on Erving Goffman's classic study Stigma (1963) and Michel Foucault's histories of ever more pervasive regimes of surveillance and regulation, historians have begun to uncover the myriad ways in which corporeal signs have been called upon or invented as a tool of citizenship and exclusion or to express and give credibility to social, religious and ethnic differences. ² Relations between sin and disfigurement or physical abnormality in the early modern period have been studied by historians of religion and morality, while a good deal of research has been undertaken into perceptions of ‘monstrous’ births. ³ Historians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have focussed their attention on the development of ‘disability’ as a function of modernity and outlined the processes by which disabled and mentally deficient persons were subjected to institutional care and control. ⁴ While such studies have tended to develop in isolation from each other, the emergence of a dynamic and politically aware ‘new disability history’ in recent years provides a means of drawing together these disparate strands, not just shedding light on the experiences of an oppressed minority, but also exploring disability as a ‘fundamental element in cultural signification’, revealing the complex relationship between the biological and the social worlds. ⁵