Representing physical difference

The seventeenth century physician John Bulwer published four works that explored the body including Philocophus; or the Deafe and Dumbe Mans Friend (1648) and Anthropometamorphosis: man transfor’d (1650). ¹ With the former work, Bulwer became ‘probably the first British person to write emphatically about deafness and sign language in any depth’, a feat that established him as a founding father of British sign language. ² With the latter he presented a survey of ethnic monstrosity based on bodily modification and adornment. Anthropometamorphosis, a ‘strange grab bag of ethnographic shudders’, offered a sustained critique of cultural artifice equating fashion and foreignness with the monstrous body. ³ Whilst the xenophobia and misogyny evident in the 1650 work were common currency for the period, to modern sensibilities it fits uneasily with an enlightened and progressive concern for the deaf. This incongruity is reflected in academic studies relating to Bulwer and in turn highlights the uneasy juxtaposition of contemporary academic discourses regarding the body. The work and interests of Bulwer would suggest that academic studies of disability and of monstrosity potentially have something in common, that their respective interests could be expected to coincide and overlap. In actuality a divergence is apparent that reflects the discipline of body history. In relation to Bulwer, studies have been divided between those focusing on deafness and the rhetoric of gestures and those exploring the proto-anthropology of Anthropometamorphosis. ⁴ As Graham Richards observes in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, the ‘overall unity’ of Bulwer's work has been largely over-looked. ⁵