Buried in the footnotes: the absence of disabled people in the collective imagery of our past

Any casual visitor to museums in Britain would assume that disabled people occupied a specific range of roles in the nation’s history. The absence of disabled people as creators of arts, in images and in artefacts, and their presence in selected works reinforcing cultural stereotypes, conspire to present a narrow perspective of the existence of disability in history. What impact might this narrow and distorted view be having on the society we live in today?