Introduction

In his 1924 foreword to Garthorne Robert Girdlestone’s The Care and Cure of Crippled Children, the orthopaedic surgeon Sir Robert Jones set out a narrative of the treatment of disabled people through the ages. ‘The cripple has always presented a problem awaiting solution’, he began, ‘and his story is unequalled in its tragic sequence of obloquy and neglect’. Jones’s history moved quickly from ‘ancient days’ when ‘the cripple’ was the ‘embodiment of magic’, through medieval times when as an object of derision the highest rank ‘he’ could aspire to was that of ‘King’s Jester’, to the world of Shakespeare’s Richard III, in which disability was synonymous with ‘malice, cruelty and perversion’. For the Puritans, ‘the cripple was frowned upon as an outcast, and crawled through his miserable distorted life as an example of divine punishment and humiliation’. Thus, concluded Jones, ‘for long centuries deformity remained little more than a text for theological discussion’ until finally, modern medical techniques for repairing and rehabilitating disabled bodies offered hope of ‘cure’ and the prospect of a life of value and social utility. ¹