Making Disability Modern

Design Histories

Bess Williamson, Elizabeth Guffey, Bess Williamson, Elizabeth Guffey

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350070448
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Conception
• Subtopic: Conception générale

Making Disability Modern: Design Histories brings together leading scholars from a range of disciplinary and national perspectives to examine how designed objects and spaces contributes to the meanings of ability and disability from the late 18th century to the present day, and in homes, offices, and schools to realms of national and international politics. The contributors reveal the social role of objects - particularly those designed for use by people with disabilities, such as walking sticks, wheelchairs, and prosthetic limbs - and consider the active role that makers, users and designers take to reshape the material environment into a usable world. But it also aims to make clear that definitions of disability-and ability-are often shaped by design.

Part 1 Designers and Users from Craft to Industry

In the opening chapter of this part, Nicole Belolan highlights the creative work of adaptation to disability in the eighteenth century. In her account, Philadelphia gentleman John Lukens commissioned, invented, borrowed, and refashioned an array of things to deal with the debilitating condition of gout. A man of ample means, some of Lukens’s assistive devices—like the phaeton carriage that he commissioned to get around—were grandiose. But other early Americans, she argues, relied on a variety of devices in order to live with disability in the preindustrial age. The preindustrial normalcy of disability is evident in a rich material culture that includes Lukens’s well-appointed carriage along with other ad hoc, improvised, or adapted aids for support. Over the next two centuries, material objects and designed environments would increasingly be celebrated for their ability to cure—or treat—disability. But in the preindustrial era disabled people, family members, craftspeople, servants, and enslaved workers routinely made things accommodate and mitigate disability in everyday life.¹

Functional and stylish equipment documented or preserved through history tell us not only about the biographies of historical figures, but also about rarely studied forms and techniques of craft, including customization for both function and style. At a time when most disabled people lived at home, they, their friends, and their families designed their own devices and environments. As physical impairments were a common part of pre and early industrial life, this approach was widespread. By the late nineteenth century, designed interventions like Braille, hearing aids, and wheelchairs were being mass produced and available for purchase by or prescription to disabled users. Their histories also interlink with strains of national ambition, industry, war, and conquest.

Disabling the Industrial Revolution

The design histories in this volume mark out the early modern period as the onset of industrialization. In the context of mass production and communication, definitions of disability were closely intertwined with shifting notions of utility and fashion in everyday material life. Cara Fallon’s study of nineteenth-century canes available to consumers reveals the variety and sheer faddishness of designs on sale once mechanization and the American system of production took over. As her study notes, in an earlier age canes may have functioned as mobility aids, but by the nineteenth century they were fashionable enough that middle-class users typically owned several and could choose from a huge variety of handcrafted models. When canes fell out of fashion—partly because they once again became medicalized in the twentieth century—this variety and stylishness all but disappeared.

Much of the documented history of design and disability has been from a Western perspective, but Aparna Nair documents how these dynamics played out in India with distinctive colonial implications. In British India, patented, designed, and mass-produced technologies like ear trumpets were presented to deaf colonial subjects as part of the purported benefits of colonial rule. Better-off Indians could buy for themselves audiphones and electrophones, but tended to disdain the indigenous form of communication known as the “language of the fingers.” Capitalizing on this stigma, colonial authorities emphasized oralism and instilled an increasing reliance on mass-produced devices imported from the West. But these impulses were hardly limited to India. In the early twentieth century, modernity was more and more associated with design.

In a broader sense, the Industrial Revolution itself was a source of disability. Factory labor was dangerous, especially because the rise of unskilled labor led industry to view people (not machines) as disposable. Work injuries were common and resulted in little recompense, whether in industrial-era coal mines or in automobile factories.² This was also the case in great feats of engineering, like the construction of the Panama Canal, a project that transformed modern life by facilitating easier maritime trade between the Pacific and the Atlantic Oceans and reshaped the lives of many laborers due to the large numbers of injuries and amputations. Caroline Lieffers investigates how prosthesis design became a synecdoche of the United States’ growing global design presence, especially in Panama. As Lieffers argues, the distribution of more modern, designed limbs reproduced inequities based on race, class, and nation in the US Empire.

Throughout the premodern world, a rich variety of improvised, adapted, or specially made aids suggests that disability was accommodated as a normal feature of everyday life. As society industrialized in the nineteenth century, more and more patented, and mass-produced designs replaced the ad hoc systems and devices used before the Industrial Revolution. The emergence of professional design in the late nineteenth century did not abolish non-professional innovation. But designed answers to disablement became more and more common. By the beginning of the twentieth century, to be disabled and living in the modern era often meant using some kind of designed device.

Notes

1 Abrams, Revolutionary Medicine; Dea H. Boster, African American Slavery and Disability: Bodies, Property, and Power in the Antebellum South, 1800–1860 (New York: Routledge, 2013).

2 Rose, No Right to Be Idle; Blackie, “Disability, Dependency, and the Family in the Early United States.”

Bibliography

Abrams, Jeanne E. Revolutionary Medicine: The Founding Fathers and Mothers in Sickness and in Health. New York: New York University Press, 2013.

Altschuler, Sari. The Medical Imagination: Literature and Health in the Early United States. Early American Studies. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018.

Blackie, Daniel. “Disability, Dependency, and the Family in the Early United States.” In Disability Histories, ed. Susan Burch and Michael Rembis. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2014.

Boster, Dea H. African American Slavery and Disability: Bodies, Property, and Power in the Antebellum South, 1800–1860. New York: Routledge, 2013.

Rose, Sarah F. No Right to Be Idle: The Invention of Disability, 1840s-1930s. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017.

1 The Material Culture of Gout in Early America

NICOLE BELOLAN

Applying the last coat of varnish onto the phaeton Pennsylvania Surveyor General John Lukens (1720–89) ordered in 1789, a worker at George Hunter’s internationally acclaimed coach-making shop in Philadelphia likely took pride in knowing his light blue paint job would soon be seen throughout the city’s streets.¹ Once the varnish dried, we can envision another worker hopping into the open, four-wheel carriage, taking the reins of a horse, and delivering Lukens’s recreational coach—which set him back the princely sum of $200 plus an annual luxury tax—to his home at Market Street between 6th and 7th streets, just a short walk from the Pennsylvania State House (now Independence Hall).²

Likely enlivened at the prospect of tooling around in his new pleasure carriage, we can imagine Lukens approaching the lower-than-ordinary entrance, slowly taking one step at a time into the capacious seating area, and settling down on the seat. After all, a man with gout, a crippling form of arthritis, who would eventually require a coffin measuring an unusually broad two feet, three inches across the shoulders, needed the “very low” and “roomy” phaeton design, as Hunter recorded in his daybook.³ Despite the disabling pain gout caused, Lukens used his new carriage to navigate his world, perhaps en route to the American Philosophical Society where he was a member. Lukens was sixty-nine and a widower, but he still probably enjoyed showing off his wealth and station to everyone who noticed the spectacle of the carriage passing through the city’s corridors.

We can imagine that after taking a spin around Philadelphia, Lukens returned his new prized possession to his home. There, he slowly climbed the stairs to his bedchamber where he enjoyed the physical comfort provided by a bed chair, two night chairs (indoor toilets), and an invalid chair (wheelchair).⁴ Or, he may have enveloped himself in the welcoming wings and soft upholstery provided by an easy chair. Perhaps Dinah, his servant of African descent, or his nurse Sarah Coombs, hustled around him, propping up his swollen, gouty limbs and fluffing the pillow on his invalid chair should he tire of the easy chair.⁵ The furniture, which his wife had likely put to good use before her death after a “long and painful illness” the previous year, may have groaned with his weight, and Lukens probably groaned with disabling pain.⁶ When it was time to turn in, Lukens slept in his bedstead, though he owned six in a time and place where one bedstead would have been considered a luxury.

To live with and manage physical disabilities such as gout in early America, people like Lukens, rich and poor alike, improvised material solutions within their physical and social environments.⁷ They did this in collaboration with friends, family, craftspeople, servants, and enslaved people using whatever resources they had at hand.They commissioned, invented, borrowed, and refashioned an array of objects ranging from specially designed phaetons to shoes to sooth and conceal the painful, disabling disease of gout. They wanted to stay mobile and active and pursue everyday life and activities.⁸ Individuals’ reputations depended, in part, on whether they looked well-groomed and healthy as well as whether they contributed to their families and communities. They used objects and people to get the job done.⁹

Today, to access places, people, and activities, Americans with disabilities tend to use and alter mass-marketed objects in conjunction with more specially made items. We typically classify objects people with disabilities use to engage with the world “assistive technology” or “assistive devices.” Historian Katherine Ott defines these objects as things that “enhance such capacities as mobility and agility, sensory apprehension, communication, and cognitive action.”¹⁰ Examples Ott lists include prosthetic limbs and hearing aids, among many other objects. People often acquire such tools through medical professionals or purveyors of medical devices. People sometimes alter such objects using materials they find around the house to customize them to their bodies.¹¹

When John Lukens had gout, there was no formalized assistive technology industry from which he could purchase what we would call an “accessible” carriage. Instead, Lukens worked closely with his Philadelphia carriage-maker to design and construct a phaeton that was at th...