Social Histories of Disability and Deformity

Bodies, Images and Experiences

David M. Turner, Kevin Stagg, David M. Turner, Kevin Stagg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134235582
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Weltgeschichte

Collecting together essays written by an international set of contributors, this book provides an important contribution to the emerging field of disability history. It explores changes in understandings of deformity and disability between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries, and reveal the ways in which different societies have conceptualised the normal and the pathological.

Through a variety of case studies including: early modern birth defects, homosexuality, smallpox scarring, vaccination, orthopaedics, deaf education, eugenics, mental deficiency, and the experiences of psychologically scarred military veterans, this book provides new perspectives on the history of physical, sensory and intellectual anomaly.

Examining changes over five centuries, it charts how disability was delineated from other forms of deformity and disfigurement by a clearer medical perspective. Essays shed light on the experiences of oppressed minorities often hidden from mainstream history, but also demonstrate the importance of discourses of disability and deformity as key cultural signifiers which disclose broader systems of power and authority, citizenship and exclusion.

The diverse nature of the material in this book will make it relevant to scholars interested in cultural, literary, social and political, as well as medical, history.

Part I Disability and deformity

The medical and moral world of monstrosity

1 Representing physical difference

The materiality of the monstrous

Kevin Stagg

DOI: 10.4324/9780203008522-2

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

Such partial appreciation of Bulwer thus can be extended to make a more general point about the academic approach to the subject of physical difference. Academic studies relating to monsters have appeared with great frequency over the past decade. The same period has also witnessed the growing prominence of disability studies. There seem to be obvious connections between the disciplines in that both tend to focus on the body and issues of physical difference. Equally both monster studies and disability studies have tended to draw on representations of the body in their exploration of their topics at the expense of embodiment. Such an emphasis is in part related to available sources, but the neglect of lived experience in relation to the history of body has meant that the disabled body has invariably been analysed as an ‘alien condition’, an ‘absolute state of otherness’ in relation to the normative body.⁶ Where the discourses of disability and monstrosity diverge is in their intent. Disability studies seek, through an interdisciplinary approach, to ‘think about disability not as an isolated, individual medical pathology but instead as a key defining social category on a par with race, class, and gender’.⁷ Works dealing with monstrosity on the other hand tend to evade the specific social context of physical difference, preferring to examine the subject in relation to such topics as providential literature, secularisation, the imagination, changing ideas of maternity and reproduction, and religion amongst others. The monstrous thus stands for error, abnormality and the ‘other’ or becomes a vehicle for conveying historical shifts from (say) religious to scientific perspectives.⁸ Robert Garland's Eye of the Beholder, which incorporates analysis of ancient portents, omens and rituals of pollution with a sensitive appreciation of the treatment of the disabled, stands out as a work effectively synthesising disability studies with the monstrous.⁹

David T. Mitchell has set out a more developed critique regarding disability and representation. As disability has tended throughout history to be perceived as a problem in need of a solution, it has resulted in not only a range of state interventions and policies but also made it a ‘primary object of literary representation’.¹⁰ Literary representations have a rarely acknowledged dependency upon disability. Unlike other marginalised identities (gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity), disability is omnipresent throughout literature creating a conundrum whereby disability's social invisibility is accompanied by its cultural profusion. In their concept of ‘narrative prosthesis’ Sharon Snyder and David T. Mitchell propose that narratives need anomaly; they are structurally dependent upon deviant or extraordinary elements to propel the narrative, and these elements draw upon an underlying archetype and historical association with a physically different body. Through their notion of the ‘materiality of the metaphor’ Snyder and Mitchell draw attention to the degree to which disability is also called upon as a ‘master metaphor for social ills’. Such metaphors lend bodily abnormalities a greater metaphysical significance. The personal, social and political implications of disability are constantly elided whilst the physically different body is incessantly invoked. Thus, discourses of monstrosity invariably reflect on issues of gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity but the disability or deformity that underpins the original category of monstrosity is overlooked. Where works exploring issues of gender, sexuality and race have highlighted the problem posed by invisibility, of being excluded from discourse, for disability the opposite is true. Disability is represented everywhere but its specific social significance is invisible. As Mitchell argues, ‘the social navigation of stigma or the physical demands of a disability are slighted in favour of gesturing toward a symbolic register of commentary on the conditions of the universe’.¹¹

To test this hypothesis I wish to explore a body of early modern works which invoke such metaphorical richness in relation to physical abnormality, in the form of the monster and, more specifically the ‘monstrous birth’. A monstrous birth was the usual early modern term for congenital malformations; the term‘monstrous birth’, although imprecise effectively meant anything out of the ordinary such as conjoined twins. Tales of monstrous births made up part of a genre of providential news printed in broadsides and pamphlets. Stories of bewildering and horrific births were a popular form of news in England and Wales over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They combined sensational detail of malformed bodies and horrified and distressed families with dire warnings of the need for all to repent. Such monsters were seen as signs of the last days, and, like the celestial comet prodigies, heralds of the apocalypse or at least of political and social upheaval. Monstrous births joined other notable signs of divine disfavour including extraordinary fish, beached whales, unusual animals, unexpected weather and celestial phenomena. Thus under the banner of providential signs a varied range of phenomena could be drawn upon:

plague, pestilence, warre, famine, scarcity, dearth, new sicknesses and diseases, Comets, blazing stares, flashing lights, shooting and streamings in the ayre, monsters of man and beast &c.¹²

Thus within the portent tradition, monstrous births were viewed as just one of a number of unusual occurrences that were deemed significant in determining divine intentions.

Although there is no simple correspondence between the overlapping discourses of disability and monstrosity, physical difference lies at their core. Overall, the monster birth ballads and pamphlets offer a useful support for Mitchell's argument regarding the ‘the materiality of the metaphor’ as these are works that are centrally about birth abnormalities but their content tends to focus on matters of sinful conduct, on concern over maternity, or they act as satirical comments on religious and political issues. In this sense early modern tales of extraordinary births disqualify the represented child ‘from possessing a shared social identity’.¹³ Between 1550 and 1700 in England, some 70 ballads and a similar number of pamphlets along with a number of book-length collections utilised monstrous births as prodigies. These monster works tended to follow a format that combined a written description of the prodigy (often augmented with an illustration) with a reflection on its significance.

Early modern attitudes to disability and deformity reveal three main themes: improvement and repair; artifice; and providence. This range of responses is clearly expressed in the writings of the sixteenth-century French surgeon Ambroise Paré whose complete works were translated into English by Thomas Johnson and published in 1634. The 23rd book of Paré’s collected works, ‘Of the Meanes and Manner to Repaire or Supply the Naturall or accidentall defects or wants in mans body’, sets out examples of surgical procedures to treat wounds including the loss of eyes, teeth, parts of the nose, tongue; to treat defects afflicting the face and ears, hunchbacks, fingers and thumbs, legs and feet. The 25th book, ‘Of Monsters and Prodigies’, offers an account of the causes of monstrous births (invoking both natural and supernatural sources) and includes a chapter (‘Of the Cozenages and crafty Trickes of Beggars’) to the counterfeits of beggars describing the use of a hanged man's arm to claim alms; using a sponge to imitate an ulcer, with examples of those mimicking leprosy, deafness, St. Vitus’ dance and scabies. In Paré’s work medical advice for the deformed and maimed jostles alongside accounts of monstrous births derived from demonic and bestial intercourse and a harsh judgement of the social practices of beggars.¹⁴ According to Paré, physical difference could result from divine wrath for sinful conduct; it could also, following Aristotle and Hippocrates, be related to the superfluity, deficiency or misplacement of the male seed; to the active shaping faculties of the conceiving woman's imagination or to the influence of the stars. However defects and blemishes could be healed, so that nature's deficiency could in many cases be overcome and superseded. William Turner's 1697 encyclopaedic work on providential wonders lists examples of the blind, deaf and other defects ‘improved by Art and Industry’. Unlike Paré, Turner does not offer examples of surgical repair, but of the benefits of the arts:

Where Nature is defective, there the Assistance of Art is required: Nothing makes us more Ingenious than Necessity: Rather than Men shall suffer all the Inconveniences consequent upon a Total Eclipse of any of their Senses, especially that of Sight, and the comfortable use of the Sun, they will set their Brains upon the rack, and use the greatest intention of Thought, to procure a Compensation.¹⁵

Turner describes human prodigies overcoming handicap by displaying extraordinary abilities to read, learn and perform actions. A woman from Basle is noted for ‘Spinning Artificially with her Feet, Sweeping the House, and performing all other the Offices of a good Houswife’, whilst a British woman ‘born with Arms and Legs, distorted in so strange and unusual a manner’ was able to thread a needle, tie a knot and write with her tongue.¹⁶

The most prominent themes in relation to the disabled evident in popular representations associated disability with fraud. This is evident in the 1614 pamphlet, Deeds against Nature, and monsters by kinde, which describes the trial of John Arthur, a London cripple, for murder. Arthur's case was set alongside that of a case dealing with infanticide. The sinful and corrupt nature of Arthur is evident from his physical form:

An unperfect wretch wanting the right shape and limbes of a man though in forme and visage like unto one of us, this decreped creature … lived and maintain’d himselfe with the charitie and devotions of almes-giving people, and by his lame and limblesse usage purchased more kinde favours then many others of his base fraternitie.¹⁷

The fact that the ‘wretch’ appears ‘like unto us’ allies disability with deception suggesting that it operates as a hidden treachery. John Arthur is described as ‘continually abusing the gifts of charitie, and wasting away the same with drunkennes’, and along with his ilk (‘such begging vagabonds and disordred liners’) viewed as being ‘instruments of the divell’.¹⁸ The popular ballad about the ‘stout Criple of Cornwall’ made similar accusations linking fraud and disability.¹⁹

This association of disability with deceit in the accounts of beggars and cripples was also evident in accusations about the status of freaks displayed at such places as Bartholemew Fair.²⁰ Establishing the veracity of the reported monstrous birth was also the constant concern of ballad and pamphlet writers.

In ballads and pamphlets, abnormal or monstrous births were usually regarded as omens, signs of trouble ahead which came as admonishments from God for the sinful conduct of his flock. Such popular monster works covered more than human disability. Firstly, animal abnormalities were popular as exemplified by the most famous sixteenth-century monster broadsides – Martin Luther's Monk-calf and Philip Melancthon's Pope-ass, translated and published in London in 1579. Pigs and cows were the most usual animals featured and their inclusion suggests that it was the unusual nature of birth that was significant in monster works, rather than the human dimension. Another popular theme concerned prophesying children as featured in works such as Corn...