Victria Ns People Di Sabli Ties

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26/7/2015 Healing Spas and Ugly Clubs: How Victorians Taught Us to Treat People With Disabilities | Collectors Weekly

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Disability is a continuum,

and its actually difficult to

decide, legally, who is

disabled and who is not.

In fact, society didnt have a concept of lacking ability until

industrialization, which, by the 19th century, had created an

obsessive demand for able-bodied workers who could rapidly

churn out mountains of goods. Unfortunately, in the 1800s the

sciences of biology and medicine hadnt kept pace with

advances in mechanical technology, so one infection or unfortunate encounter with a factory

machine could lead to invalidism, loss of a limb, or early death. As people with disabilities

became more visible and regarded as problematic, able-bodied citizens started to feel

compassion for what they perceived as tragic lives. What to do with all these unproductive

bodies?

Everyone had different ideas. Social reformers in the 19th century attempted to normalize

people with disabilities through rehabilitation, education, and discreet new prosthetics.

Inventors created all sorts of bizarre quack devices to help people overcome their disabilities.

Certain educators even waged a war against sign language to force deaf people to learn how to

speak like regular folk. Darwin-inspired eugenicists supported sterilizing anyone thought to

have inherited undesirable traits, which physiognomists asserted could be read on ones face or

body. Many people with obvious physical disabilities and deformities still made a living by being

gawked at and mocked in freak shows, while men with deformities but deep pockets raised their

own esteem by joining Ugly Clubs, even as cities were starting to pass ugly laws against

unsightly beggars.


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Top: An 1844 portrait of Oliver Caswell and Laura Bridgman, the first

blind and deaf person educated at the Perkins Institute for the Blind

in Massachusetts. (Via Nineteenth-Century Disability, courtesy of

theWellcome Library) Above: An early wheelchair, known as a Bath

chair, at the St Johns Museum Store, Bath. (Via WikiCommons)

Before industrialization, British scholar Lennard J. Davis asserts in his book,Enforcing

Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body, people with disabilities were an integrated part

of their community, though subjected to regular ridicule. For example, according to Davis, in

ancient Greece, people with physical or mental impairments were likely to be given tasks suited

to their unique abilities or that accommodated their slower pace. So-called freak shows got their

start in medieval Europe, where men with hunchbacks, dwarfism, or other physical or mental

disabilities, who were considered natural fools, were hired to create comedy routines that
http://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/the-last-laugh-why-clowns-will-never-die/http://www.amazon.com/Enforcing-Normalcy-Disability-Deafness-Body/dp/1859840078http://wellcomelibrary.org/


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played up their differences some eventually became trusted advisors to royalty as court jesters.

Even in the 18th century, it was socially acceptable to point and laugh at a person who looked

or moved in an obviously different way.

When capitalism exploded in the 19th century, it created a middle class obsessed with

normalcy, and as industrialization spread, Western society put an emphasis on the body as a

means of production and productivity as a means to citizenship. Then, having a disability wasseen as more sad than funny. Men who couldnt work were thought to have more in common

with women, while disabled women had a harder time fulfilling their gender role of getting

married and having children.

Preindustrial societies tended to treat people with impairments as part of the social fabric,

although admittedly not kindly, Davis writes, while postindustrial societies, instituting

kindness, ended up segregating and ostracizing such individuals through the discursivity of

disability.


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An Ugly Club member would

be an object of ridicule on the

streets, but a superstar within

the sanctum of the club.

In Edgar Allan Poes 1849 short story Hop-Frog, the titular little person, a kings

natural fool with disabled legs, falls in love with a beautiful little person named

Trippetta and seeks revenge against the royals for abusing her. Arthur Rackham drew

this illustration in 1935. (Via WikiCommons)

In her new book, The Measure of Manliness: Disability and Masculinity in the Mid-Victorian

Novel, Karen Bourrierwho is also the project director of the fascinating web site Nineteenth-

Century Disability: Cultures and Contextsexplores how men with disabilities were portrayed

in the literature of the era. While these characters lacked the ability to be strong men of

industry, their perceived weakness was thought to give them incredible insight.

When I started reading Victorian novels about disability, I

noticed a strong masculinity that would be able to take up the

challenges of industry was a priority, says Bourrier, who is an

assistant professor of English at the University of Calgary. But

often the life story of the strong, self-made man is told through

the perspective of a weak or disabled male character to soften

the contours of that kind of industrial masculinity. Often a character with a clubfoot or a

hunchback has this terrible experience growing up. Im thinking about Philip Wakem inThe Mill

on the Flossby George Eliot, for example. It makes them feel excluded from society, but then,

therefore, theyre more sensitive to others pain. Thats an idea that makes a lot of sense to us

these days, but it was a switch from the 18th century when people might have viewed disability

as just humorous.

In the Victorian novel, a person with a disability often has all of these powers of observation, as

a privileged spectator who cant participate in other arenas of life, she continues. Disability

study scholars call that a fantasy of compensation, a stereotype thats worrisome and

pernicious. Literary critics of the era did ponder, Why is there this saintly figure whos directing

the whole household from the couch and has special insight that seems to stem from his or her

disability?
https://www.press.umich.edu/7499689/measure_of_manlinesshttp://www.nineteenthcenturydisability.org/


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An industrial mentality saw

workers as interchangeable

and therefore sought to create

a universal worker whose

physical characteristics would

be uniform.

If a person didnt possess the physical or mental ability to be a productive worker, they were

seen as defective. That defectiveness was also thought to affect their character, sometimes poorly

and sometimes positively, as Bourrier explores in The Measure of Manliness. Because physical

appearance was believed to reveal a persons moral compass and chances at success, even

deformities that didnt affect ones ability to work were also seen as problems to be corrected.

In 1887s Animal Locomotion: An Electro-Photographic Investigation of Consecutive

Phases of Animal Movements, photographer Eadweard Muybridge shows people withdisabilities, such as this crawling child, in motion. (Via Nineteenth-Century Disability,

courtesy of the Wellcome Library, London)

According to Nineteenth-Century Disability, the Victorian era laid the groundwork for a belief

system still operating today known as the medical model of disability, which sees disability as

a personal tragedy that needs to be fixed or overcome through medical intervention. Seeing

disability through a tragic lens, however, sparked interest in the experiences of people with

disabilities and made them more visible in the 1800s.

The 19th century was the first to portray disability as the cause

of individual suffering, and many disabled persons expressed

their lived experiences in writing or art, says Jaipreet Virdi-

Dhesi, a researcher who contributes to Nineteenth-Century

Disability, in an interview via email. Harriet Martineau (1802-

1876) was deaf since childhood and an invalid for a few years

she shared her experiences in several essays, including her
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Letter for the Deaf, in which she suggests conquering the struggle over the constraints of

deafness required first acknowledging the limitations of a deaf persons social surrounding.

British missionary John Kitto (1804-1852), deaf since age 12, was self-educated and wrote

several books on religion and his travel experiences. American painter William Dunlap (1776-

1839) painted a series of self-portraits depicting the permanent blindness in his right eye.

As people with disabilities started telling their stories in the public arena, they also werephotographed in ways that suggests their disabilities were crucial to their identity, explains

Virdi-Dhesi, who has a doctorate in the history of science from the University of Toronto.

A 1786 mezzotint of James Hutton, a Moravian minister and bookseller,

showing him using his ear trumpet, by J.R. Smith after R. Cosway.

(Via The Science Museumin South Kensington, U.K.)
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Disabled persons were captured in photographs with the objects of their disability clearly

presented, she says. Scottish geologist James Hutton (1726-1797) is depicted in a mezzotint

holding an ear trumpet to his ear. A black-and-white photograph of Elizabeth Margaretta

Maria Gilbert (1826-1885), the founder of the Association for Promoting the General Welfare of

the Blind, shows her wearing a cape and shaded glasses. And amateur painter William Agnew

(1846-1941), who was born deaf and mute, painted several scenes illustrating Queen Victoria

conversing in sign language with a subject. These examples push forth the notion that disability

in the 19th century was not always perceived negatively, to be hidden, or as though disabled

persons were living in misery.

Ear trumpets were among the myriad inventions that came out of the persistent belief that, even

with the help of political or social institutions, it was the disabled individuals responsibility to

strive to become more normal.

Having lost my hearing at age 4 following a serious bout of meningitis, my childhood was

marked by my familys attempts to cure my hearing loss, Virdi-Dhesi says of growing up in thelate 1980s and 1990s. I recall the painful scent of burning chili peppers as a move to ward off

the evil eye, scores of visits to the temple for blessings, the chafing of copper bracelets

possessing powers to extract the disease. Among these attempts were visits to the ENT clinic,

feelings of failure following hearing tests, the weight of hearing aids, and special speech lessons.

Reading 19th-century medical case studies of all the attempts invoked to cure a person of their

hearing loss resonated through the passages of time and connects with me. I can sympathize

with the patients, but I also understand the need for a cure that was so tirelessly advocated by

medical practitioners.

The Hall Braille-writer was the first successful and widely


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used mechanical Braille-writer. (ViaAntique Typewriters:

The Martin Howard Collection)

On the plus side, useful Victorian inventions such as Braille, wheelchairs, typewriters,

phonographs, and advancements in prosthetics offered people with disabilities more mobility,

autonomy, and access to education.

Braille was invented in the 19th century, and the phonograph, invented by Edison in 1877, gave

the blind a way to listen to books and be more independent, even though it was not necessarily

made for them, Bourrier says. The typewriter also became commercialized, in the 1860s and

1870s, so you could write a letter if you were blind. There were huge improvements

inprosthetics, in part due to the Civil War in the U.S. Apparently, prosthetic eyes also werent

very convincing before the mid-19th century, but they got a lot better, and that helped people

whod lost an eye become less stigmatized.

Inventors also came up with many aids to hearing by studying the anatomy of the ear andexploring scientific principles of acoustics, Virdi-Dhesi says. Some of them were brilliantly

constructed, even designed to be camouflaged as ordinary furniture or hidden on the person,

she says. There was an acoustic headband, with a porcelain flower painted white and blue,

and a hidden ear trumpet beneath the flowerit was designed to be disguised in a womans

bouffant hairdo. There are ear trumpets designed as walking canes, so a gentleman could

simply bring the cane up to his ear when he needed to. Most trumpets and aids were pretty

standard in the 19th centurydesigned to increase hearing amplification through funnels, but

the shape and weight of these aids depended on the user, as did their degree of success. A

person with moderate hearing loss, for instance, could have their hearing increased by 20 dBwith the use of a bell-shaped trumpet.
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Often the life story of the

strong, self-made man is told

through the perspective of a

weak or disabled male

character.

A Victorian hearing trumpet swathed in black fabric and lace. (Via Nineteenth-Century

Disability, courtesy of the Wellcome Library, London)

But this push toward normalization also created what disability scholars call the overcoming

narrative, which puts undue pressure on people with disabilities to excel despite their

impediments.

Simply put, the overcoming narrative is this cultural idea that

a person must overcome any limitations that set them back or

prevent them from achieving success, Virdi-Dhesi says. For

the most part, this requires masking the disability to appear as

normal as possible, or managing to do normal things in order

to fit in with the rest of society. For deaf persons, this means to

adopt technologies that allow them to hear, or to learn how to

lip-read and articulate sounds, rather than using sign language, which draws attention to their

status as a deafened person. For individuals with amputated limbs, this requires the use ofprostheses to camouflage their disability, especially the use of prostheses that enables them to do

ordinary things, such as use a fork, tie a shoelace, and so on.

Quack doctors in the 19th century also subjected disabled people to plenty of inventions that just

didnt work, particularly devices that used new technology such as violet rays, electricity, and

vibrations as well as strange orthopedic apparatuses and patent medicinesthat promised

miraculous cures.
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The closing years of the 19th century and the early 20th century introduced a tremendous

amount of interesting and quackish hearing devices, such as the artificial eardrums, tiny devices

made of metal or rubber and inserted into the ear to increase residual hearing, Virdi-Dhesi

says. Many of these devices were experiments with the new marvel of electricity. Galvanism was

a well-known remedy in cases of deafness that were diagnosed as paralysis of the auditory

nerves treatments required applying electricity to the ear in order to simulate dead ear

muscles.

In 1905, Dr. Guy Clifford Powell, of Peoria, Illinois invented and

marketed a device he called the Electro-Vibratory Cure for Deafness.

(Via JaiVirdi.com)

Similar principles were governed in the Electro-Vibratory Cure for Deafness, a device invented

and marketed by Dr. Guy Clifford Powell of Illinois in 1905, she continues. The apparatus
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Freak shows seem to be a

way for communities to define

whos normal and whos not,

and assert those values in a

troublesome manner.

apparently cured a patient of deafness by pumping air through the ears via cotton-covered

electrodes soaked in salt water. After pumping in air, a jolt of electricity generated by the

solenoid coils is sent to the patients head. Two Electro-Magneto Storage Cells batteries were

placed inside the top cover. Several patented devices made use of violet-ray therapy, believing

that ultraviolet rays could cure damages in the ear or build-ups of calcium. Vibrating therapy

was a popular design for apparatuses to cure deafness some were advertised as tissue

oscillators. The rare battery-powered Violin Vibraphonewhich used sound frequencies to

stimulate frozen inner-ear ossiclesis perhaps the strangest instrument Ive ever come across!

For deaf people in particular, the drive for normalization also

held them back. Sign language, which Western societies

developed in the early 18th century, helped deaf children

communicate with their hearing family and friends, who may

have never tried to communicate with deaf people before,

Bourrier explains. But in the 19th century, American telephone-

inventor Alexander Graham Bell led a movement to force deaf

persons to give up sign language, which he insisted wasnt a language, and learn how to speak,

controlling the shape and volume of the sounds they made. He believed that this capacity to

speak is what makes you human and separates you from the animals, Bourrier says. These

pernicious arguments made things worse for the deaf in the 19th century.

In her research, Virdi-Dhesi has looked into why this cultural shift happened. While the 18th

century and first half of the 19th century was marked with a steady increase in the

popularization of sign language as a mode for communication with the deaf, and the

establishment of residential schools for the deaf, things changed after the 1850s, she says. As

deaf persons from across America became integrated into a Deaf culture, with a common

language and community, they no longer felt isolated. Organizations, employment, events, and

even newspapers for the deaf were created, further solidifying a sense of belonging and

community. However, as Deaf identity and culture was coming into fruition, the deaf were in

danger of being isolated from another vision of America. In her book, Words Made Flesh,

R.A.R. Edwards shows how education outlined on the Prussian model of practicality and

efficiency was believed to be the cure for all of Americas problems, from poverty and crime to

disease, and ignorance. Tying Americans under a common culture would unify the country

under the same nationalistic banner. And that included the Deaf, who had to learn English,

rather than sign language, and share in the same oral culture.
http://www.collectorsweekly.com/telephones/overviewhttp://www.amazon.com/Words-Made-Flesh-Nineteenth-Century-Disability/dp/1479883735


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An acoustic headband was

designed to disguise an ear

trumpet in a womans

bouffant hairdo.

A postcard print of William Agnews popular 1889 painting shows Queen Victoria using

sign language to communicate with a deaf woman. The queen sided with the manualists

even after sign language was banned from schools. (Via Nineteenth-Century Disability,

courtesy ofWellcome Images)

This led to a war between sign-language advocates, known as manualists, and the oralists,who pushed for speech and articulation. By the 1870s, this shift additionally coincided with

newer scientific theories, especially Charles Darwins theory of evolution and natural selection

signing was reminiscent of ape-like behavior, crude and below the parameters of human

reason, Virdi-Dhesi says. Fierce debates amongst educators for the deaf questioned the value

of sign-language: Was it beneficial for introducing the deaf-mutes to ideas of the world, giving

them tools for constructing knowledge and understanding in order to assimilate themselves into

normal society? Or was it isolating them from the common culture by creating a sense of

comfort incomprehensible by others? Oralists rejected sign language as primitive and argued

that sign language should be removed from all schools and replaced by emergent sound andwriting technologies, in order to teach deaf students to speak and understand English.

In 1880, educators from around the world came together in

Milan, Italy, for the second International Congress on

Education of the Deaf where they debated a resolution on

banning sign language in schools and replacing it with oral

instruction. Even though sign language and its earlier
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variations of finger-spelling were used since the 1600s, delegates voted to ban sign language as

a mode of instruction, Virdi-Dhesi says. A historic event, the ban had a significant impact on

the education and culture of the deaf. It was devastating. Deaf teachers lost their jobs to hearing

teachers for the deaf. Sign-language instruction was forbidden. And as historians have shown,

the congress was biased from the start, as more than half of its delegates were well-known

oralists furthermore, out of 164 delegates, only one person was deaf. Almost all deaf schools

used the oral method by 1920. Even as sign language was banned in classrooms, it still

flourished in communities and was supported by the National Association of the Deaf. It was

not until the 1960s and 1970s that sign language returned to the classroom.

For people with physical deformities, some of the medical interventions to normalize people put

them in danger, too. There was a group of doctors starting in the 1830s in France and in

Germany who decided that they were going to start operating on orthopedic deformities, which

they defined as any and every asymmetry in the human body, Bourrier says. So it could have

been like a clubfoot or a harelip or a spinal problem, all these deformities that may not

necessarily have been causing people all that many problems. In some cases, the surgery

actually caused more harm than good. The idea was that they were going to operate by splitting

the tendons and straightening them out, but it was risky to operate before the development of

antisepsis in the end of the 19th century. People would get gangrene sometimes, and the

surgeries werent all that successful.


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It is not the person with a

disability who is defective, but

the society that builds the

world around one standard

kind of body.

Orthopedic medicine began as a practice of child rearing in France, thanks to Nicolas

Andrys 1741 book Orthopaedia, translated into English in 1743. In the mid-19th century,

orthopedic medicine became a specialized branch of surgery that aimed to correct

asymmetries in the human frame. (Via Nineteenth-Century Disability, courtesy of

theWellcome Institute for the History of Medicine)

The emphasis on looking normal also fed into pseudo-sciences like physiognomy and

phrenology, which, respectively, associated types of facial features and skull measurements with

moral character and criminality.

Phrenologists reinforced the medicalization of disability, the

idea that disability was a medical problem that could be solved

through the application of science and invasive treatments,

Virdi-Dhesi says. Concerned with the functions of the brain,

phrenologists believed that the shape of an individual skull can

reveal the persons morality, personality, and other intellectual

characteristics, as placed on their brain. As the founder of
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phrenology, Franz Joseph Gall believed ones madness, criminal nature, or moral deviance

could thus be read. More so, phrenologists argued that the shape of the cranium was

correlated to ones intelligence, and certain races had differently shaped craniums, thus

accounting for their lower position on the hierarchy of race supremacy. The idea of brain

localization was a powerful science and used to justify an abundance of discriminatory atrocities

against disabled persons.

British statistician Sir Francis Galton first pushed to establish the normal or average body as

ideal. He also employed a method of composite photography to layer images of different faces

on top of one another to determine the average face. His goal was to deduce physiognomic traits

that would reveal a persons state of health or criminal tendencies. But after Galton read

1859sOn the Origin of the Species,by his half-cousin Charles Darwin, Galton began to reject

averageness or mediocrity in favor of the survival of the fittest. He developed a science about

perfecting the human race, known as eugenics, in 1883.

Phrenologists believed the shape of ones skull could determine Philoprogenitiveness, or

ones capacity for parental love. (Via Special Collections and Rare Books, University of

Missouri Library)

In eugenics, the most average traits were no longer the most desirable instead, one extreme, like

tallness or high intelligence, would be the most ideal and the other extreme, like shortness or

low intelligence, the least. Since evolution theory posited that such traits are hereditary,

eugenicists pushed to sterilize or prevent those with unwanted characteristics from having

children. (Eugenics remained a well-respected science in the United States and Europe until the

1930s when Adolf Hitler adopted it for a campaign of genocide.)
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Treatment included the use

of domestic rituals, such as

tea parties and gardening, in

order to reinforce social

norms of good manners.

During the late 19th century, eugenics became obsessed with

the elimination of defectives, a category which included the

feebleminded, the deaf, the blind, the physically defective, and

so on, Davis writes, explaining that fitness became a national

concern in Great Britain. If individual citizens are not fit, if

they do not fit into the nation, then the national body will not

be fit as if a hunchbacked citizenry would make a hunchbacked nation. This belief

combined with an industrial mentality that saw workers as interchangeable and therefore

sought to create a universal worker whose physical characteristics would be uniform. One of

the central foci of eugenics was what was broadly called feeblemindedness. The term included

low intelligence, mental illness, and even pauperism, since low income was equated with

relative inefficiency. Likewise, certain ethnic groups were associated with feeblemindedness and

pauperism.

The idea that you could read someones character by reading their body played out in literature,

too. In addition to the sympathetic view of disability, which is the one I concentrate more on in

my book, in the Victorian novel, a physical deformity can be a shorthand for a villain, Bourrier

says. Quilp, the hunchback dwarf in Dickenss The Old Curiosity Shop, or Silas Wegg, who has

a peg leg in Our Mutual Friend, would be good examples of someone whos seen as villainous

because of his disability. I think that comes from 19th-century theater, because it was a quick

visual to suggest this person is evil.


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Disability in the 19th century

Harold Coppings 1924 illustration for Charles Dickens Our

Mutual Friend, written 1864-65, shows Mr. Boffin addressing

Silas Wegg, who keeps his foot warm in a basket. (ViaVictorian

Web)

In fact, the term degenerate, meaning an immoral person, comes from the idea that evolution

could go in reverse, so that a criminals corruption would manifest in his body in some way.

People like Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso started taking photographs of criminals to

see if they were degenerating physically, Bourrier says. Because if Darwin had proved that we

could evolve forward, maybe we could go backward as well. Again, its this terrible idea that who

you were was marked on your body and could be legible to people in some way.

While eugenicists promoted sterilization, more compassionate

social reformers and philanthropists put their energy into
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was not always perceived

negatively, to be hidden, or as

though disabled persons were

living in misery.

making people with disabilities productive members of society.

The nineteenth century was an age when people self-

consciously boasted about philanthropy, Virdi-Dhesi says.

Charities became popular avenues for the lay public to

demonstrate their moral and social values as a way of

contributing to national responsibility. Many institutions were directed toward the goal of

normalizing defective or disabled bodies, in order to eventually integrate them into society as

productive citizens, or else isolate them within secured gates. These institutions were based on

the predilection that there existed a clear boundary between the normal and the pathological.

Medicine was directed toward dealing with the body, whereas moral therapy was directed

toward dealing with the mind.

Institutions for the deaf in Britain emerged as part of a wider evangelical movement for social

reform, she continues. Beginning with John Townsends Asylum for the Support and

Education of the Deaf and Dumb Children of the Poor (informally, the Bermondsey Asylum) in

1792, residential institutions for the deaf grew exponentially. These institutions claimed that the

deaf were capable of communication, and thus, worthy of education, and were driven by a

missionary zeal that constructed education as a charitable enterprise. Relying upon private

benevolence and public donations, these institutions advocated intellectual development,

religious instruction, and material well-being, directed toward protecting the deaf until they

were trained to venture or assimilate into society.

The lithography frontispiece of Ben Rhydding: The Principles of Hydropathy and the

Compressed-Air Bath (1858) shows the Ben Rhydding spa where Victorians sought the

water cure for various ailments. This cure involved taking baths, having steams, and


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Joseph Carey Merrick, a.k.a.

The Elephant Man. (Via

Nineteenth-Century

Disability, WikiCommons)

drinking loads of mineral water. (Via Nineteenth-Century Disability, WikiCommons)

Then, as now, the level of comfort and access to new technology a person with a disability

experienced depended on his or her wealth. Those with physical or mental impairments in the

higher classes were whisked away to elegant country institutions that resembled spas or vacation

resorts. Some of these places, like J. Langdon Downs Earlswood Asylum, which specialized in

Downs syndrome care, offered education or at least basic literacy. But if you were impoverished

and mentally ill, you often got locked up in a brutal asylum that was more like a jail.

Institutions for the mad offered a sense of care that left individuals in a comfortable and

accommodating space in order to allow their bodies to recover, Virdi-Dhesi says. Most of these

institutions were privately managed and for the wealthy. Treatment included the use of

domestic rituals, such as tea parties and gardening, in order to reinforce social norms of good

manners. The Royal Hospital for Incurables was one such private charitable institution, offering

treatment for both the disabled and those with long-term illnesses. The Holloway Sanatorium

was another resort for rest and recovery for caring for the middle-class insane. But madhouses

such as Londons Bethlem Hospital, the York Asylum, or the Brookwood Asylum create a more

sinister picture of institutionalized care for mental illnesses: They were dumping grounds for

unmanageable family members or workhouse employees, for hysterical women, for violent and

mad persons. These people were subjected to invasive and horrendous medical treatments,

confined into hydrobaths, chained to walls or beds, and otherwise restrained.

A person who was impoverished and obviously disabled but

not seen as threatening might end up begging or selling

shoelaces on the street. But there was another way to survive:As much as Victorians saw themselves as enlightened by

progress, science, and social reform, they still paid to gawk at

people they found strange at freak shows. Steam-

poweredtrainsand ships guided by improved navigation

systems were allowing Western adventurers and scientists to

explore the previously unknown parts of the world. People

were excited to gather natural wonders and marvels as well

as travelsouvenirsfor their personal cabinets of

curiosities.Worlds Fairscelebrated the achievements of

industry and design and brought diverse cultures together.

But the shadow side of all this earnest curiosity is the fact

that humans, particularly dark-skinned Africans, were

regularly kept like animals at zoos in Paris, Hamburg,

Antwerp, Barcelona, London, Milan, Warsaw, and New York

at the same time other Africans were kidnapped, shipped to
http://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/the-relic-hunters-who-saved-american-history/http://www.collectorsweekly.com/advertising/worlds-fairhttp://www.collectorsweekly.com/railroadiana/overview


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the American South, and treated as beasts of burden at slave

plantations. The people who were visibly disabled or disfigured provoked the same sort of

rubbernecking intrigue as people with dark-pigmented skin.

Spearheaded with a rising interest in biology and classification, people became curious about

physical and organic differences between humans and animals, Virdi-Dhesi says. Deaf persons

were certainly perceived as cause clbres, as theatrical spectacles. Some persons withdisabilities found success by acknowledging, and showcasing, their disability or deformity.

Joseph Carey Merrick, known widely as the Elephant Man supported himself by joining

traveling freak shows and displaying his deformity. He became a celebrity and received the

support of rich benefactors later in his life, but they still required him to display his deformities.

For many, these shows were preferable to begging and becoming destitute.

Conjoined twins Millie and Christine McKoy, pictured in the 1890s, were
http://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/disabilities_conjoinedtwins.jpghttp://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/why-arent-stories-like-12-years-a-slave-told-at-southern-plantation-museums/


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born into slavery in North Carolina in 1851 and sold by their owner to a

showman for $1,000. (Via Nineteenth-Century Disability, WikiCommons)

But freak shows also contributed to harmful social constructions about whos an outsider to be

ogled, involving racism and sexism as much as ableism. Saartjie Sarah Baartman, also known

as the Hottentot Venus, was a black able-bodied woman who was sexualized in freak shows

for her large posterior. Such shows seem to be a way for communities to define whos normal

and whos not, and assert those values in a troublesome manner, Bourrier says. Blind Tom,

who was black, blind, and probably autistic but a piano prodigy, was exhibited in a freak show.

However, if a white man who had a physical deformity or who just wasnt conventionally

attractive had enough money and power, he could achieve a certain amount clout by joining a

type of fraternal organizationknown as an Ugly Club. The first person who wrote a memoir of

being physically disabled was a member of Parliament called William Hay, who had a

hunchback, Bourrier says. In 1754s Deformity: An Essay, he talks about being hooted at on

the street and Ugly Clubs were sort of a response to that. They survived throughout the 19th

century. It does bring up the idea that disability is a continuum, and its actually difficult to

decide, legally, who is disabled and who is not.

Ugly Clubs rejected the dogma of physiognomy, which said facial features revealed ones

character. The Ugly Face Clubs, gentlemens clubs whose members prided themselves on their

facial eccentricities, are a perfect example for how deformity was juxtaposed with social

exclusion: a member would be an object of ridicule on the streets, but a superstar within the

sanctum of the club, Virdi-Dhesi says.
http://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/decoding-secret-societies/


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From an advertisement for an Ugly Face Club anniversary celebration (1806) reprinted

with the frontispiece in Edward Howells edition of Ye Ugly Face Clubb, Leverpoole, 1743-

1753 (Liverpool, 1912). (Via Nineteenth-Century Disability, courtesy of Gretchen E.

Henderson)

However these clubs did perpetuate the stigma that equated disability with ugliness, which

eventually pushed disabled people out of public spaces. In the late 19th century, cities and

towns around the United States passed laws banning unsightly beggars. In The Ugly Laws:

Disability in Public,Susan M. Schweik investigated how such laws criminalized people with

disabilities.

These laws stayed on the books until the 1970s, when lawmakers started to relent to pressure

from the disability rights movement, which rose in the 1960s along with the civil rights, gay

rights, and womens liberation movements. Disability rights activists campaigned to replacewhat they identified as the medical model of disability with a new social model of disability

which, according to Nineteenth-Century Disability, argues that it is not the person with a

disability who is defective, but the society that stigmatizes physical difference and builds the

world around one standard kind of body.

It wasnt until 1990 that the Americans with Disabilities Act, which made it illegal for employers

to discriminate based on disability, was signed into law in the United States. The lawwhich
http://www.amazon.com/The-Ugly-Laws-Disability-History/dp/0814783619


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celebrates its 25th anniversary this monthrequires schools, businesses, and public buildings to

install accommodations such as wheelchair ramps, wheelchair-accessible door handles and

restrooms, and Braille signage. Television programs, for example, are obligated to provide

captioning for the hearing impaired. For the first time, American society was forced to change,

as opposed to the people with disabilities shouldering the burden of adapting.

Alexander Graham Bell and Clarence J. Blakes ear phonautograph

incorporated an actual human ear, taken from a corpse, into machinery

designed to draw shapes based on a deaf students vocalizations. Thephonautograph inspired Bell to invent the telephone. The image comes

from Count du Marcels 1879 book, The Telephone, the Microphone and

the Phonograph. (Via Nineteenth-Century Disability, viaArchive.org)

The Americans with Disabilities Act is an enormous improvement for people with disabilities,

Bourrier says. And medical technology has done a lot to improve the lives of people with

disabilities in the 20th and 21st centuries. But I also think that in some ways, because the
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Phrenology was used to

justify an abundance of

discriminatory atrocities

against disabled persons.

Victorians lived with so much disability, they might have had a more fluid and compassionate

understanding of it. Today, if were able-bodied, we tend to think of disability as something that

will never happen to us. But the truth is were all, scarily enough, one car accident away from

becoming disabled. Victorians might have had a better understanding of the fragility of the

body.

Today, as it was then, money determines whether, say, a double

amputee ends up using a skateboard to beg on the street or has

access to the most advanced motorized wheelchairs or

prosthetics. And we still celebrate narratives of overcoming and

compensationthink of any sports drama like The Karate

Kid, in which the title character goes on to win the karate

tournament in spite of a seriously injuring his foot. Politicians that promote the idea of pulling

oneself up by ones bootstraps are eager to cut public funding for disability checks and health

care, because any challenge can be overcome with a can-do spirit, right? According to

compensation stories like Daredevil, you might even have special powers that give you an

advantage.

We still have the overcoming and compensation narratives today, and they arent very helpful,

Bourrier says. The more you look at the Victorian era in the present day, the more you see the

way we regard people with disabilities today is not that different. Whats so interesting about the

Americans with Disabilities Act is that it gives disability rights to people who have all sorts of

conditionslike morbid obesity, clinical depression, ulcerative colitis, work injuries, or heart

diseasethat we wouldnt necessarily traditionally see as a disability. Its anything that impairs

your day-to-day life. Most people eventually have a condition like that.


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An artificial left leg with a thigh socket for amputation above the knee, circa 1920. (Via

Nineteenth-Century Disability, courtesy of Wellcome Library, London)

(Learn more at Nineteenth-Century Disability: Cultures and Contexts. For further reading,

pick up Karen Bourriers new book The Measure of Manliness: Disability and Masculinity in

the Mid-Victorian Novel Lennard Davis book Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness,

and the Body Susan M. Schweiks book The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public and R.A.R

Edwards book Words Made Flesh: Nineteenth-Century Deaf Education and the Growth ofDeaf Culture. Explore the history of medicine at the Wellcome Librarys web site.)
https://www.press.umich.edu/7499689/measure_of_manlinesshttp://www.amazon.com/The-Ugly-Laws-Disability-History/dp/0814783619http://www.amazon.com/Words-Made-Flesh-Nineteenth-Century-Disability/dp/1479883735http://www.nineteenthcenturydisability.org/http://wellcomelibrary.org/http://www.amazon.com/Enforcing-Normalcy-Disability-Deafness-Body/dp/1859840078

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