Disability In Eighteenth-Century England (Routledge Studies In Modern British History) details from infibeam

Disability is a burgeoning area of historical research. Historians of disability a " largely looking back at the period from a modern perspective a " have identified the eighteenth century as a key period of transition. In materialist histories of disability, the stirrings of industrialisation and economic change in this period is taken to herald the emergence of new modes of economic rationality that served to marginalise and devalue people with impairments as they were excluded from the mode of production. In other accounts, the period is one in which the dominant cultural paradigm for understanding impairment shifted from a a religiousa (TM) model, in which disability was viewed as a an immutable condition caused by supernatural agencya (TM), to a a medicala (TM) model which cast disability as a a biological insufficiency amenable to professional treatmenta (TM). This book seeks to re-assess and modify these perceptions of the pre-modern era.Disability in Eighteenth-Century England analyzes both cultural representations of impairment and how impaired men and women discussed their own experiences of disability. While histories of disability have often focused on the causes of impairment and the treatment of disabled people as recipients of medical provision or institutional care, this book takes a cultural approach. It captures disability in a net of narratives, in the process exploring ways in which meanings of impairment were formed within different cultural contexts, and examining how disabled men and women used, appropriated or rejected these representations in making sense of their own experiences.