Editing Disability (section)

=== Middle Ages and After ===
During the [[Middle Ages]], madness and other conditions were thought to be caused by demons. They were also thought to be part of the natural order, especially during and in the fallout of the [[Black Death]], which wrought impairments throughout the general population.<ref name=":0">{{cite book |last1=Braddock |first1=David |last2=Parrish |first2=Susan |chapter=An Institutional History of Disability |pages=11–68 |chapter-url=https://books.google.com/books?id=vAKSZPR-hk0C&pg=PA11 |editor1-last=Albrecht |editor1-first=Gary L. |editor2-last=Seelman |editor2-first=Katherine D. |editor3-last=Bury |editor3-first=Michael |title=Handbook of Disability Studies |date=2001 |publisher=SAGE |isbn=978-0-7619-2874-4 |doi=10.4135/9781412976251}}</ref> In the [[early modern period]] there was a shift to seeking biological causes for physical and mental differences, as well as heightened interest in demarcating categories: for example, Ambroise Pare, in the sixteenth century, wrote of "monsters", "prodigies", and "the maimed".<ref>{{Cite book |last=Stiker |first=Henri |title=A History of Disability |publisher=University of Michigan Press |year=2000 |location=Ann Arbor, Michigan |page=91}}</ref> The [[European Enlightenment]]'s emphases on knowledge derived from reason and on the value of natural science to human progress helped spawn the birth of [[Institutionalisation|institutions]] and associated knowledge systems that observed and categorized human beings; among these, the ones significant to the development of today's concepts of disability were [[Psychiatric hospital|asylums]], [[clinic]]s, and [[prison]]s.<ref name=":0" />

Contemporary concepts of disability are rooted in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century developments. Foremost among these was the development of clinical medical discourse, which made the human body visible as a thing to be manipulated, studied, and transformed. These worked in tandem with scientific discourses that sought to classify and categorize and, in so doing, became methods of [[Normalization (people with disabilities)|normalization]].<ref>{{Cite book |last=Foucault |first=Michel |title=The History of Sexuality, vol. 1 |publisher=Vintage |year=1980 |location=New York}}</ref>

The concept of the "norm" developed in this time period, and is signaled in the work of the Belgian [[statistician]], [[Sociology|sociologist]], [[mathematician]], and [[astronomer]] [[Adolphe Quetelet]], who wrote in the 1830s of {{lang|fr|l'homme moyen}} – the average man. Quetelet postulated that one could take the sum of all people's attributes in a given population (such as their height or weight) and find their average and that this figure should serve as a statistical norm toward which all should aspire.<ref name=":8">{{Cite journal |last1=Grue |first1=Lars |last2=Heiberg |first2=Arvid |date=November 4, 2006 |title=Notes on the History of Normality – Reflections on the Work of Quetelet and Galton |journal=Scandinavian Journal of Disability Research |language=en-US |volume=8 |issue=4 |pages=232 |doi=10.1080/15017410600608491|doi-access=free}}</ref>

This idea of the statistical norm threads through the rapid take-up of statistics gathering by Britain, the United States, and the Western European states during this time period, and it is tied to the rise of [[eugenics]].<ref name=":8" /> Disability, as well as the concepts of abnormal, non-normal, and normalcy, came from this.<ref>{{cite book |last=Davis |first=Lennard J. |chapter=Constructing Normalcy |pages=23–49 |chapter-url=https://books.google.com/books?id=zMzpCUVeII4C&pg=PA23 |title=Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body |date=1995 |publisher=Verso |isbn=978-1-85984-007-8 }}</ref> The circulation of these concepts is evident in the popularity of the [[freak show]], where showmen profited from exhibiting people who deviated from those norms.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Bogdan |first=Robert |title=Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit |year=1998}}</ref>

With the rise of eugenics in the latter part of the nineteenth century, such deviations were viewed as dangerous to the health of entire populations. With disability viewed as part of a person's biological make-up and thus their genetic inheritance, scientists turned their attention to notions of weeding such as "deviations" out of the gene pool. Various metrics for assessing a person's genetic fitness were determined and were then used to [[Deportation|deport]], sterilize, or institutionalize those deemed unfit. People with disabilities were one of the groups targeted by the [[Nazi Germany|Nazi regime]] in Germany, resulting in approximately 250,000 disabled people being killed during [[the Holocaust]].<ref>{{Cite web |title=Disabled people |website=Holocaust Memorial Day Trust |url=https://www.hmd.org.uk/learn-about-the-holocaust-and-genocides/nazi-persecution/disabled-people/ |access-date=June 7, 2023 |language=en}}</ref> At the end of the [[World War II|Second World War]], with the example of [[Nazi eugenics]], eugenics faded from [[Public sphere|public discourse]], and increasingly disability cohered into a set of attributes to which medicine could attend – whether through augmentation, rehabilitation, or treatment. In both contemporary and modern history, disability was often viewed as a by-product of [[incest]] between [[first-degree relatives]] or [[second-degree relatives]].<ref>{{cite journal |author=Barlow, Kathleen |year=2006 |title=Inbreeding, Incest, and the Incest Taboo: The State of Knowledge at the Turn of the Century |journal=American Anthropologist |volume=108 |issue=2 |pages=447–48 |doi=10.1525/aa.2006.108.2.447}}</ref>

[[File:Let's Raise the Roof - A Social Model of Disability - a Welsh Government video - 2021.webm|thumb|A short government advisory animation on the [[social model of disability]]]]
Disability scholars have also pointed to the [[Industrial Revolution]], along with the economic shift from [[feudalism]] to [[capitalism]], as prominent historical moments in the understanding of disability. Although there was a certain amount of religious superstition surrounding disability during the [[Middle Ages]], disabled people were still able to play significant roles in the rural production based economy, allowing them to make genuine contributions to daily economic life.<ref name=":10">{{Cite journal |last1=Russell |first1=Marta |last2=Malhotra |first2=Ravi |date=2002 |title=Capitalism and Disability |url=https://socialistregister.com/index.php/srv/article/view/5784 |journal=Socialist Register |language=en |volume=38 |pages=212–213 |issn=0081-0606}}</ref> The Industrial Revolution and the advent of capitalism made it so that people were no longer tied to the land and were then forced to find work that would pay a wage in order to survive. The wage system, in combination with industrialized production, transformed the way bodies were viewed as people were increasingly valued for their ability to produce like machines.<ref>{{Cite book |last1=Marini |first1=Irmo |url=https://connect.springerpub.com/content/book/978-0-8261-8063-6/part/part01/chapter/ch01 |title=Psychosocial Aspects of Disability |last2=Graf |first2=Noreen M. |last3=Millington |first3=Michael |date=2017 |publisher=Springer |isbn=978-0-8261-8062-9 |edition=2nd |publication-date=2017 |language=en |chapter=The History of Treatment Toward People With Disabilities}}</ref> Capitalism and the industrial revolution effectively solidified this class of "disabled" people who could not conform to the standard [[Working class|worker]]'s body or level of work power. As a result, disabled people came to be regarded as a problem, to be solved or erased.<ref name=":10" />

In the early 1970s, the [[disability rights movement]] became established, when disability activists began to challenge how society treated disabled people and the medical approach to disability. Due to this work, physical [[Accessibility|barriers to access]] were identified. These conditions functionally disabled them, and what is now known as the [[social model of disability]] emerged. Coined by Mike Oliver in 1983, this phrase distinguishes between the [[medical model of disability]] – under which an impairment needs to be fixed – and the social model of disability – under which the society that limits a person needs to be fixed.{{sfn|Oliver|1990}}