Imagine the world without the Internet, without mobile phones, cable television, fossil fuel, and pesticides. The world where cataract is treated with a hare’s gall bladder and honey applied to the eye with a feather, and infant mortality is high enough to be the norm.
Welcome to the Middle Ages.
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People with disabilities live here, too.
In Europe, the monasteries took up the task of looking after people with impairments who could not work. Families, friends, communities, and towns offered some support. Often times, begging was all they could resort to, especially in the early days.
The attitude towards people with disabilities varied from judgement (“disability as a punishment for sins”) to compassion (“their suffering on Earth brings them closer to God”), from indifference to fear.
“State-funded”, centralised care systems were yet to become a thing, but sickly babies (and adults) wouldn’t face the grim fate of their mythical Spartan spiritual ancestors any more.
Speaking of the glorious ancient times, Plutarch’s famous words summarise it quite well.
…it is neither better for themselves nor for the city to live [their] natural life poorly equipped.
Many centuries later, in 1948, Camus would paint a similar attitude towards disability in “The Plague”:
An invalid needs small attentions, he likes to have something to rely on, and that's natural enough. But at Oran the violent extremes of temperature, the exigencies of business, the uninspiring surroundings, the sudden nightfalls, and the very nature of its pleasures call for good health. An invalid feels out of it there.
The Middle Ages, having as little regard for human life as they did, nurtured a certain peculiar curiosity.
Foucault in “Madness and Civilisation” talks about how locating leper hospitals close to the city gates reminded the people of their Christian duties. Moreover, until the 17th century, insanity was perceived as a sign of cosmic wisdom.
In 1425 in Paris, an infamous “pig beating” contest took place, where four blind men, armed with sticks, were set to beat a pig for the crowd’s amusement. Obviously, they ended up hitting each other, to which an anonymous chronicler, recapping the events, notes that they would have likely killed one another, were they given real weapons instead.
Idiot Cages and Ships of Fools, monasteries and foster care: people with impairments were segregated, perceived as “different”, feared, ridiculed, but the God-fearing society was not (yet) ready to pretend they did not exist or purge them for contaminating the gene pool.
Fair to say, the Medieval people with disabilities were not entirely marginalised. Some were lucky enough to have a community looking after them, a job, a prosthetic limb, or a horseback to fight on, like the blind king John of Bohemia.
Would it also be correct to assume that the public was better aware of disabilities than, say, in the centuries to come? With somewhere between 15–20%% of the population having a disability, and no universal contemporary definition of disability, it is hard to arrive at a definitive conclusion, but it appears to be so.
In A Social History of Disability, Irina Metzler claims that people with disabilities were a
…cultural wild card, removed from one status, but not yet inhabiting another, and opening the possibility of any outcome.
Being “everywhere”, people with impairments were “deeply engrained in collective mentalities and social attitudes”: perhaps not seen as equal, but definitely not completely overlooked by their able-bodied fellows.
Further reading
A Social History of Disability, a book Irina Metzler;
A social history of disability in the Middle Ages: cultural considerations of physical impairment, an article by Dustin Galer;
A Social History of Disability in the Middle Ages, a book (reviewed by Dr Katherine Harvey);
Education in the Middle Ages, a book, edited by Cameron Hunt McNabb';
Medieval Constructions of a Disability, a book by Edward Wheatley;
Disability in the medieval period 1050-1485, by Historic England;
Disability in England, a blog post by Joe Chaplin;
Disability in the medieval period, a blog article by Alex Squire;
Representations of Disabilities and Illnesses in Medieval Manuscripts, an article by Alison Hudson;
The Middle Ages, Original Sin, and the Solidarity of Disability, an article.