Disability studies has gained prominence in recent years, transforming fields ranging from design to literary studies with insurgent approaches to access and representation. The newest volume of Osiris, “Disability and the History of Science,” extends this movement to ask how disability has been a central, if unacknowledged, force in the scientific disciplines and the history of science. The volume examines the many roles that disability and disabled people have played throughout the history of science, calling attention to the shaping of scientific knowledge production by disability.
Editors Jaipreet Virdi, Mara Mills, and Sarah F. Rose, in their introduction to the volume, distinguish “disability history of science” from conventional “histories of disability,” in which disabled people are treated as passive objects of inquiry. The disability histories in this volume, by contrast, examine the contributions of disabled people to the sciences, highlighting the work of ME/CFS (chronic fatigue) activists, “supercrip” laboratory scientists, and people using assistive technologies. Other articles address historical definitions of disability through subjects such as blindness in ancient Mesopotamia, smallpox vaccination campaigns in Meiji Japan, and the phrenological attribution of pathology to Indigenous remains.
Many of these chapters discuss the formation of disability within structures of empire and capitalism, which necessitated new methods of “sorting and managing workers’ bodies.” The British Empire, for instance, applied the category of “infirmity” to people at the margins of its economy, and used racialized claims of disability to re-define “health” for African soldiers to justify extracting their labor. For British miners, disability was a crucial issue for receiving compensation for breathing issues caused by their labor, and, conversely, for industrial supervisors seeking to eliminate disabled employees from their enterprises.
The volume also investigates the relationship between disability and medical epidemics. The editors write that Osiris 39, assembled under the conditions of the COVID-19 pandemic, illustrates “the urgency of disability studies as an expert discourse in our personal lives, work environments, and social worlds.” It is a project produced through disability and the work of disabled scholars, arguing for a new commitment to disability epistemology in the history of science.
