Disability history and the history of emotions: reflections on eighteenth-century Britain
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3989/asclepio.2016.18Keywords:
Disability, Emotion, Pity, Sympathy, HappinessAbstract
Both Disability History and the History of Emotions have expanded significantly as fields of enquiry but despite sharing common interests in health, well being and difference there has been little interaction between scholars working in these areas. This article suggests ways in which history’s “emotional turn” can shed light on disability in the past, using the case study of Britain in the eighteenth century. Theories of the “passions”, “sentiments” and “affections” were used to describe causes of impairment and to prescribe appropriate responses. Although this was a period in which disability was commonly regarded as a “miserable” or “pitiable” state, a close reading of a variety of sources from medical texts to newspapers and periodicals reveals that the degree of “unhappiness” associated with disability depended on timing, context and the symbolic significance of certain impairments.
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