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This article provides a new exploration of disabled innovation that transforms our understanding of collective contributions to the history of science and technology. It does so by showing how a user network galvanized individual inventions into disabled expertise by tracking the development of two technologies-the Selectascan/Possum and the adapted Loudspeaking Telephone. Hamraie and Fritsch's 2019 "Crip Technoscience Manifesto" defined "disabled expertise" by exploring how disabled technology modification has been devalued. This article takes up their manifesto's challenge to combine disability history with science and technology studies by analyzing the technologies discussed in Responaut, a British quarterly magazine published between 1963 and 1989. Responauts were people who depended on respirators to breathe. This technological interdependence meant that users adapted an extraordinary variety of technologies to live well with respirators and modify their personal environment.

Early nineteenth-century America's robust trade in medical and health care products is richly documented, yet many scholars have overlooked just what role people with impairments played in that industry as inventors and retailers, forming relationships with clients based on their shared experiences of disability. A study of newspaper advertisements, patents, organizational records, medical accounts, and objects suggests that many impaired and formerly impaired producers marketed products to impaired consumers, creating an organic and unselfconscious network of disabled people who made, sold, and bought knowledge and devices about and for disability. Recovering this world of disabled inventors, retailers, and their clients reveals how disability fueled innovation in early nineteenth-century America, expanding scholarly understandings of who participated in and profited from the burgeoning medical and health care economy. This study also suggests that the market was an early venue of disability community where people came together around their common bond.

This study examines the origin and religious roots of taegyo, Korean traditional prenatal education, and raises concerns about potential negative impacts of contemporary taegyo practice from feminist and disability perspectives. Taegyo has been accepted without much criticism due to its deep integration into prenatal care culture, and most existing literature focuses on taegyo's positive impacts on fetal health and development from scientific or nursing perspectives. This article analyzes a 19th-century taegyo manual, Taegyo Singi, and Seon and Won Buddhist literatures on taegyo in order to understand the religio-cultural concepts and contexts of taegyo. The article then discusses the potential downsides of taegyo practice today, considering its patriarchal, mother-blaming, ablest roots in Korean history and culture. The author raises concerns about social oppression, the control of women's bodily autonomy, and the disproportionate responsibility burden that taegyo places on Korean women. The article concludes with suggestions for future research and for well-balanced taegyo practice.

This essay argues that considering disability and disability history needs to be part of any history of epidemics. Recent scholarship has shown the many intersections of disability history and history of medicine. This essay argues that disability plays many roles in an epidemic from establishing pre-existing conditions, to affecting the acute phase of the disease, to creating lingering disabilities in the long aftermath. Histories of epidemics that ignore the many ways in which disability affects the experience of an epidemic are incomplete.

Recently, there has been a prominent call in the history of medicine for greater engagement with disability perspectives. In this article, I suggest that critiques of the so-called medical model have been an important vehicle by which alternative narratives of disability entered the clinical arena. Historians of medicine have rarely engaged with the medical model beyond descriptive accounts of it. I argue that to more adequately address disability perspectives, historians of medicine must better historicize the medical model concept and critique, which has been drawn upon by physicians, activists, and others to advance particular perspectives on disability. My present contribution describes two distinct formulations of critique that originated in differing interest groups and characterized the medical model alternatively as insufficient and oppressive. I examine the World Health Organization's efforts to incorporate these distinctive medical model critiques during the development and revision of its International Classification of Impairments, Disabilities, and Handicaps.

This article addresses the precarious place of transgender and gender non-cis persons in relation to their discrimination-protections in recent legal, medical, and ethical policies in the United States. At present, there exists a contradiction such that trans persons are considered "pathological" enough that they are included in the latest iteration of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-V) as "gender dysphoric," but they are not included in the category of "disabled" under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). As such, trans persons in America are subject to the stigma of pathology (albeit with medical treatment) without the full protections of the ADA. By contrast, transgender and non-cis-gender Americans find their queer cohorts who are HIV-positive to be fully protected by the ADA. We ask whether transgender and non-cis-gender persons should embrace their (already pathologized) personhood as a disability. Sometimes "choosing disability" affords more rights than it deploys stigma.

This article reviews adoption debates about the disclosure of children's medical history in the twentieth century, noting shifts in the prescription of how much and what to tell adoptive applicants. I look at how adoption professional debates throughout the twentieth century around the disclosure of a child's medical history reveal the ways in which these professionals tried to deal with issues of predictability, risk, adoptability, and acceptability when it came to the persistent question of disability in adoptive family making. I consider how this management is similar to and different from histories of reproduction. I argue that as child eligibility gradually expanded to include children labeled disabled, and as adoption moved from a being a parent-centered practice to a child-centered one, professionals more intensely negotiated the management and communication of disability risk as a way to both mitigate the possibility of a failed placement and to facilitate a successful one.

This essay explores the multiple sites where disability appears in the history of medicine and suggests ways in which medical historians can self-consciously incorporate a disability perspective into their own work. Just as medical historians have much to learn from disability historians, disability historians could benefit from looking more closely at the history of medicine. While disability cannot (and should not) be reduced to disease, the fact remains that some forms of disability are brought about by disease processes, and some require daily regimes of home health care, therapy, and pain management. How the disabled have interacted with health care institutions, caretakers, and the medical establishment is too significant to be written out of its history.

While characters with disabilities appear frequently in Victorian fiction, deaf characters, specifically, are almost entirely absent. In fact, the only deaf characters who use sign language in Victorian fiction are Madonna Blyth in Wilkie Collins’s Hide and Seek and Sophy Marigold in Charles Dickens’s “Doctor Marigold.” Grounding its analysis in these two texts, this article contends that it is, in particular, a deaf character’s relationship to language that disqualifies him or her from conventional representation in Victorian fiction. Through reading Hide and Seek and “Doctor Marigold” in the context of Victorian deaf history, Collins and Dickens’s realist aims, and Victorian generic conventions rooted in transcribing orality, this essay argues that the absence of deaf characters reveals the investment of mid-Victorian fiction in a particular and normativized relationship between bodies, spoken language, and textuality.

As a group of accounts that span the decades from the mid-1940s to the present, the published polio narratives enable us to align their shifting perceptions of disability with social, cultural, and technological change. This paper identifies two distinct groups of narratives. Authors of the first group, writing between the mid-1930s and mid-1950s--a period of relative prosperity, conformity, and homogeneity--were uncomfortable with radical movements, diversity, and conflict; their narratives typically told of either full or substantial recovery. Beginning in the mid-1950s--the period of both McCarthy and the Civil Rights movement--a second wave of narratives begins to tell stories of partial to serious disability; typically, they reflect on a lifetime of coping with chronic disability. Both sets of narratives, however, represent a dialogue with Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Roosevelt himself, journalists, and the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis all helped to create and promote a core polio narrative featuring FDR's triumph over disease and disability that would become a national myth. Yet while the early narratives reinforced the core elements of the Roosevelt myth, the later ones began to challenge them.