Disability by David Turner review – a revelatory new history
This study of the struggle for rights includes incredible personal stories that we should all be more familiar with You could take two outwardly contradictory
This study of the struggle for rights includes incredible personal stories that we should all be more familiar with You could take two outwardly contradictory lessons from the historian David Turner’s new book on disability in the UK. First, that alarmingly little has changed for disabled people since the beginning of the modern age (the book’s first few stories, of 17th-century men and women having to prove they were disabled enough to receive parish support to avoid starvation, will be familiar to anyone who has tried to claim the personal independence payment).
And second, that absolutely everything has changed - from the closing of asylums to the advent of prosthetics to the eventual, belated enshrining of disability rights in law. But the central argument of Disability helps to reconcile these two narratives into a coherent whole. Turner, a professor at Swansea University, shows that while public and political attitudes to disability have remained poor, disabled people have challenged them at every stage, wresting progress out of even the most unpromising circumstances.
This is not a story of rights and dignity bestowed from on high, but of the people and communities clawing them into being. Continue reading...
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