A HISTORY OF EXTRAORDINARY HUMAN DIVERSITIES

A HISTORY OF EXTRAORDINARY

HUMAN DIVERSITIES

plotting a few points

KEY THEORISTS & CONCEPTS

John Langdon Down’s A Treatise on Idiocy and its Cognate Affections (1867): classifies idiots as “Mongolian,” “Malay,” “Ethiopian,” “Aztec,” or “Caucasian” Francis Galton’s Hereditary Genius (1869): “natural” genius, “evil inheritance,” selective breeding, the “lower” races Irving Goffman’s Stigma (1963)

types: physical, behavioral, racial responses of the stigmatize:

surgery or therapy overcompensation (“supercrip” later coined by others) break w/ reality: “blessing in disguise,” “the limits of normals”

Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilization (1964): powerfully liminal, symbolic position of madness in Middle Ages; 18th c. Reason, fear of madness

KEY THEORISTS & CONCEPTS

Lennard Davis’ Enforcing Normalcy (1995)

“ableism,” “differently abled,” “temporarily abled”

sign language as: evolutionary predecessor to speech, closer to writing than speech, beautiful & effective

the average and the 19th-century rise of statistics

Rosemary Garland Thomson’s Extraordinary Bodies (1997)

disability as ethnicity, not pathology

the “normate”

lit. repres. lacks mimesis—is static; births objectification, symbolism

KEY THEORISTS & CONCEPTS

Joseph N. Straus’ “Autism as Culture” (1997)

autism as pathological excess of what the Western world most values—autonomous individuality:

Local coherence (detail-focused processing & refusal to subsume individual events into a hierarchy

Fixity of Focus (gift for mimesis, rote memories)

Private Meanings (locally coherent networks & originality); autistic arts

Simi Linton’s “Reassigning Meaning” (1998): specious “nice” words,” “nasty” words used metaphorically

DR. BEVERLY TAYLOR’S EMAIL: METAPHOR

Dear Paul, 4-7-16

I’m so chagrined to be such a tardy and unsatisfactory correspondent. I actually just discovered in an email file titled ‘drafts,’ which I never had looked in before, an email I wrote just a week after I was visiting in your department in San Luis Obispo. I was thanking you profusely for showing me such a wonderful time. I loved meeting your colleagues and students, visiting your classes, and speaking to the lovely large group! And it was terrific seeing Tracey and your smart beautiful girls. This all sounds very lame at the remove of so much time. I truly thought I had thanked you properly last year! I don’t know how I ended up not pressing ‘send’ on the message. Now it seems hopelessly out of date, and evidence of very bad manners on my part. I’m so very sorry. Please know that I loved everything about the trip and that I thank you most sincerely for thinking to invite me.

DR. BEVERLY TAYLOR & ENGL 512 (VICTORIAN LIT.) IN WINTER ‘15

DR. BEVERLY TAYLOR TEMPORARILY ABLED

. . .

I’m trying not to whine, but I’ve broken my leg and everything is terribly slow and difficult. Who knew that one’s brain worked less well when a fibula was fractured! (Nothing terribly exciting—I fell down some steps at the NC Symphony performance in Raleigh and was very luck not to break my neck.)

Thanks so much for persevering in writing to me even though that’s akin to sending things into a black whole in the universe.

Please give my love to Tracey and the girls—and keep a dose for yourself—

Beverly

KEY THEORISTS & CONCEPTS

Marsha Saxton’s “Disability Rights and Selective Abortion” (1998)

eugenic abortion as oppression

the right not to have an abortion

no disabled child as inherently “defective”; Social Model vs. Medical model

Brenda Brueggemann’s Lend Me Your Ear: The Rhetorical Construction of Deafness (1999)

“passing” & “coming out”

deafness as gendered

“Brother & Sister, or Deaf and Dumb” Thomas Woolner” (1862)

“Deaf and Dumb: A Group by Woolner” (1864)Robert Browning Only the prism’s obstruction shows aright

The secret of a sunbeam, breaks its light Into the jeweled bow from blankest white;So may a glory from defect arise:Only by Deafness may the vexed Love wreak 5 Its insuppressive sense on brow and cheek,Only by Dumbness adequately speakAs favored mouth could never, through the eyes.

5-MIN. BREAK (SHOW 2ND CLIP FROM 300)

ANCIENT NEAR EAST

Mesopotamia: places of primary care

Sumerian Creation Myth of Enki & Ninmah

“exposure” & infanticide rare

chronic diseases (e.g. dropsy, leprosy) as punishment for hidden sin; stigma

from chp. 25 of the Instruction of Amenemope, an Egyptian wisdom text

Do not laugh at a blind man,Nor tease a dwarf,Nor cause hardship for the lame.Don’t tease a man who is in the hand of the god [i.e. ill or insane] Nor be angry with him for his failings.Man is clay and straw,The god is his builder.He tears down, he builds up daily.

GREEK MYTH

Oedipus: “swollen foot”; Sphinx’s riddle; eyes plucked

Hephaestus: lame; magician; god of fire & artisans

Thersites (of The Iliad): bandy-legged, shoulders stooped, pointed head; equally flawed character

Teiresias: blind prophet

assorted myths of blind individuals w/ special abilities

GREEK UTOPIAS & IDEALS

Plato’s Republic (c.380 B.C.): secret disposal

Aristotle’s Politics (384-322 B.C.): exposure

Plutarch’s Lycurgus (c.100-200 B.C.): deposit at the Apothetae, chasm beneath Mount Taygetusu

kalokagathia: from kalos (beautiful) and kagathos (good)

SPARTAN GREECEfrom Zack Snyder’s 300 (2007)

THE BIBLE OLD TESTAMENT

Leviticus 19:14 / cursing & stumbling blocks 2 Samuel 4:4 & 9:1-13 / lameness of Mephibosheth (son of Jonathan); solicitude of King David Isaiah 35:1-7: “glory of the Lord” one day erasing disability: “5 Then will the eyes of the blind be opened / and the ears of the deaf unstopped. / 6 Then will the lame leap like a deer, / and the mute tongue shout for joy.”

THE BIBLE NEW TESTAMENT

John 9:1-41 / Jesus Heals a Man Born Blind

disability not tied to parents’ sin; disability as opportunity to show God’s works (v.3)

Jesus as “light of the world”; process: spit, mud, washing, & healing (v.5-7)

spiritual blindness of the Pharisees (v.35-40)

I Corinthians 1:26-29: 28 God chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are, 29 so that no one may boast before him.

IRISH BREHON LAW (432-1603 A.D.)

age 7: sensible, fool, or mad? Useful?

fear & fetters

proscriptions for both fools and the mad

legal protections: crime, contracts, care & protection, & property

BETHLEM (“BEDLAM”) ESTABLISHED 1247 A.D.

1403: concerted shift towards “lunatics”

1556: Bethlem annexed to Bridewell; Bethlem only mental hospital in Europe

1675-76: new hospital built, holds 120

1704: galleries still open to visitors

1770: weekend “funfair” closes; visitors must have ticket and be accompanied

William Hogarth’s“A Rake’s Progress” (1735)

BETHLEM HOSPITAL AROUND 1761from Mark Robson’s Bedlam (1946)

5-MIN. BREAK (SHOW 2ND CLIP FROM

BEDLAM)

BRITISH PUBLIC POLICY

1536: Henry VIII dissolves monasteries, priories, friaries.

1536: short-lived act requires parish churchwardens to collect voluntary alms for providing handouts; no begging

1538: City of London petitions Crown to fund hospitals for poor

1563-1601: various poor laws to remedy widespread poverty & encourage agriculture, commerce, manufacture

1601: “AN ACT FOR THE RELIEF OF THE POOR”

individual parishes now responsible for collecting poor rate, allocating relief

materials provided for able-bodied, working poor: “out-relief” (primarily bread, clothing, fuel, rent payment)

almhouses, poorhouses, non-residential workhouses for “impotent poor”; relief & maintenance legal of family if able

collection of poor rates by unpaid parish overseers

EARLY BRITISH INSTITUTIONALIZATION

1575: one bridewell required per county

1697: first workhouse formed by several parishes.

1713: one of first charitable asylums set up at Norwich.

1723: parishes allowed to set up workhouses & deny “outside” relief

1754: bill to mandate licensing of private madhouses fails. 1774: Act for Regulating Private Madhouses (licenses, inspections) passes

1792: Tuke’s York Retreat founded (“moral management”)

BRITISH PUBLIC POLICY

1714: passes act distilling laws concerning rogues, vagabonds, sturdy beggars, & vagrants into one law authorizing justices of peace to lock up “furiously mad and dangerous” in “some secure place.” Prompts creation of madhouses.

1800: Act for Safe Custody of Insane Persons Charged w/ Offenses

1808: County Asylum Act permits magistrates to erect public asylums where parishes can send “dangerous idiots & lunatics”; asylums become mandatory in 1845

1834: POOR LAW AMENDMENT ACT

restricts outdoor relief

parishes unite to form one workhouse per area (660 new, larger Poor Law parishes)

theoretically, insane and idiots cannot stay in workhouse longer than 2 wks, but in practice . . .

provision of food & wages must be lower than that earned by poorest able-bodied laborers in local community

BRITISH PUBLIC POLICY

1845: County Asylums Act

1845: Lunatics Act of 1845—declared all insane persons (lunatics, idiots, & “persons of unsound mind”) should be relocated to county asylums, but . . .

1860: Criminal Lunatics Asylum Act—creates Broadmoor Hospital

1886: The Idiots Act

BRITISH PUBLIC POLICY

1913: Mental Deficiency Act adds fourth category of “moral imbeciles.” Many idiots & imbeciles placed in “colonies” or other institutions

1930: Mental Treatment Act allows voluntary patients to pay for outpatient care, “lunatic asylum” becomes “mental hospital”

1959: Mental Health Act introduces new, continuous scale of gradations based on not only IQ but other social & psychological factors; new focus on social integration

Emily Dickinson’s “Much Madness is Divinest Sense” (1861-64)

Poem 620

Much Madness is divinest Sense - To a discerning Eye - Much Sense - the starkest Madness - ’Tis the Majority In this, as all, prevail - 5 Assent - and you are sane - Demur - you’re straightway dangerous - And handled with a Chain -

Robert Browning’s “Porphyria’s Lover” (1834; 1836, 1842)

“No pain felt she; / I am quite sure she felt no pain” (ll.41-42)

5-MIN. BREAK (SHOW CLIP FROM THE

MADNESS OF KING GEORGE)

“IDIOT” ASYLUMS

1837: Édouard Ségouin founds 1st school (Paris)

1848: idiot asylum created in Park House, Highgate

1850: Park House full; 2nd facility opens

1858: John L. Down becomes medical superintendent at Highgate

1855: overflow moves to incomplete facility on Earlswood Common in Surrey

1881: Earlswood Asylum overcrowded by 10%

AMERICAN FREAK SHOWS (1835-1940)

Joice Heth

reductive; hyperbolic

narrative pamphlet

singularity as “freak”

the “average man”

Joice Heth

Extraordinary Bodies (1997)

“The cultural dilemma regarding the extent to which

individual variations could be tolerated within a society based on freedom and equality was solved by installing the average

man—a common version of Emerson’s Representative Man—

in the position previously held by the dethroned exceptional

man, the aristocrat or the king. An abstract construct

mandated by the idea of democracy, the multiply measured average man embodied humanity’s regularity and stability,

around which particularities ranged on a short leash” (64).

AMERICAN FREAK SHOWS (1835-1940)

new social hierarchy

foils for Emerson’s & Thoreau’s ideals

repulsion & identification

displaced anxiety

spectacle, but celebrity

economic independence, community

today’s medical modelJoseph Merrick

THE CARNIVAL COMMUNITY from Tod Browning’s Freaks (1932)

Walt Whitman’s “The Wound-Dresser” (1865)

I dress the perforated shoulder, the foot with the bullet-wound,Cleanse the one with a gnawing and putrid gangrene, so sickening, so offensive . . .

(ll.53-54)

Siegfried Sassoon’s “They” (1919)The Bishop tells us: ‘When the boys come back‘They will not be the same; for they’ll have fought ‘In a just cause; they lead the last attack ‘On Anti-Christ; their comrades’ blood has bought ‘New right to breed an honorable race, 5 ‘They have challenged Death and dared him face to face.’‘We’re none of us the same!’ the boys reply.‘For George lost both his legs; and Bill’s stone blind;‘Poor Jim’s shot through the lungs and like to die;‘And Bert’s gone syphilitic: you’ll not find 10 ‘A chap who’s served that hasn’t found some change.’And the Bishop said: ‘The ways of God are strange!’

RELEVANT LIT.

1487: Malleus Maleficarum (The Witch Hammer)

1621: Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy

1664: Thomas Willis’ Anatomy of the Brain

1733: Thomas Fitzgerald’s Bedlam Verses

1757: William Batties’s Treatise on Madness

1846: Edouard Ségouin’s Traitement moral, hygiene et education des idiots

1844: James Sheppard’s Observations on the Proximate Causes of Insanity

RELEVANT LIT.

1847: John Conolly’s On the Construction and Government of Asylums and Hospitals for the Insane

1849: John Barlow’s Man’s Power over himself to Prevent or Control Insanity

1859: Samuel Smiles’ Self-Help

1864: Association of Medical Officers of Hospitals and Asylums (1864) becomes Medico-Psychological Society & establishes Asylum Journal

1867: John Langdon Down publishes ethnic classification system of idiots (“Mongolian,” “Malay,” “Ethiopian,” “Aztec,” “Caucasian”) in Journal of Mental Science