History of Disability in Nineteenth Century Scotland

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Year:
Pages:432
ISBN:0-7734-5271-0
978-0-7734-5271-8
Price:$259.95 + shipping
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This book considers the way in which disability was perceived in the popular and official culture of nineteenth-century Scotland. Assembling the voices of the disabled from memoirs, letters and court proceedings, this work provides the empirical groundwork for understanding the disability experience and its representation during a period of unprecedented industrialization, urbanization and demographic change. This book contains 26 black and white photographs.

Reviews

“This is a sympathetic and densely textured picture of attitudes to and experience of disability. ... Because of the originality of its conception, the book has significance far beyond nineteenth-century Scotland. It should be required reading for historians of medicine and of poverty, irrespective of their country or period of interest, and for those charged with making and implementing social policy, regardless of where they work.” - Professor Rab Houston, Department of Modern History, University of St. Andrews

“Iain Hutchison has gathered an impressive range of stories in his work, and assembles them with great clarity and insight. ... This book has the potential to be a model for how disability history in a national context should be done.” - Dr. Penny L. Richards, Research Scholar, Center for the Study of Women, University of California - Los Angeles

“Iain Hutchison’s study ... makes an important contribution to the growing field of disability history. ... Dr. Hutchison achieves his objective of placing disabled people at the center of disability history.” - Professor Anne Borsay, School of Health Science, Swansea University

"The real triumph of this work is the collection of such compelling qualitative data, which conveys not simply injustice, prejudice, and grief, but also humor, determination, and resilience. ... it is the multifacted nature of experience and the irreducibility of the individual that this book so powerfully affirms." -- Prof. Martin Gorsky, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Foreword by Professor Rab Houston
Preface
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
1 Introduction
2 Perceptions of ‘Other’
3 Literary Encounters with People with Disabilities
4 Life in the Community
5 A Home from Home: The Role and Experience of Institutions
6 People with Disabilities in a ‘Productive Society’
7 Personal Relationships
8 Conclusion
Appendices
1 Census Returns as Identification of ‘Other’
2 Glasgow Royal Infirmary - Examples of Amputations Resulting from Industrial Injury, 1864-1879
3 Glasgow Royal Infirmary - Examples of Amputations Resulting from Transport Accidents, 1866-1881
4 ‘Regulations Respecting the Conduct and Employment of the Blind Admitted into the Asylum at Edinburgh’
5 Occupation Categories of the Blind, 1871
Bibliography
Index

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