Early scholars within the field of disability history noted that much of the pre-modern historical evidence related to disability came from institutional bodies and people working inside of an institution, such as the medical and legal field. Particularly prior to the 20th C, it can be more difficult to find records that are written by disabled peoples themselves rather than written about them by someone else. Therefore, the technique of reading sources ‘against the grain’ in order to recover the voices of those who might have been lost within the traditional narrative can be very helpful.

Reading against the grain means that, when looking at a typical source, you should read to search for the opposite of what it might tell you at face value. To do this, you might investigate certain word choices or descriptions to consider the motives of the author and what it might reveal about the subject beyond what has been written down. You are ultimately trying to get at the perspective of someone who was not able to voice their own side of the story within the historical record.

When working on disability history, it is also important to consider silences in the archive. Sometimes, there may be gaps in what has been preserved, the sources may only be from a certain perspective or produced by a specific person, organisation, or body. To recover the voices and perspectives that have been lost, it might be necessary to think outside the box and consider the sources that you do have in a broader context, perhaps also thinking about what has been left out and why.

• What methods and techniques from other disciplines might we use to give us a greater understanding of disability history / to look at topics within disability history through a more comprehensive lens?

• What questions do other disciplines pose in relation to disability studies and how might these questions inform our own understanding?

• Are there techniques within other research areas of history that might prove useful for understanding disability history?

When thinking about disability history, it is important to remember that understandings about disability, both in terms of what may constitute a disability and what was previously understood compared to our modern knowledge, change through time and space.

The social model of disability also suggests that there are changes over time in what is considered to be a disability and what is not. Cultural differences also mean that there is variation in understandings and constructions of disability across countries and demographic groups. For example, in the 19th C, the physician Samuel A. Cartwright suggested that enslaved peoples who wanted to run away from slavery were suffering from a mental illness called Drapetomania. The idea of Drapetomania is unacceptable and deeply out of step with our modern-day perspective but this concept was given credence during the period.

(Mia Edwards)