Accessibility statement

Disability history

Six male blind members of the Wilberforce Memorial in a black and white photograph, pictured lined up on tandem cycles, with six male guides.

Researching disability history is important but can be challenging. The stories of people in the past with disabilities range from great successes to appalling mistreatment. Recognition and acceptance of disability has varied over time, often making it difficult to identify in the historical record. The voices of those with disabilities are often more marginalised and less well documented. Understandings of impairments and the corresponding terminology have developed substantially, and historical records may be difficult to interpret or what we would now consider offensive. On top of that, disability history is a broad, diverse and multifaceted field with many nuances to consider. 

Yet researching disability history is very valuable. As of 2023, Scope estimates that there are 16 million people with disabilities living in the UK, and the World Health Organisation estimates 1.3 billion people, 16% of the world’s population, experience significant disability. Disability is often a basis for health, social and economic inequality, and therefore past people with disabilities may have different stories to tell than standard historical narratives centred on people without disabilities, and in telling such stories our contemporary understandings and approaches to disability may develop. 

This Research Guide 

This introductory guide aims to provide a foundation for researching disability history in the Borthwick Institute for Archives. It seeks to highlight major potential research themes, provide suggestions for relevant materials held within the archives, and illustrate potential stories to be uncovered through examples and case studies. It is hoped that it will direct and inspire researchers of all levels and backgrounds to add to our knowledge of disability in the past, and we would welcome any suggestions and new insights. 

There are several things this guide is not intended to be. It is not intended to be a comprehensive gazetteer of all the relevant material held in our collections; it provides suggestions, but doubtless further useful materials will be available too. It is not prescriptive to any particular approach to or theory about disability history; recognising that research will operate from numerous perspectives and for numerous purposes, it is deliberately broad and general, and thus some content that may not appear relevant to those operating from a specific perspective may usefully benefit others. Similarly, it does not adopt any specific definition of disability beyond seeking to identify an impairment, mental and/or physical, that differs from a traditional normative understanding of the body; as understandings vary in the present and past, the cases considered are purposefully very broad and thus may not fully align with any one definition. 

Users of the guide are warned that it may discuss content and terminology which may be considered offensive and distressing. Disabilities, and people with disabilities, were often omitted or marginalised, and so this guide can only work within the constraints of such historical omissions and biases. Accounts of people with disabilities, such as those produced in an institutional setting, can often be dehumanising and deny their agency, and while this guide seeks to avoid such treatment some sources reflect this approach. The consent of those discussed in historical documents may not have been obtained by their authors, and unethical and immoral approaches may have been used to obtain information. Additionally, it is often unclear whether people referred to in historical documents would have considered themselves ‘disabled’, or how else if at all they would have identified. This guide seeks to avoid mislabelling people where their self-identification is unclear. Thus, while examples of people living with impairments are given, this is not meant to imply that they or their contemporaries necessarily considered them ‘disabled’. These examples are also generally not recent in date to avoid identifying living people or their relatives.

Please note that data protection laws restrict access to records less than 100 years old, where they contain personal information about potentially living individuals. These records can generally only be used for statistical research, and researchers wishing to use twentieth century personal records should contact the Borthwick for further information.

We would like to thank University of York student Andrew Hill for his work creating this guide. 

Further Reading

Bredberg, E. (1999). Writing disability history: problems, perspectives and sources. Disability & Society, 14(2), 189-201. https://doi.org/10.1080/09687599926262 

Burch, S. and Rembis, M. (2014). Re-membering the past: reflections on disability histories. In Burch, S. and Rembis, M. (Eds.). Disability histories. Urbana, Chicago and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, pp. 1-13. https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/york-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3414453 

Kudlick, C. J. (2003). Disability history: why we need another “other”. The American Historical Review, 108(3), 763-793. https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/108.3.763 

Richards, P. and Burch, S. (2018). Documents, ethics, and the disability historian. In Rembis, M., Kudlick, C. and Nielsen, K. E. (Eds.). The Oxford handbook of disability history. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190234959.013.10 

In July 2022, University of York celebrated it's first campus-wide Disability Pride Month. You can find out more about Disability Pride Month, and hear the thoughts of some of our disabled students and staff, on the University's Disability History Month 2022 microsite. We're very grateful to student intern Sophie Mattholie, who created the microsite, for giving us permission to use her work in this guide.