Common questions about Disability

Short answers, pulled from the story.

What did the Windover Archaeological Site reveal about how ancient hunter-gatherer communities treated disabled individuals?

The Windover Archaeological Site revealed that a fifteen-year-old boy with spina bifida was cared for, fed, and integrated into the group until his death. This discovery challenges the belief that ancient societies ruthlessly discarded the disabled to preserve scarce resources. It shows that community survival depended on collective care rather than the elimination of the weak.

How did ancient Greek society treat disabled individuals like Hephaistos and Thersites?

Ancient Greek society placed disabled members in the center of their myths and daily life rather than hiding them away. Hephaistos walked with a limp yet was revered as a master artisan and appeared forty-one times in the Iliad and nineteen times in the Odyssey. The Hippocratic Corpus treated infants with congenital anomalies with neutrality and optimism, documenting conditions like clubfoot and cleft palate to cure them.

When did the concept of the norm emerge and how did it impact the eugenics movement?

The concept of the norm emerged in the 1830s through the work of Adolphe Quetelet, a Belgian statistician who calculated the average man based on height and weight. This mathematical approach laid the groundwork for the eugenics movement, which viewed deviations from the norm as dangerous to the health of the population. The dark culmination of this ideology occurred during the Nazi regime in Germany, where approximately 250,000 disabled people were systematically killed.

Who coined the term social model of disability and when was it introduced?

Mike Oliver, a British sociologist, coined the term social model of disability in 1983 to distinguish between the impairment itself and the disabling environment. Under this framework, disability is not an attribute of an individual but a complex collection of conditions created by the social environment. The model shifted the focus from finding cures to demanding accessibility and social change.

When was the term neurodiversity first seen in print and who wrote it?

The term neurodiversity was first seen in print in a 1991 chapter by Judy Singer. It has become a rallying cry for the civil rights movement, challenging the notion that neurological differences are disorders. The concept posits that neurological differences are natural variations of the human experience rather than disorders to be cured.

When was the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities adopted and how many nations have ratified it?

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities was adopted on the 13th of December 2006. It is the first human rights treaty of the 21st century and has been ratified by 193 nations. The convention requires countries to adopt national laws that ensure equal rights to education, employment, and cultural life.

Read the full story about Disability →