"From ancient Greece to the Renaissance, a fundamental feature common to all these different cultures was the question of the meaning of disability. Schematically, in Greece, birth deformity was a curse or even malefice and individuals were excluded or left to die by exposure to the elements; in Hebrew culture, certain expressions of disability were treated as an impurity, but the poor had to be approached with compassion. The New Testament shows Jesus detaching infirmity from sin and placing himself closer to disabled hordes banished from temples and cities; this alternative intimacy of relations happened because the existence of disability proclaimed the Kingdom of God. At the end of the Byzantine Empire, we see a man like Zotikos found one of the first leper colonies. As for the Middle Ages there was a great deal of harshness for those termed “crippled,” as they were assigned the role of revealing a world beyond socially sanctioned appearances (the buffoon), or of the cripple without resources, constituted as a figure of Christ. The suffering and stigma associated with disability was to be alleviated while also serving as an opportunity to make the individual/organization granting charity into a vehicle of their own salvation. "
David Mitchell & Sharon Snyder
"Stiker’s historical analysis demonstrates that in each of the key epochs of Western thought—the classical era, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Victorian age, the modern—that disability and disabled populations continue to surface as that which must be assimilated or made to disappear. The less visible physical and cognitive difference becomes, the more a society can pride itself upon its own illusory value as a human(e) collectivity. The “success” of integration can be based upon a variety of assimilation strategies, from legislative policies to segregation to eradication, but Stiker argues that there is a disturbing ideology underwriting each action along this continuum—the social ideal of erasure. The rhetoric of sameness dominates the twentieth century by vehemently promoting the erasure of differences as its ultimate goal".
David Mitchell & Sharon Snyder
"For example, the deaf and mute are subnormal according to Jewish law, while the blind are considered normal and enjoy their full rights. It has at times been said that the blind were looked on as persons who had died. The Encyclopedia Judaica sees this as only a rhetorical formula.6 But all these distinctions in no way detract from the fundamental fact that disabilities as a whole were judged impurities, disqualifying their bearers from active participation in the cult. In the Qumran texts, reflecting a late and admittedly Essene Judaism, we find an Essene regulation that denies the disabled engagement in combat on the one hand and participation in communal meals on the other. “And no man, lame, blind or crippled or having an incurable defect of the flesh, or afflicted by an impurity of the flesh, none of these shall accompany them to battle,” and, in the appended regulation, “every person afflicted by these impurities, unsuited to occupy a place in the midst of the Congregation, and every person stricken in his flesh, paralyzed in the feet or hands, lame or blind or deaf or mute or stricken in his flesh with a defect visible to the eye . . . let not these persons enter to take a place among the Congregation of men of repute. And if one among them has something to say to the Council of Sanctity, he will be questioned apart; but this person shall not enter into the midst of the Congregation, for he is afflicted,” and elsewhere “the slow-witted, the fools, the silly, the mad, the blind, the crippled, the lame, the deaf, the underage, none of these shall enter the bosom of the Community, for the holy angels dwell in its midst.”
Stiker, Henri-Jacques
Charity, the founding principle of ethical and social order for centuries, endures but becomes tangled among other ideas issuing either from the struggle of the exploited classes or from economic and technical development (the idea of assimilation to the community of the normal). To the extent that the idea of charity persists, it directs a series of practices, such as the appeal to a philanthropic attitude, devotion to an almost spiritual mission, fear of opposition to government power. In the disinterested service of a form of poverty the worker at rehabilitation institutions had the dominant characteristic of being an “apostle” before being a professional, of being generous before being salaried, a kind of lay brother or sister, marked in the first hand by a sense of vocation. And this corps of social workers, in all logic, could not make claims against a government that was itself viewed in “charitable” optics (by citizens as intermediaries) and never critically seen as a manipulator of economic or ideological interests. Thus, the institutions were content with weak resources, very loose coordination, and minimal rationality.
Stiker, Henri-Jacques
As Agnes Pitrou has shown, there are, for example, underground networks of family solidarity; in periods of crisis hidden economies, “black markets,” develop. Under certain conditions social spaces, public without being statist, differential without being individualistic, may arise or be created, and there is a fertile ground, thus far scarcely noticed, for this to happen.
Stiker, Henri-Jacques
On the model of “Be beautiful and keep quiet” we have “Take your benefits and don’t ask for more.” People will pay as much as needed—in the double form of subsidies to institutions and aid to individuals—in order to make the problems of social misery disappear, in the desire to leave the social surface as it is and without necessarily reducing inequalities. Paying seems easier than establishing aggressive programs to offset the problems of these deficiencies.
Stiker, Henri-Jacques
The medical eye is everywhere. An immense power, which has taken up where father confessors and directeurs de conscience (spiritual advisors) left off. The proof no longer needs to be laid out, so numerous are the analyses. But the analyses clearly have not changed anything: this power is still in place and holding firm.48 The dimensions of this power have been stated time and time again: exclusive possession of knowledge, limitation of access to information and medical “secrets,” the position as “counselor” and social “monitor”...The power network of physicians and medicine is tight, intense, far-reaching. I shall not rehearse the analysis of this network at present.
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