Rachael Gillibrand, our 2021 Jaipreet Virdi Fellow in Disability Studies, offers this look at her work half-way through her fellowship period.
Hello there, I hope you’re all having a lovely summer. I can’t quite believe how quickly the summer months are flying by! Here at the Medical Heritage Library, I am already half-way through my research for the Jaipreet Virdi Fellowship in Disability Studies. So, I thought I would write a quick blog post to update you on my progress so far.
The purpose of my fellowship is to use the Medical Heritage Library’s digital collections to produce a primary source dataset relating to the theme of ‘Disability and Technology’. (If you saw my previous blog post you’ll know just how excited I was about this subject, given that my personal research focuses on the relationship between disability, technology, and the body in the pre-modern period.) The first thing I did when I started the fellowship in June was to dive into the primary sources. Using a really broad array of search terms, I trawled the Medical Heritage Library’s Internet Archive catalogue for anything and everything relating to disability and technology. As a result of this search, I found five-hundred individual sources that deal with some kind of disability technology dating from c. 1650 to c. 1950.
I input these five-hundred sources into an easily accessible ‘shelf’, listing the author, title, publication details, and URL addresses. This shelf will be made accessible to you soon, and will hopefully enable you to quickly search for and scan through the Medical Heritage Library’s materials relating to disability and technology. However, I have almost certainly missed something or failed to search for a particular kind of disability technology that folks might be interested in, so I have also compiled a short guide to using the Medical Heritage Library’s catalogue to help research the history of disability. This guide will be released alongside my ‘shelf’, so take a look and go digging into the archives yourselves, I’d love to hear what you find!
With this ‘shelf’ at my fingertips, I was able to see how certain materials might be brought together in themed primary source sets. As is the way with research, I found huge amounts of material relating to items for which I had expected to find very little (such as the construction and use of dentures), and only a limited amount of material relating to devices that I thought would generate more results (such as wheelchairs). I intend to address some of these disparities in my primary source sets – so stay posted for more on that!
At the moment, I have arranged material into the following six source sets:
- Ocular Aids – Glasses
- Ocular Aids – Guide Dogs
- Ocular Aids – Reading Devices
- Hearing Aids
- Dentures
- Prosthetic Limbs
Of course, these source-sets are currently a work in progress, so the themes may change before they’re published and, depending on time constraints, new sets might be added to the list – but this is where I’m at for now! I plan to spend August digging more deeply into the material and bringing together these data-sets ready for online publication towards late-summer/early-fall.
I look forward to seeing how things shape up over the coming weeks!