Rachael Gillibrand, PhD, Jaipreet Virdi Fellow in Disability Studies, 2021
Lecturer of Medieval History and Heritage at Aberystwyth University in Wales
The Disability and Technology set explores materials in the Medical Heritage Library through three different types of technology: Ocular aids, Hearing aids, and Dental aids. The primary source set provides an overview of the types of technology in these different areas of disability, with accompanying images to illustrate the wide variety of materials in the historical record. The accompanying resource shelf contains over five-hundred individual sources that deal with some kind of disability technology dating from c. 1650 to c. 1950 in the Medical Heritage Library. I also created a short search guide to assist researchers in identifying material related to disability and technology in the hundreds of thousands of items in the Medical Heritage Library set on Internet Archive. If there are any additions you identify for the set in your own research, please email medical.heritage@gmail.com with the link and description of the item.
A note on terminology: Please be aware that materials in the set will historical or archaic language. In the case of disability history, this kind of language can often be uncomfortable to use. Words such as ‘cripple’, for example, have especially negative and harmful connotations today. However, this kind of language was frequently used in historical documents, and failing to recognize and search for it can lead to the exclusion of key sources.