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History

Contemporary understandings of disability derive from concepts that arose during the scientific Enlightenment in the west; prior to the Enlightenment, physical differences were viewed through a different lens.

There is evidence of humans during prehistory that looked after people with disabilities. At the Windover Archeological Site, one of the skeletons was a male about 15 years old who had spina bifida. The condition meant that the boy, probably paralyzed below the waist, was taken care of in a hunter-gatherer community.

Disability was not viewed as a means of divine punishment and therefore disabled individuals were neither exterminated nor discriminated against for their impairments. Many were instead employed in different levels of Mesopotamian society including working in religious temples as servants of the gods.

In Ancient Egypt, staffs were frequently used in society. A common usage for them was for older persons with disabilities to help them walk.

Provisions that enabled individuals with impaired mobility to access temples and healing sanctuaries were made in ancient Greece. Specifically, by 370 B.C., at the most important healing sanctuary in the wider area, the Sanctuary of Asclepius at Epidaurus, there were at least 11 permanent stone ramps that provided access to mobility-impaired visitors to nine different structures; evidence that people with disabilities were acknowledged and cared for, at least partly, in ancient Greece. In fact, the Ancient Greeks may not have viewed persons with disability all that differently from more able-bodied individuals as terms describing them in their records appear to be very vague. As long as the disabled person in question could still contribute to society, the Greeks appeared to tolerate them.

During the Middle Ages, madness and other conditions were thought to be caused by demons. They were also thought to be part of the natural order, especially during and in the fallout of the Black Death, which wrought impairments throughout the general population. In the early modern period there was a shift to seeking biological causes for physical and mental differences, as well as heightened interest in demarcating categories: for example, Ambroise Pare, in the sixteenth century, wrote of "monsters", "prodigies", and "the maimed". The European Enlightenment 's emphases on knowledge derived from reason and on the value of natural science to human progress helped spawn the birth of institutions and associated knowledge systems that observed and categorized human beings; among these, the ones significant to the development of today's concepts of disability were asylums, clinics, and prisons.

Contemporary concepts of disability are rooted in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century developments. Foremost among these was the development of clinical medical discourse, which made the human body visible as a thing to be manipulated, studied, and transformed. These worked in tandem with scientific discourses that sought to classify and categorize and, in so doing, became methods of normalization.

The concept of the "norm" developed in this time period, and is signaled in the work of the Belgian statistician, sociologist, mathematician, and astronomer Adolphe Quetelet, who wrote in the 1830s of l'homme moyen – the average man. Quetelet postulated that one could take the sum of all people's attributes in a given population (such as their height or weight) and find their average and that this figure should serve as a statistical norm toward which all should aspire.

This idea of the statistical norm threads through the rapid take-up of statistics gathering by Britain, the United States, and the Western European states during this time period, and it is tied to the rise of eugenics. Disability, as well as the concepts of abnormal, non-normal, and normalcy, came from this. The circulation of these concepts is evident in the popularity of the freak show, where showmen profited from exhibiting people who deviated from those norms.

With the rise of eugenics in the latter part of the nineteenth century, such deviations were viewed as dangerous to the health of entire populations. With disability viewed as part of a person's biological make-up and thus their genetic inheritance, scientists turned their attention to notions of weeding such as "deviations" out of the gene pool. Various metrics for assessing a person's genetic fitness were determined and were then used to deport, sterilize, or institutionalize those deemed unfit. People with disabilities were one of the groups targeted by the Nazi regime in Germany, resulting in approximately 250,000 disabled people being killed during the Holocaust. At the end of the Second World War, with the example of Nazi eugenics, eugenics faded from public discourse, and increasingly disability cohered into a set of attributes that medicine could attend to – whether through augmentation, rehabilitation, or treatment. In both contemporary and modern history, disability was often viewed as a by-product of incest between first-degree relatives or second-degree relatives.

Disability scholars have also pointed to the Industrial Revolution, along with the economic shift from feudalism to capitalism, as prominent historical moments in the understanding of disability. Although there was a certain amount of religious superstition surrounding disability during the Middle Ages, disabled people were still able to play significant roles in the rural production based economy, allowing them to make genuine contributions to daily economic life. The Industrial Revolution and the advent of capitalism made it so that people were no longer tied to the land and were then forced to find work that would pay a wage in order to survive. The wage system, in combination with industrialized production, transformed the way bodies were viewed as people were increasingly valued for their ability to produce like machines. Capitalism and the industrial revolution effectively solidified this class of "disabled" people who could not conform to the standard worker 's body or level of work power. As a result, disabled people came to be regarded as a problem, to be solved or erased.

In the early 1970s, the disability rights movement became established, when disability activists began to challenge how society treated disabled people and the medical approach to disability. Due to this work, physical barriers to access were identified. These conditions functionally disabled them, and what is now known as the social model of disability emerged. Coined by Mike Oliver in 1983, this phrase distinguishes between the medical model of disability – under which an impairment needs to be fixed – and the social model of disability – under which the society that limits a person needs to be fixed.