Martha L Rose, The staff of Oedipus: transforming disability in ancient Greece, Corporealities: Discourses of Disability, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2003, pp. xiii, 154, illus., £26.00, US$42.50 (paperback 0-472-11339).

Abstract

Martha Rose presents a well-researched study of physical disability in ancient Greece. Not only does the book further our awareness of issues related to the body and its care, but it also helps to dispel misunderstood perceptions of disability in the past. It is often assumed the Greeks had strict definitions of disability that were used to separate people into distinct groups. This misconception is used today to validate attitudes and understandings towards those classified as disabled, and it is this naive application of medical history to modern disability studies that is the main issue of Rose's book. The principal argument against making direct analogies between the two periods is that disability is a cultural construct determined by the inherent beliefs of a particular society. On the basis of cultural and temporal variation, Rose confidently asserts that modern conceptions of ancient disability are based on false premises that should not be employed to comprehend disability today. The book's focus is limited to physical impairments because teratology and mental illness, for example, were more distinctly classified than physical variations. Although people were known to have physical disabilities, the terms used to describe them were often nebulous such as “lame”, “incomplete” or “imperfect”. Furthermore, there is little mention in the Greek medical literature of physical variations, suggesting it was society, not the doctor, that determined whether a person was disabled. If a person with a physical limitation was able to support him or herself or had someone to care for them they remained integrated in their community and were not medically classified as being different. The book has five main chapters, each with a comparative discussion of ancient and modern perspectives of the topics considered. Chapter one is used to examine the evidence for disability in classical texts and the tenuous nature of disability classification in ancient Greece. The evidence demonstrates that people of varied body types were fully integrated into Greek society, which is in opposition to a society consisting of people with ideally proportioned bodies, as Victorian scholarship would have us believe. In chapter two, Rose argues against the common misunderstanding that infants regarded as disabled were exposed at birth for being a potential burden to their family and community. Reasons against the presumption of exposure are that many congenital defects are not apparent at birth, and with reference to the first chapter many had survived childhood with physical differences. More specifically defined disabilities—speech impairments, deafness and blindness—are the focus of the next three chapters. Speech impairments were discussed in both historical and medical texts, but understood to be a problem related to the tongue. It is noted by Rose that modern support networks for people with speech impediments do not account for these interpretations of speech difficulties. Rather they uncritically use people in the past, such as Demosthenes, as heroic symbols, who overcame speaking difficulties in spite of the fact these individuals were not noted as being important by their contemporaries for overcoming such problems. Deafness and blindness are discussed to demonstrate that disability was dependent on context rather than physical limitations. Deafness, for example, was considered an impairment of reasoning and a sign of inferior intelligence, which were grounds for excluding people from political life. It is suggested that agricultural workers did not suffer social ostracism because there was no need to communicate in the manner of a politician. Similarly, with blindness, different conditions suggest that each person with visual impairments had to adapt to their own particular situation in Greek society. The common perceptions of seclusion of disability in ancient Greece are here broken down, demonstrating there was no dichotomy of ability and disability, but a range of conditions defined by the society. Thus, the past should not be used to justify and explain present opinions of a modern disabled lifestyle.