Reviewed by: Disabled Children: Contested Caring, 1850–1979 ed. by Anne Borsay, Pamela Dale Alysa Levene Disabled Children: Contested Caring, 1850–1979. Eds. Anne Borsay and Pamela Dale. London: Picking & Chatto, 2012. xi + 235pp. £60/$99 Disabled Children is a collection which is breaking a new path in the history of child health. We have been slow to take up and develop the discussion of disability in the past. Children with profound disabilities (and also those only just outside the contested definition of the “normal”) have been assumed to be too hard to reach in the historical record. The editors of this thought-provoking collection consider this with some care in their introduction, pointing out that disabled children are twice hidden in the historical record. Firstly, in the way readers of this journal will be most familiar, by dint of being minors whose feelings and actions are generally mediated and described by adults, and secondly, because of their disability, which enhances all of these problems for historians and also often subordinates their parents’ voices to those of doctors or to the need to lobby for services. The disability rights movement, meanwhile, has tended to focus on adults. This book attempts to shift the spotlight directly onto these issues, examining the reality of the experiences of disabled children in the past, and revealing that these were contested in several different ways. The editors frame their discussion with reference to the “social model,” which they characterize as emphasizing disabling factors and exclusion from the mainstream. What they and their contributors show is that in fact things were a good deal more complicated and “contested” than this and that the contest was played out in the “triangular relationship” between parents, providers of services, and children. Reading between the lines of the different contributions, it is also possible to tease out contests between varying definitions of disability, and between different services competing for scarce resources. These issues are particularly pertinent for the time period under discussion (1850–1979), not only because of the shifts in the treatment of the disabled (for example, from institutions to family care), but also because of the increased societal and state surveillance and control of disabled children and their families at this time. Another theme which comes through strongly in many chapters is the contemporary emphasis on educability and employability: these children are treated in terms of their potential usefulness and ability to be self-sufficient. [End Page 332] The essays in the collection cover a broad geographical remit: there is a significant focus on Britain, but within this there are geographically specific essays on Wales and Scotland. Others examine Spain, Australia, Sweden, and America. Most spotlight a particular institution, although they are generally attempting to situate these in a wider relationship with families, communities, political imperatives and economic realities. They take in disability in its broadest sense (a useful reminder that this is a huge topic): physical impairment, mental disability, polio, child guidance, special education, hyperactivity, and deafness. It is impossible to do justice to all the contributions in a short review. All have interesting things to say, but a few essays stood out for this reader as managing to situate the history of disability in a much broader framework— a particularly useful way to draw this topic into the mainstream of historical research. Steven Thompson’s study of disability services in South Wales puts the experiences of disabled children within the wider economy of welfare, economy, and politics in the region. Anne Borsay uses a well-known and more general set of sources—advice literature for parents—to pick out the way that disabled children were discussed and pathologized by experts (a point also made by Pamela Dale in the context of health visiting in Scotland). Finally, Matthew Smith uses his discussion of the Feingold diet for hyperactive children in America to highlight “a lesson about the contexts in which certain behaviours become perceived as disabling” (181). The one area where the book falls down is in the attempt to get at “lived experiences” of disability. Many of the authors state this as an aim, and several make reference to sets of personal testimonies, but few actually...
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Nov 27, 2023
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