Disability History Month reading list - Manchester University Press

This year, UK Disability History Month runs from 16th November to 16th December and the theme is Disability, Children and Youth.

UKDHM 2023 provides an opportunity for all councils, service providers, education establishments, youth, play and sports organisations, health providers and employers to examine their approaches to disabled children and youth.

You can learn more about the UK Disability History Month campaign via their official website.

Manchester University Press have created a reading list which explores the history of disability to raise awareness of the campaign.

You can get 30% off any of these books by signing up to our newsletter!

Want to explore our Social Histories of Medicine series? Social Histories of Medicine is concerned with all aspects of health, including disability illness and medicine, from prehistory to the present, in every part of the world.

Our series, Disability History responds to the growing interest in disability history as a discipline worthy of historical research. It has a broad international historical remit, encompassing issues that include class, race, gender, age, war, medical treatment, professionalisation, environments, work, institutions and cultural and social aspects of disablement including representations of disabled people in literature, film, art and the media.

Disability and the Victorians

Iain Hutchison, Martin Atherton, Jaipreet Virdi

Disability and the Victorians investigates the attitudes of Victorians towards people with impairments, illustrates how these influenced the interventions they introduced to support such people and considers the legacies they left behind by their actions and perspectives. A range of impairments are addressed in a variety of contexts.

Spectacles and the Victorians

Gemma Almond-Brown

This book explores how the Victorians standardised vision and transformed spectacle use. It offers new insights into how technology and its adoption in medical and non-medical contexts shaped, and continues to shape, our understanding of sensory perception and the assimilation of assistive devices.

Disability in the Industrial Revolution

David M. Turner, Daniel Blackie

This book asks what happened to disabled people during industrialization by examining the experiences of those disabled in the coal industry. It presents new perspectives on disabled people's working lives in the past, and for the first time places disabled people at the heart of the story of Britain's Industrial Revolution.

Disability in industrial Britain

Kirsti Bohata, Alexandra Jones, Mike Mantin, Steven Thompson

This book examines disability and disabled people in British coalmining, an industry with high levels of injury and disease and where, as one outsider noted, streets 'thronged with the maimed and mutilated'.

Intellectual disability

Patrick McDonagh, C. F. Goodey, Timothy Stainton

This collection of essays investigates the historical genealogy of our contemporary ideas of intellectual or learning disability. The essays engage with literary, educational, cultural, legal, religious, psychiatric and philosophical histories to track how and why these precursor ideas arose and explore how they helped shape current concepts.

The economics of disability

John Cullinan, Seán Lyons, Brian Nolan

This book brings together research relating to the economics of disability in Ireland. It addresses a range of issues of relevance to the economic circumstances of people with disabilities, considering...

Patient voices in Britain, 1840-1948

Anne Hanley, Jessica Meyer

This edited collection repositions the patient experience at the centre of healthcare histories and considers the contributions that such histories can make to debates over health policy and service delivery.

Fools and idiots?

Irina Metzler

Combines modern and medieval approaches to intellectual disability, and engages with a very wide range of sources in order to fill a major gap in this relatively new field, and demonstrate that disability, illness and healthcare are embedded in daily life.

War, disability and rehabilitation in Britain

Julie Anderson

Through a series of thematic chapters, this book focuses on the nature of injured and disabled bodies in relation to rehabilitative practices established in Britain during and immediately following the Second World War.

Measuring difference, numbering normal

Coreen McGuire

This book argues that health measurements are given artificial authority if they are particularly amenable to calculability and easy measurement, and shows that problems often coalesce around disabilities that do not lend themselves to easy quantification.

Recycling the disabled

Heather Perry

Examines the "medical organisation" of Imperial Germany for total war

Reframing health and health policy in Ireland

Claire Edwards, Eluska Fernandez

This study demonstrates how governmentality can be used to understand some of Ireland's contemporary health issues and dilemmas. By drawing on a range of empirical contexts, it explores the potential of governmentality to contribute to a critical politics of Irish health and health policy.

Deafness, community and culture in Britain

Martin Atherton

A case study of deaf people's leisure in England within a wider British context and gives insights into a misunderstood, misrepresented community. It questions perceptions of deafness as a disability and shows the importance of shared leisure in community formation and how changing patterns of socialisation are affecting British society.

Eradicating deafness?

Marion Andrea Schmidt

How did American geneticists go from fearing the dysgenic effects of deaf intermarriage to considering modern biotechnology a threat for Deaf culture? This book provides insight into changing ideas of what deafness is, what science and medicine should achieve, and to the transformative effect of exchange between scientists and deaf communities.

Rethinking modern prostheses in Anglo-American commodity cultures, 1820-1939

Claire L. Jones

A collection of essays examining the development and commodification of prostheses in Britain and America that occurred during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, due to the shift to standardized industrial manufacturing and associated market growth.

Framing the moron

Gerald O'Brien

Framing the moron details the variety of dehumanizing and fear-inducing rhetoric employed by the American eugenic movement during the early twentieth century, which led to tens of thousands of innocent people being involuntarily sterilized, forced into institutions, and otherwise maltreated.

Performing care

Amanda Stuart Fisher, James Thompson

Performing care explores the relation between socially-engaged performance and care and care ethics. It questions how performance might be understood as caring or uncaring and how care might be viewed as an embodied or aesthetic practice --arguing for more careful art and artful care.

The malleable body

Heidi Hausse

This invaluable study reveals how practices for treating the loss of limbs in early modern Germany transformed western medicine. From amputations to mechanical arms, surgical and artisanal interventions forged a growing perception, fundamental to biomedicine today, that humans could alter the body-that it was malleable.

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