History / Sophie Mattholie
The first few times you walk into a lecture theatre in your first year of university are intimidating enough. Doing this with your walking stick in hand, desperately scanning the rows of folding seats for another person who was visibly disabled, adds another dimension to this fear. Like many History students, I have spent a significant portion of my degree so far seeking diverse histories ordinary working-class people, people of colour, women, disabled people - with mixed results. My department has decolonised the curriculum to a large extent, but it’s far from perfect. Just as I walk into lectures wondering where the disabled people are, I sift through readings and feel the pain of our absence. Disability as a whole was absent from my first term, save a brief mention of disabled beggars, and it was not until my second term that it was covered in any detail. In an optional module called ‘Empire, Welfare and Citizenship’, we learned about some of the horrendous attitudes held toward poor and disabled people in the 1800s. These concepts of eugenics, degeneration, and destitution did not fulfil my desire to find myself in the curriculum, but rather left me with a sour taste in my mouth. Disabled people have been around for all of history, but I struggled to find proof of that. Just as I had hunted for role models who were living their best lives with chronic illness in the present, I wanted to see that in the past, disabled people had been anything other than dead, dying, or suffering in poverty.
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