Cultural History of Disability in the Long Eighteenth Century

18th century philosopher Edmund Burke wrote, ''deformity is opposed, not to beauty, but to the complete, common form. If one of the legs of a man be found shorter than the other, the man is deformed; because there is something wanting to complete the whole idea we form of a man''. During the long 18th century, new ideas from aesthetics and the emerging scientific disciplines of physics, biology an...