To close out July as Disability Pride Month, I thought I would borrow some words from famous people. (Yeah, it’s August 1st, but whatever.)
Disability has been a part of the human condition ever since we learned to walk upright. Before we differentiated ourselves from the animals, individuals who couldn’t keep up were probably left to die, like the weakest member of the wildebeest herd is left to be devoured by the lion.
But we’re not wildebeests. Even the primates don’t do their troop mates that dirty.
Given that disability is such a long-standing fixture, I thought to look at what has been written about it over the ages, and I found a startling lack of documentation. Other than infirmaries, sanitariums, and leper colonies, I didn’t find much historical writing on the topic. Here is what I could find.
The anthropologist Margaret Meade is quoted as saying:
Thus, a healed femur is a sign that a wounded person must have received help from others. Mead is said to have concluded, “Helping someone else through difficulty is where civilization starts.”
(When I searched online for the exact quote above, it returned about 600 different results with links to videos, debates on the veracity of the quote, and Etsy shops with this embroidered on a pillow. I just wanted to be accurate, so if it isn’t, blame the slop of the internet and my lack of energy for a deep dive into investigation.)
Let’s sit with that quote for a moment, regardless of origin.
“Helping someone else through difficulty is where civilization starts.”
This raises the question of whether a society that refuses to provide care and dignity for the disabled population can call itself civilized.
She is one of my favorite authors, a stunningly brilliant poet and keen observer of human behavior. Her early departure from this life robbed us all of what her genius could have produced if she continued to live.
Below is an excerpt from an essay she wrote in 1930 which is still true today, and a link to the full text is embedded in the title if you wish to continue reading, and I sincerely hope you do so.
Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to view, what precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise of temperature reveals, what ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us in the act of sickness, how we go down into the pit of death and feel the waters of annihilation close above our heads and wake thinking to find ourselves in the presence of the angels and the harpers when we have a tooth out and come to the surface in the dentist’s arm-chair and confuse his ‘Rinse the mouth — rinse the mouth’ with the greeting of the Deity stooping from the floor of Heaven to welcome us — when we think of this, as we are so frequently forced to think of it, it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature. Novels, one would have thought, would have been devoted to influenza; epic poems to typhoid; odes to pneumonia; lyrics to tooth-ache. But no; with a few exceptions — De Quincey attempted something of the sort in The Opium Eater; there must be a volume or two about disease scattered through the pages of Proust — literature does its best to maintain that its concern is with the mind; that the body is a sheet of plain glass through which the soul looks straight and clear, and, save for one or two passions such as desire and greed, is null, and negligible and non-existent. On the contrary, the very opposite is true.
All day, all night the body intervenes; blunts or sharpens, colours or discolours, turns to wax in the warmth of June, hardens to tallow in the murk of February. The creature within can only gaze through the pane — smudged or rosy; it cannot separate off from the body like the sheath of a knife or the pod of a pea for a single instant; it must go through the whole unending procession of changes, heat and cold, comfort and discomfort, hunger and satisfaction, health and illness, until there comes the inevitable catastrophe; the body smashes itself to smithereens, and the soul (it is said) escapes. But of all this daily drama of the body there is no record. People write always about the doings of the mind; the thoughts that come to it; its noble plans; how the mind has civilised the universe. They show it ignoring the body in the philosopher’s turret; or kicking the body, like an old leather football, across leagues of snow and desert in the pursuit of conquest or discovery. Those great wars which the body wages with the mind a slave to it, in the solitude of the bedroom against the assault of fever or the oncome of melancholia, are neglected. Nor is the reason far to seek. To look these things squarely in the face would need the courage of a lion tamer; a robust philosophy; a reason rooted in the bowels of the earth. Short of these, this monster, the body, this miracle, its pain, will soon make us taper into mysticism, or rise, with rapid beats of the wings, into the raptures of transcendentalism.
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