Disability and Deformity

Historically, linguistic usage reflects social insensitivity in referring to those now termed “physically disabled” or “handicapped.” Words like cripple and spastic not only had wide currencies, but until recently were also terms of insult, black humor, and belittlement. Political Correctness has heightened awareness and increased sensitivities so that such words have become taboo and been replaced, in official or public discourse at any rate, by terms
like disabled, differently abled , or physically challenged . Most dictionaries now mark terms like cripple and spastic as “offensive.” The extent to which these measures will affect the metaphorical currency, as in “crippling debts” remains to be seen.

In the past the injustices of birth and the accidents of life were depicted unflinchingly by major artists. The teeming canvases of Pieter Brueghel the Elder (?1525–1569) do not exclude the blind, the halt, and the lame. The Parable of the Blind (1568) grimly illustrates St. Matthew 15:14: “If the Blind lead the Blind, both shall fall into the ditch,” while his huge work The Fight between Carnival and Lent (1559) includes a small group of discarded lepers and cripples entertaining themselves with indomitable energy. The same motif fills another small canvas, entitled The Cripples (1568), although the virtually legless dwarfs have been identified as lepers, since they are wearing foxes’ tails. Diego Velázquez’s iconic Las Meninas (1656) presents the Spanish royal family and the elegant ladies in waiting of the title, but pointedly includes the female dwarf Maribarbola and Nicolasito Pertusato, a male dwarf and buffoon. They occupy the foreground, virtually obscuring the King and Queen. Velázquez painted at least seven penetrating studies of court dwarfs and jesters, several of them evidently mentally retarded. His official dignified portrait Don Diego de Acedo (1644) similarly makes no concessions, since the Don’s hands appear minute by being juxtaposed with a huge ledger. Those modern artists who have depicted deformity and disability, like Diane Arbus and Joel-Peter Witkin, tend to treat their subjects as freaks or curiosities.

Dwarfs are historically a complex category, in Teutonic, especially Scandinavian, mythology constituting a special race; in folklore reputed to be endowed with magical powers, especially in the working of metals. In medieval romance they frequently accompany a lady or damsel and often had a position of honor in courts as fools or clowns. Although in modern usage the term is disrespectful rather than insulting, in the Flyting of Kennedy with Dunbar (1508), Kennedy uses the old form of the word in mocking his opponent: “Duerch, I sall ding thee” (“Dwarf, I shall smash you,” l. 395).

Cripple , related to the verb “to creep,” is recorded from Anglo-Saxon times, notably in the place-name Cripplegate in London (about 1000). Gross lack of sympathy is shown in the old saying recorded by Angel Day in 1586: “Of ancient time it hath often been said that it is ill halting before a cripple” ( The English Secretary II). Among the word’s various slang senses were “a damaged coin” and “an awkward oaf; also a dullard.” There is even an ironic encouragement, “Go it, you cripples,” to a team in William Makepeace Thackeray’s Coz’s Diary (1840). In American English the word has been used in a technical sense in baseball for an easily hit pitch since World War I. Although disabled dates from the fifteenth century, its semantic history as a euphemism starts with George Herbert’s use in 1633 in a religious poem, The Temple, Crosse iii: “I am in all a weak disabled thing.” The Earl of Rochester, somewhat typically, wrote a poem “The Disabled Debauchee” (1680), making an elaborate comparison between a retired admiral and a rake for whom “the days of impotence approach” (l. 13).

Studies of the Elizabethan underworld present the disabled as a clearly visible underclass provoking hostility and suspicion rather than sympathy, since there were so many confidence tricksters, bogus cripples, and able-bodied beggars, known at the time as sturdy beggars . Works like Thomas Harman’s A Caveat [Warning] for Common Cursetors [Tramps] (1566) and Robert Greene’s A Notable Discovery of Coosnage [Trickery] (1591) detail what Salgado describes as a “vast army of wandering parasites” (1972, 10), referring to types such as an Abraham man , a person feigning madness to seek alms, Fresh-Water Mariners or Whipjacks , those “whose ships were drowned in the plain of Salisbury … [and] counterfeit great losses on the sea.” Harman, a country magistrate in Kent, defines twenty-three of such types, including Counterfeit Cranks , “young knaves and young harlots that deeply dissemble the falling sickness [epilepsy].”

Literary depictions show extraordinary historical changes. Shakespeare’s pioneering study Richard III (1594) is a remarkable example of reverse psychology in the dramatization of a cripple. Richard Crookback (his popular name) is afflicted with a hunchback, a withered arm, and a limp, but he makes embarrassing capital out of his disabilities, harping on his deformity, being consistently aggressive, exhibitionist, and outrageous. “Look how my arm is like a blasted sapling, withered up!” he exclaims, cynically claiming to be the victim of witchcraft (III iv 71). He opportunistically blames his murder of his brother Clarence on “some tardy cripple” (III ii 90). Trading on the traditional physiognomical belief that mind and body reflect each other, Richard gives the proposition a disturbing new twist:

Then since the heavens have shaped my body so,
Let Hell make crooked my mind to answer it.
( Henry VI, Part III vi 79-80)

His most vocal enemies are, interestingly, women, who denounce him roundly as “thou lump of foul deformity” (I ii 57), “thou elvish-mark’d abortive rooting hog!” (I iii 228), and “this poisonous bunch-backed toad” (I iii 246). The end of his reign of terror is greeted with the words “the bloody dog is dead.” (V iv 15).

Modern studies have been starkly different. Somerset Maugham’s major novel, Of Human Bondage (1915), seldom discusses the hero’s clubfoot directly, and this modern reticence has attracted various psychological interpretations seeing the deformity as a projection of Maugham’s homosexuality and even his stammer. Far more direct, even brutal, have been the recent biographical depictions by Peter Nichols, A Day in the Death of Joe Egg (1971), about a hopelessly retarded infant; and Christy Brown’s My Left Foot (1989), about a sufferer from cerebral palsy.

Spastic , originally the adjectival form of spasm in the pathological sense, has extended its meaning from “uncoordinated” to more contemptuous senses of “clumsy,” “incompetent,” or “foolish.” In British English it has a wide currency of disparagement, as in “the defense was spastic” and the slang abbreviation spaz recorded from 1965. The original Oxford English Dictionary contained only medical and technical senses, but the Supplement (1986) added the following usage note: “Although current for some fifteen years or more, it is generally condemned as a tasteless expression, and is not common in print.” Virtually all dictionaries now mark it as “offensive.”

Basket case has maintained a common currency, now referring to a person, country, or situation so chaotic as to be without hope of resuscitation. The origins, deriving from World War I, are truly horrific, referring with gruesome black humor to a soldier with all limbs amputated who thus had to be carried in a basket. The phrase surfaced in the modern sense several decades later, in the Saturday Review (March 25, 1967): “Kwame Nkrumah should not be written off as a political basket case.” If the origin were more widely known, the current popularity of the phrase would be severely curtailed.