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David M. Turner and Kevin Stagg, eds. Social Histories of Disability and Deformity. Routledge Studies in the Social History of Medicine, no. 25. London: Routledge, 2006. xiv + 198 pp. Ill. $120.00 (ISBN-10: 0-415-36098-6, ISBN-13: 978-0-415- 36098-2).
This edited collection-an outcome of the conference Controlling Bodies: The Regulation of Conduct 1650-2000 held in June 2000 at the University of Glamorgan- stands among several influential projects of the past several years that have combined to make disability central to historical inquiry, indeed as dominant as the traditional categories of race, class, and gender.1 As David M. Turner explains in his introduction, the contributions to this book position themselves at the intersection of three historiographical developments: (1) inquiry by social historians of medicine and by practitioners of body history into "how societies have conceptualized the normal and the pathological, and how these ideas have been used to uphold systems of power and authority and to stigmatize deviance"; (2) explorations, on one hand, by historians of early modern religion and morality into "relations between sin and disfigurement or physical abnormality," and, on the other, by historians of the modern period, who have "focused their attention on the development of 'disability' as a function of modernity and outlined the processes by which disabled and mentally deficient persons were subjected to institutional care and control"; and (3) the emergence of...