How does one express a disability?
This is a pressing question for scholars studying the lives of disabled people in the archives of early America. This question becomes even more complicated when considering those with less legible invisible disabilities (see e.g., Klages 1999 and Daen 2017). In the nineteenth century, some disabilities were nebulously categorized by labeling individuals as “invalids” or describing them as afflicted by “weak constitutions,” “the hypos,” “hysteria,” or “nervous disorders.” Each of these labels could include a variety of disparate conditions, but they often adhered to a standard definition of disability as a condition that prevented someone from maintaining employment and made them more likely to become dependent on state support, or a “public charge” (Nielsen 2012, 75).
In this post, I will spotlight an underexplored area of early nineteenth-century life that became something of a haven for people whose bodies and minds were poorly understood by medical professionals: antebellum body reform movements. These reform movements included temperance societies as well as health reform movements that encouraged people to improve their health through lifestyle changes, including exercise, regular sleep, improved hygiene, and changed diets.
Such reform movements certainly disseminated what Tobin Siebers calls the “ideology of ability,” or “the preference for ablebodiedness,” which has long accompanied the social construction and stigmatization of disability (Siebers 2008, 10). Yet I argue that these reform movements have a more complex relationship to disability than might initially be assumed. Some members engaged with these movements in ways that expressed their experiences with disabilities rather than a straightforward preference for ablebodiedness. Thus, by studying these reform movements, scholars may be able to access lived experiences or perceptions of disability that stand outside of or even challenge the prevailing ableism in nineteenth-century American society and culture.
My argument follows a trend among disability historians who are shifting towards a “cultural model of disability,” which “blurs or erases the distinction between impairment and disability to better recognise the interconnectedness of the corporeal and social worlds” (Blackie and Moncrieff 2022, 792). By attending to the social construction of disability as well as embodied experiences of disability, scholars are opening new avenues for understanding how disability finds expression and, thus, where it can be located in historical archives. As I will show, the cultural model can revise interpretations of these apparently ableist reform cultures. I will discuss two case studies related to diet reform showcasing how people experiencing invisible and chronic disabling conditions turned to body reform movements to better understand their bodies and express their agency.
Case #1: James Fenimore Cooper
In the early 1820s, famed American author James Fenimore Cooper modeled how to read expressions of disability in relation to diet reform. Cooper struggled with a mental and physical affliction in 1823 and 1824, which included “recurrent bouts of a bundle of symptoms (fever, digestive upset, weakness, and severe headache)” that incapacitated him for extended periods (Franklin 2007, 393). The symptoms, some of which became chronic issues for Cooper, may also have had a “psychological component” related to the death of his son in 1823 (Franklin 2007, 394). When reflecting on this period, Cooper’s daughter linked his intestinal problems to a disordered mental state by describing her father’s affliction as a “nervous dyspepsia.” This variously defined affliction, marked by invisible mental and physical impairments, led Cooper to pursue “abstinence and exercise” to “restore his ‘constitution’” (Franklin 2007, 395).
Cooper’s interest in diet and exercise preceded the publication of his Revolutionary War novel, Lionel Lincoln; or, The Leaguer of Boston (1825), which featured one character named Polwarth who discusses diet reform at length. Polwarth, who serves as a captain in the British army, troublingly links notions of diet to national hierarchies. For instance, after expounding upon the proper method of selecting and consuming food, he proclaims that the people of the colonies are weak because “[t]hin diet and light meals . . . are good for nothing but to rear dwarfs and idiots!” (Cooper 2019, 717). Polwarth’s derogatory reference to “idiots” and “dwarfs” parallels the habit among the novel’s British soldiers of mistreating vulnerable people, such as the character Job Pray. Pray, who is classified as an “idiot,” is beloved by many patriotic characters because he supports and participates in the revolutionary cause. In the novel’s context, Polwarth’s ableist views are condemned as elitist, aristocratic thought running counter to the Revolution’s egalitarian impulse. His elitist proclamations also reveal that, for some, interest in diet reform stemmed from a preference for ablebodiedness, or what disability studies scholars today would identify as the “ideology of ability.”
In an ironic reversal, however, the virulently ableist Polwarth becomes disabled during the war when he loses his leg. Afterward, he navigates his changed relationship to his embodiment and environment, first by being fitted with a “wooden leg,” and later by utilizing “tom-pungs,” or Native American toboggans, to get around town (Cooper 2019, 634, 642). Polwarth’s mobility impairment and related concerns about accessibility parallel Cooper’s efforts to use diet and exercise to manage and adapt to his invisible disabilities. Whereas Cooper’s invisible disabilities were difficult to interpret, Polwarth’s disability is both highly visible and legible. After this development in the novel, Polwarth views disability less as a stigmatized form of embodiment and more as a bodily condition that may require dedicated material structures to make the world accessible. By changing Polwarth’s relationship to his body and environment, Cooper also begins to create distance between diet reform and a preference for ablebodiedness. Through his character’s development, Cooper presents Polwarth’s desire for accessible technologies as analogous to Cooper’s real-life engagement with diet and exercise reform. By reading the novel against Cooper’s personal life, I argue that Cooper offers a template for reading diet reform as a space for people with disabilities to imagine and create a more livable and accessible world.
Case #2: Henry Douglass
Although Cooper’s novel was published in the 1820s, his decision to associate diet reform with a character with a disability became increasingly relevant as body reform movements exploded in popularity later in the antebellum period. In the 1830s and 1840s, diet and exercise reform was heavily influenced by Sylvester Graham, famed inventor of the graham cracker. Graham proposed a variety of lifestyle changes to his followers, such as eating a diet primarily comprising “fruits and vegetables,” consuming less alcohol and stimulants like coffee, sleeping regularly for seven hours per night, and exercising “in the open air” (“The Graham System” 1837, 17). Graham published the Graham Journal of Health and Longevity (1837-1839) to showcase his system’s efficacy, and the journal frequently included testimonials from members who lauded the system’s benefits.
One such testimonial was written by Henry Douglass, a man from Westfield, Massachusetts who struggled with physical and intellectual ailments from a young age before discovering Graham’s diet and exercise system. In Douglass’s testimonial, he elucidates why he became an adherent to this system. He explains how he “was afflicted much with the sick-headache and dizziness” as well as “a weakness in [his] stomach” that made it difficult to maintain employment. After following Graham’s precepts, he was rewarded with a “mind” that “was clear and cheerful” with “no symptom of sick head-ache or dizziness for more than a year and a half.” In this process, Douglass emphasizes his agency, as when he tested the system for a month before he “made up [his] mind to pursue it faithfully” (Douglass 1837, 78). Douglass’s turn to diet and exercise suggests that the pseudo-science of diet reform became a site where some people with disabilities purposely sought aid for their impairments.
Diet and exercise reform also reoriented Douglass to his own body in a way that so-called regular medicine, or medicine practiced by formally trained and licensed physicians, did not. Douglass admits that he had not paid much attention to his “physical nature” before and “had been a stranger to [himself], wandering in a strange region of perplexity and uncertainty, without the knowledge of any certain law to guide [him].” After embarking on this regimen, he “studied [himself] and became acquainted with [himself].” Rather than mastering the body to gain ability, Douglass learned to approach his own body with humility and curiosity in the absence of medicine’s guiding “law.” He concludes that diet reform taught him how to better listen to his body. Waxing poetic, he declares: “I found I had not to ascend nor to descend to bring it nigh, for it was within me a true light to lead to the fountain of healthfulness” (Douglass 1837, 78).
This post showcases the importance of antebellum body reform movements in the lives of people with invisible disabilities. While recognizing the ways that these movements uphold Siebers’s “ideology of ability,” I encourage scholars to not allow an awareness of this ideology to obscure more empowering historical expressions of disability. These insights compel scholars of other nineteenth-century reform movements to also consider how these sites may be places where people expressed their disabilities, adapted to their conditions, exercised their agency, and reoriented themselves to their bodies in surprising and productive ways.
References
Blackie, Daniel, and Alexia Moncrieff. 2022. “State of the Field: Disability History.” The Journal of the Historical Association 107 no. 377: 789–811.
Cooper, James Fenimore. 2019. “Lionel Lincoln; or, The Leaguer of Boston.” In Two Novels of the American Revolution. New York: The Library of America.
Daen, Laurel. 2017. “Revolutionary War Invalid Pensions and the Bureaucratic Language of Disability in the Early Republic.” Early American Literature 52, no. 1: 141–67.
Douglass, Henry. 1837. “Letter from Mr. Douglass.” The Graham Journal of Health and Longevity (1837-1839), June 6, 1837. Proquest.
Erlandson, Andrew. 2022. “Intemperate Reform: Cripped Associations in Walt Whitman’s Franklin Evans.” J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists 10, no. 1: 179-185.
Franklin, Wayne. 2007. James Fenimore Cooper: The Early Years. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Klages, Mary. 1999. Woeful Afflictions: Disability and Sentimentality in Victorian America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Nielsen, Kim E. 2012. A Disability History of the United States. Boston: Beacon Press.
Siebers, Tobin Anthony. 2008. Disability Theory. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
“The Graham System: What is it?” 1837. The Graham Journal of Health and Longevity (1837-1839), April 18, 1837. Proquest.
Andrew Erlandson is a Ph.D. candidate in the English department at Pennsylvania State University. His dissertation examines early national and antebellum literature that challenges the relationship between disability and democracy formed in political and medical discourses. He has presented selections of his dissertation at C19: Dissent and NeMLA, and was recently published in J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists.
