Just like the familiar triad of gender, class, and race, disability is historically constructed, and its meanings are situated in time and place. In seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth-century America, disability was not a term commonly deployed outside of British American legal discourse. However, diverse peoples used a plethora of words, far more than we use today, to represent anomalous bodies and minds and the experience of incapacity. They described a host of bodymind variations (congenital, acquired, temporary, permanent, physical, sensory, intellectual, and psychological) in a range of contexts (legal, medical, social, cultural, religious, and economic). Indigenous and African peoples had fundamentally different worldviews than their European counterparts and their words for bodymind differences tended to reflect their more empowered understandings of these corporeal experiences. Even still, ableism persisted among these groups. The language of disability was also weaponized against individuals and groups, especially those marginalized by race, gender, class, culture, religion, place of origin, and legal status. In these instances, concepts of disability were powerful tropes to justify these people’s dispossession and maltreatment.
As much disability history scholarship has centered on the modern era, most premodern terms for disability are unfamiliar to scholars of the topic as well as those studying the early Americas more generally. Some of this language has been lost. Much of it is offensive by modern standards. Nevertheless, premodern words about disability can signal to the perceptions and lived experiences of historical people with diverse bodies and minds. These terms can also help researchers recover such individuals in the archive. To facilitate the continued growth of the field of early American disability history writ large, we share a list of the search terms we use in our own research. We have used these keywords to locate primary sources about disability in colonial North America and the Caribbean, the early United States, and the Anglo-Atlantic World. These terms are primarily those used by British and British American people to describe themselves as well as people of African and Indigenous descent. We have utilized these search terms in library, museum, and archival catalogs and databases in the U.S., Canada, the Caribbean, and the U.K. We welcome scholars to use our list of search terms to augment their own lists and further develop their analyses of disability in the early Americas.
Laurel and Stefanie’s List of Search Terms
Able
Abscess
Absess
Abssess
Afflicted
Affliction
Aged
Ague
Ailment
Alement
Arm
Bad
Bandy-legged
Bilious
Blind
Blindness
Blood
Bleed
Bleeding
Bodily
Body
Bone
Bow
Bowlegged
Broak
Broke
Broken
Capable
Capacity
Chronic
Cold
Colic
Colick
Compos
Confined
Conservator
Conservatorship
Convalescent
Convalescing
Constitution
Countenance
Crazed
Crazey
Crazy
Crepple
Creppled
Cripple
Crippled
Crooked
Contagious
Curable
Cure
Cut
Deaf
Deafness
Debilitated
Debility
Decay
Decrepit
Decriped
Decripid
Defect
Deformed
Deformity
Delirious
Delusion
Deranged
Derangement
Disability
Disabled
Disease
Diseased
Disenabled
Disinabled
Disjointed
Disorder
Disordered
Distemper
Distempered
Distracted
Distraction
Distressed
Doctor
Down
Down-cast
Dropsy
Dumb
Dwarf
Dwarfism
Ears
Epileptic
Epilectick
Enfeebled
Eyes
Feeble
Feebleminded
Feet
Fever
Feverish
Firmness
Fit
Fits
Fitts
Fool
Foole
Foolish
Foot
Furious
Furiously
Gait
Guardian
Guardianship
Head
Health
Healthy
Hearing
Helpless
Hunch
Hurt
Ideocy
Ideot
Idiocy
Idiot
Ill
Illness
Impotencie
Impotency
Impotent
Inability
Incapable
Incapacity
Incurable
Indisposed
Indisposition
Infection
Infirm
Infirme
Infirmed
Infirmities
Infirmity
Inflamed
Inflamatory
Inflammatory
Injured
Injury
Insane
Insanity
Insensible
Invalid
Invalidity
Irrational
Knock-kneed
Labor
Labour
Lame
Lameness
Languish
Languishing
Languishment
Leg
Limb
Low
Lucid
Lunacy
Lunatic
Lunatick
Mad
Madman
Madness
Maim
Maimed
Malady
Mania
Manic
Maymed
Medical
Medicin
Medicine
Melancholia
Melancholic
Melancholy
Memory
Mental
Mind
Monster
Monstrosity
Monstrous
Mute
Nervous
Non compos
Non compos mentis
Non sanae memoriae
Non sane memorie
Numb
Nurse
Nursing
Old
Pain
Pains
Palsey
Palsy
Palsied
Paralitic
Paralisis
Paralytic
Paralysis
Physic
Physician
Physick
Pidgen-toed
Pidgin-toed
Pigeon-toed
Pleurisy
Pleuretic
Poor
Pox
Purge
Purging
Putrid
Rational
Reason
Rehabilitate
Rehabilitation
Relief
Reliefe
Restored
Reumatick
Rheumatic
Rheumatick
Rheumatism
Rupture
Ruptured
Sane
Sanity
Seized
Seised
Sense
Senseless
Sick
Sicke
Sickly
Sickness
Sight
Silly
Simple
Smallpox
Soor
Sore
Sound
Stutter
Stutters
Sullen
Superannuated
Surgeon
Swelled
Swelling
Swollen
Teched
Thought
Touched
Trouble
Troubled
Troublesome
Ulcer
Ulcerated
Unable
Uncapable
Understanding
Unfit
Unhealthy
Unreason
Unsound
Unsoundness
Unwell
Useless
Wandering
Weak
Weakened
Weakly
Weakness
Wild
Wildness
Work
Worke
Wound
Wounded
Wounds
Yaws
Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy is the Executive Editor of All of Us and Associate Professor of History at the University of New Brunswick. Her research and teaching focus on disability, colonialism, madness, race and gender in the Caribbean, Atlantic World, and vast early Americas from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries.
Laurel Daen is an Editor of All of Us and Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of Notre Dame, where she is affiliated with the Program in Gender Studies and the John J. Reilly Center for Science, Technology, and Values. Her research and teaching focus on disability, sickness, medicine, and health in America, primarily during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
