The only one-handed pianist in the world – and not just because most people have two hands

By Emmeline Burdett

Maurice Ravel’s Concerto for the Left Hand was performed at the BBC Proms  2025 by Nicholas McCarthy, the only professional one-handed pianist in the world. It had not previously been performed by a one-handed pianist since 1951 (McCarthy, 2025). This inevitably raises questions about how physical disability is seen and interpreted, and how much this has really changed over the decades.

It also reminds me of the 2016 film Florence Foster Jenkins, starring Meryl Streep. This film was based on the true story of the US amateur soprano Florence Foster Jenkins (1868-1944), who was destined from childhood to become a concert pianist, but who had to abandon what were presumably her dreams due to an arm injury.  The idea clearly is that if you only have one arm, it is impossible to become a concert pianist. This is not the case, as this post will show.

Historical Background

Ravel’s Concerto for the Left Hand was written for Paul Wittgenstein, (1887-1961) an Austrian pianist who lost his right arm in the First World War.  

Figure 1 - This Photo of Paul Wittgenstein by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND

McCarthy has described Wittgenstein as his ‘hero’ and pointed out that Ravel was not the only composer to write works for one-handed pianists.  A lot of nineteenth century composers wrote works for the left hand for the purposes of showing off: statistically, most people are right-handed, and writing for a performer’s less-dominant hand was gave a good opportunity to showcase a musician’s talents (Roberts, 2024). Tenacity and a desire to show off meant that there was plenty of scope for a one-handed pianist to make a career. In addition, in 1957, Paul Wittgenstein published School for the Left Hand, a series of exercises, etudes and transcriptions intended for one-handed (not necessarily left-handed) pianists. So, why did Florence Foster Jenkins feel that she had to give up a career she presumably wanted to pursue; why had Ravel’s Concerto for the Left Hand not been performed by a one-handed pianist for over seventy years; furthermore, why had Nicholas McCarthy  been discouraged from taking up the piano –  he had been told at different times that training to become a pianist would be a waste of his and everyone else’s time, (Jackson, 2012) and also that he needed to concentrate on playing pieces written specifically for the left hand (Everett, 2014). This  means that people from a minority – particularly people who are in a minority of one – are obliged to reinvent the wheel as it were – not because there have never previously been, for example, any disabled musicians, but because they are all considered to be individual unfortunates whose existence means nothing. Nicholas McCarthy had to reinvent the wheel by assembling a repertoire of piano works for the left hand – not because the people for whom they were written were despised outcasts, but because it seems not to have been thought that the reasons why they were written had any meaning other than in terms of personal biography, e.g. Paul Wittgenstein losing his arm in the First World War. A result of this attitude is that a disabled individual might not be able to succeed in their chosen field without being unusually tenacious. This is one reason why ’rights’ movements prefer to concentrate on the welfare of their group, rather than on specific individuals. Concentrating on the achievements of one individual can make the group’s situation appear better than it really is, but conversely, the last thing a ‘rights’ group may want is a successful individual who is not interested in portraying everything as being stacked against them. If one feels unable to participate in anything where it will be obvious that one is not ‘the norm’, the chances of one becoming any sort of pioneer are not high, but there are ways of approaching the fact that one differs from the norm, and merely telling someone that they should have had more backbone does nothing towards making the world a better place. Nicholas McCarthy has said that he was brought up to think of himself as being just like everyone else (Macmath, 2015), but this could mean anything from accepting that someone’s difference is just there, and is only relevant to certain situations to assuming that a disabled person has to abandon his or her ambitions to fit in with what ‘everyone  knows’ about disability, regardless of whether what ‘everyone knows’ is actually true. 

Florence Foster Jenkins and Franklin D. Roosevelt

There is no clearer demonstration of this than the case of Florence Foster Jenkins and how it is perceived.  

Figure 2 - This Photo by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND.

In the 2016 film about her, there is no suggestion that she abandoned her career as a concert pianist for any reason other than she felt that it would not work. This suggests that either it was not common knowledge that a pianist could play one-handed, or that Jenkins felt that doing so was not an acceptable compromise. There may however be more to it than that, and it may be more indicative of the place of disability in certain kinds of societies. In his 1985 book FDR’s Splendid Deception, Hugh Gregory Gallagher highlights how the US president Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882-1945), who contracted polio in 1921 which meant that he had great difficulty walking, stipulated that he should never be photographed or filmed using a wheelchair lest it be assumed that he was too weak to be president (Gallagher, 1985).  Roosevelt was President before, during, and after the Great Depression, and Gallagher argues that FDR wanted to show himself as ‘getting over’ polio as the US was ‘getting over’ the Depression. Gallagher also pointed out that previous biographers had regarded Roosevelt as an individual superhuman and not put his disability into any kind of context or discussed it in a rational manner. (Floyd, 2010) Their attitude is also instructive for the insistence that Nicholas McCarthy should not waste everyone’s time by training as a concert pianist, because there certainly would not be enough pieces to sustain a career.  

A lot of the ‘disability context’ that might apply to Roosevelt might also apply to Florence Foster Jenkins. They were virtual contemporaries, and Foster Jenkins died a year before Roosevelt. They came from similarly privileged backgrounds. Though this does not make them ‘the same’, it does raise the possibility that they may have had similarly squeamish attitudes to the public exhibition of what would widely have been seen as a weakness. 

The Ugly Laws 

Both Foster Jenkins and Roosevelt lived in the shadow of the so-called ‘ugly laws’ (Schweik, 2009). These laws, which were in operation in various US states between 1868 and 1974, were ‘unsightly beggar’ ordinances, aimed at criminalizing actions indicative of disease or disability, such as limping. As these laws were in operation for over a hundred years, they were clearly not a temporary measure. They did not legislate against the public exhibition of disabled individuals, but against interactions between disabled and non-disabled people, meaning that they could be interpreted as having a quasi-eugenic purpose. Since the US passed the world’s first eugenics law, in the state of Indiana in 1912, such ideas have a certain inevitability.  As President, Roosevelt could have been instrumental in repealing them, but his obsessive desire for secrecy makes this unlikely. Foster Jenkins may have been influenced by the legal requirement to hide a disability – an impression which is bolstered by her later decision to sing in public. She may not have been very good at it, but it would have enabled her to express herself musically whilst not displaying a damaged arm. By contrast, Nicholas McCarthy wore a suit which emphasised the fact that his arms were different lengths. This striking difference may be explained partly by the passage of time, but  why was Nicholas McCarthy the first one-handed pianist in over seventy years to play a composition specifically written for a one-handed pianist?

Stigma (1963)

In his book Stigma: On the Management of Spoiled Identity, published in 1963, the sociologist Erving Goffman suggested that a person with a ‘stigma’ (something that marks him or her out as being different from other people) will try to conceal this difference, and feel shame at being unable to meet other people’s standards. The book opens with a letter, supposedly from a teenage girl to an agony aunt. In this letter, the girl, who was born without a nose, bends over backwards to understand others’ negative attitudes towards her, conjectures that she must have done something wrong in a previous life and asks the agony aunt whether she should kill herself. (Goffman, 1963)

Enter Paul Wittgenstein, who was so resolutely unembarrassed by having only one arm that he asked the composer Maurice Ravel to compose a piece of music for him.  He might, however, have felt himself to be a non-disabled person who had had a serious injury. This attitude might be partly attributable to having lost his arm in wartime, which lends a certain heroism and might mean that he did not struggle with his identity to the same extent as someone who had been disabled from birth. Nevertheless, even if Wittgenstein was not ‘the norm’, he unquestionably existed.  The apparent assumption, however, that his attitude was not how someone would ‘normally’ react to disability, together with Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s biographers’  portrayal of him as an individual superhuman, lend weight to the idea that there is a general assumption about how one ‘should’ respond to disability, and that (a) deviating from this requires considerable strength of character and (b) deviations are generally interpreted as evidence that one is an unusual individual, rather than that one has a legitimate point of view. It may be that if deviations became more accepted as meaning something more than that one was a remarkable individual, it would not be so necessary to be a remarkable individual.    

Dr Emmeline Burdett is an independent researcher.

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References:

Dias, L. (2025) ‘Using negativity to drive forward: One-handed pianist Nicholas McCarthy conquers the classical world’. Scroll.in

Everett, Lucinda (2014) ‘Concert pianist Nicholas McCarthy on music education and the Paralympics’. The Daily Telegraph.

Floyd, B. (2010). Hugh Gregory Gallagher's Splendid Reception. Disability Studies Quarterly.

Goffman, E. (1963). Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc.

McCarthy, N. (Performer). (2025, July 20). BBC Proms 2025: Ravel's Piano Concerto for the Left Hand. Royal Albert Hall, London, United Kingdom.

Schweik, S. M. (2009). The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public. New York/London: New York University Press.

Shaw Roberts, M. (2024). World’s only one-handed pianist reveals fascinating history of left-hand piano.  Classicfm.com

Recommended citation: Emmeline Burdett (2025): The only one-handed pianist in the world - and not just because most people have two hands. In: Public Disability History 10 (2025) 7.

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The Forgotten Room of the association Valentin Haüy in Paris, or How to Build an Inclusive Digitisation Project on the History of Blindness

By Céline Roussel & Marion Chottin

Rediscovering Maurice de la Sizeranne’s Cultural Project

As Marion and I were exploring for our academic research – for CNRS-projects on the one hand, for a doctoral thesis at Paris-Sorbonne on the other – the field of disability studies, with a focus on blindness related to philosophy, literature, and other arts, we made the acquaintance of Noëlle Roy, curator of the museum and library in the Association Valentin Haüy from 2000 to 2017. She led us into a very special room, the “salle Heimann” (“Heimann room”), which houses the great oeuvre of Maurice de la Sizeranne (1857-1924): a huge, rich, unique collection of books, writings and all kinds of documents reflecting on blindness throughout the centuries.

Maurice de la Sizeranne was a blind intellectual who, in the year 1889, founded the Association in the memory of Valentin Haüy. Haüy (1745-1822) was a French polymath who had founded the first school for blind young people, the Institute for Blind Youth ((INJA) in Paris in 1785. Maurice de la Sizeranne belongs to an influential generation of French blind people who became conscious of the importance of culture as a powerful way of achieving greater integration in the dominant sighted society. The museum and the library, both created just before the Association was born, were the fundamental pillar of this vision. They aimed at the intellectual emancipation of blind people by their own means, in accordance with Haüy’s teachings. Marion and I soon felt how much the library was inhabited by the spirits of both men and was the crossroads of countless others who were only waiting to be discovered, read, and heard again. Amongst them were Milton, Maria-Theresia von Paradis, Helen Keller, Borges, Taha Hussein; or Louis Vierne, Axel Munthe, Marie Lenéru, Cécile Douard, Olga Skorokhodova… 

Our visits in this library, which began in 2016 and are ongoing, has gradually revealed to us what marvellous the treasures the library contains, and how many different fields are represented - humanities, medicine, cultural and institutional history, pedagogy, literature, theatre, poetry… Every document deals with blindness, and they have been written by both blind and sighted people, by academics and laypersons. The number of languages represented is similarly impressive - documents not only in French, but in many foreign languages form part of the collections. But our visits had shown how even those familiar with the Association were unaware of the treasures contained within this library, and sometimes even unaware that it existed at all! When Noëlle Roy retired in 2017 (and was awarded the “grade de Chevalier de l’ordre national du Mérite” in June 2018 for her commitment in the Association), the future of these precious collections suddenly became uncertain, and Marion and I proposed our services as volunteers to keep them accessible to international researchers.

The Paradox of the Forgotten Room

A visit to the United States in the autumn of 2017 in connection with my doctoral research led me to several of the most important institutions for the education and history of blind people in America: the Perkins School for the Blind in Watertown, near Boston, the American Foundation for the Blind in New York, the Printing House for the Blind in Louisville, Kentucky. All these institutions were engaged in digitising and publishing their archives at different scales (subsidised projects; in-house digitisation according to the needs of readers; or publications on archives.org: see the links and references below). Their collections convinced me that Marion and I should take charge of the digitisation and scientific edition of the library of the Association Valentin Haüy in Paris.

Another issue also troubled us. This library houses cultural treasures, unique and essential to the understanding of blindness, written by both blind and sighted people: correspondence, press clippings, magazines, manuscripts, valuable books… But all this material is typed or handwritten in ordinary script and not in Braille. How can it be accessible to blind or partially sighted people who wish make use of it without the support of a reader or guide? This library builds up a history page after page – that of access to culture for blind people, that of their full participation in society and their autonomy – but this is contradicted and undermined by the fact that the material contained in the library is in a format inaccessible to blind people, even though it is such an important resource for learning about the history of blind and visually impaired people. This is a paradox that we now have the material and technical possibility to resolve. It is vital that we do so:

“When I started to lose my sight due to congenital glaucoma, I felt the need to know how people who had become blind before me had been able to adapt to continue to read, work and participate in cultural or leisure activities, without forgetting the main thing, the adaptations to daily life. When I wanted to consult sources of information on blindness and testimonies of blind people, I only found a few published books, whereas precious testimonies exist in the heritage collection of the Association Valentin Haüy. Only digitisation can make them accessible, via the screen-reading software used by visually impaired people who cannot read so-called black writing, whether handwritten or printed. Thanks to this colossal work, we will finally be able to access writings never read by blind people or even by the general public. Moreover, the publication of this unique heritage collection online will help to raise awareness of visual impairment among the general public.”

Catherine Grimaud, retired, former employee for accessibility in the disability mission of a large company and volunteer in the actidv employment club of the apiDV association.

By the end of her career, Noëlle Roy had already succeeded in having the two most important reviews for the social and cultural history of blindness in France (the Louis Braille and the Valentin Haüy) digitised and published online on the Gallica website (Bibliothèque nationale de France). The result was nevertheless impaired by the unfortunately poor quality of the OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and by the lack of correction for the voice synthesis, which represents a significant barrier to accessing these documents if one cannot read text on a screen. This is a point that a digitisation project, as we understand it, has to improve in order to be fully accessible – even if it may still exist some language barriers (one has to understand German to read a source written in German!). Such a project would not only contribute to safeguarding some of these old and fragile collections (the big, brittle volumes which contain the press clippings for instance are an urgent priority); it would both benefit partially and non-sighted persons and contribute to preserving the heritage and cultural legacy of blind people.

Another precedent led us to think our aim was realistic: in France, the ArchAT project (2018-2021) led by Aude Déruelle, Professor of French literature at the University of Orléans, and with which the CNRS, among other institutions, is associated, digitised, digitally edited and put online the archives of the blind historian Augustin Thierry (1785-1856). The aim of the project was to provide a better understanding of, for instance, the working techniques of this major nineteenth-century blind intellectual figure (see the link below). I had the chance to participate to it, and Aude Déruelle herself recognized the value of the archival collection of the Bibliothèque patrimoniale Valentin Haüy as she paid a visit to the library, in order to find material about Augustin Thierry. The digitisation project of the collections of the Bibliothèque patrimoniale Valentin Haüy finally began in 2018 and now comprises around twenty people, including members of the Association Valentin Haüy, French and foreign scholars, and staff from the adaptation company L'Atelier de la Villette.

Overview of the Digitisation Project and of Three Collections in The Library

This project has been a challenge. Based on a partnership between the association Valentin Haüy, the ENS of Lyon and Sorbonne Université (Observatoire des textes, des idées et des corpus and Centre de Recherche en Littérature Comparée), it involves a long and demanding processing chain: indexing the collections according to a universal model as the one usually used in libraries and archives, proceeding with digitisation, OCR processing and structuring, upgrading to official digital accessibility standards (in France, the RGAA 4), writing academic explanatory notes… It will offer an academic presentation perfectly understandable by laypersons, and easily accessible to blind and non-blind readers, since each document will be screen-reader and Braille display compatible.

A numeral estimate of the contents of the library resulted in a figure of about 29500 items. Many of them had not been indexed – and none of them to international standards – before the project began. In addition, readers who want to search in the library are still compelled to come in Paris und use the on-site computer, as the library has no online catalogue. The digitisation project will eventually provide online search possibilities. Because of the large number of documents contained in the library, we first decided to focus on three collections : press clippings, periodicals and the collections dedicated to soldiers blinded in the First World War (because the anniversary of the conflict was then being commemorated).

Innumerable press clippings relating to blind people and blindness were collected between 1856 and 1928 and are preserved in large volumes. The articles come from various newspapers (French and foreign) and are grouped under various headings (serials, information on blind people's associations, events, meetings, charity work, history…). This is one of the library's most precious collections, fully representative of the comprehensive approach that has governed the constitution of the collections of this library since its emergence: to constitute an international database on blind people and on blindness. Turning this paper database into a digital one was both important and in accordance with the library’s original aims.

Photograph (© Céline Roussel) showing one of the volumes of press cuttings devoted to blindness (1856 and 1928), on which can be seen an article illustrated with portraits of Valentin Haüy and Louis Braille, as well as a reproduction of the tactile alphabet developed by the latter.

Long before the periodicals Le Valentin Haüy and Le Louis Braille (which were created in 1883 by Maurice de la Sizeranne), several journals set out to bring together the available scientific knowledge on blind people and their education in specialised establishments - while also relaying the personal stories and literary productions of some of them. France was a pioneer in this, but other European countries soon followed suit, and examples include the Messager suisse des aveugles and L'Asile des aveugles de Lausanne. The Bibliothèque patrimoniale came to possess a large collection of periodicals, some of which are in foreign languages (such as Der Blindenfreund and Die Blindenwelt, both published in Germany). The symbolic and historical importance of these works are makes them a priority for the digitisation project.

The library also houses entire collections of periodicals designed to inform soldiers blinded in the First World War about the social networks and rehabilitation centres that were set up at that time to facilitate their reintegration into civilian and working life, and these provide us with an invaluable testimony to this pivotal period in the history of blindness. This is why our first pilot-sample centred on one of the journals in the "Blinded in War" collection of the Bibliothèque patrimoniale: Le Journal des soldats blessés aux yeux. This journal also had the advantage of already being available in digital form on the Paris-Nanterre library website L’Argonnaute: This not only saved us time, but it also showed us how much more ambitious our project was than simply putting a document online – because it involves an XML-TEI structuring and an academic presentation of everything will be published online.

Achievement of a First Pilot-sample: A Future for The Forgotten Library?

Photograph (© Céline Roussel) of the cover of the final issue, dated June 1919, of Le Journal des Soldats Blessés aux Yeux. It states that it was founded by Eugène Brieux, of the Académie Française, that it is monthly, free, and is the 'Organe de l'Œuvre pour les Soldats Blessés au Yeux'.

With the support of the Association Valentin Haüy, and especially of their project manager Hugues de Roquefeuille,, and the expertise of the ObTIC (Observatoire des textes, des idées et des corpus) of Sorbonne Université, in close collaboration with Motasem Alrahabi and Glenn Roe, the academic year 2019-2020 was devoted to the realization of this pilot project. Le Journal des soldats blessés aux yeux, a free monthly magazine founded by Eugène Brieux (1858-1932), a writer, journalist, and member of the Académie française, appeared from November 1916 to June 1919 and was aimed at the soldiers blinded in the First World War. It also gave them a voice in allowing the publication of many of their letters. With this journal, we had the opportunity to test and, when necessary, improve the processing chain on which the whole digitisation project depended. This journal was first indexed according to the Dublin Core and Library of Congress standards, while the researchers of the ObTIC drew up a set of specifications, as well as a first style sheet, necessary for the XML-TEI structuring of the document.

But we encountered some difficulties in establishing a satisfying overview of the logical structure of this document, since the headlines and the chapter-divisions varied from one year (or even from one month!) to another. Many elements (such as quotations, advertising, pictures, and mathematical equations) were widespread in this shape-shifting item and complicated our approach. After many attempts to integrate all these specificities into a stylesheet, we realised that a compromise had to be found, in order to produce a stylesheet general enough to be applicable to other documents. Two employees of L'Atelier de la Villette (which is linked to the association Valentin Haüy and employs people with disabilities), directed by Renaud Lemaire, Isabelle Risco and Rosine Loïal, were then responsible for proofreading and formatting the document according to the style sheet, which lead to satisfying results. We were very keen to work with L’Atelier de la Villette, as this would give disabled people the opportunity to take part into a project dealing with visual disability, The digitisation project would thus become not only accessible, but also inclusive. Finally, three researchers, Gildas Brégain (CNRS-Arènes/Université de Rennes 1), Corinne Doria (The Chinese University of Hong Kong – Shenzhen) and Rebecca Scales (Rochester Institute of Technology), one of whom was personally concerned with disability, wrote scholarly notes on the journal, on Eugène Brieux and on assistive technologies. The purpose of these texts is to provide all necessary information on background and context of this review, making any research on it easier.

This achievement, completed by the success of the ObTIC in generating and designing a website, was all the more encouraging as the association decided to recruit three people, Véronique Harouel, Angelica Herrera and Marie-France Hourcadie, and one person working full time in the library (as part of a sponsorship of competence offered by BNP Paribas), Marie-Bernadette Aubry, whose task is now to index the whole content of the library. We had not expected to reach this stage so early, but it is necessary to conceive the project not only at a small, but at a large scale. The global indexing also draws our attention to documents which, for copyright issues, should be excluded from the final project – even if their reference will be integrated in the online catalogue. With the jurist of the Association, we will debate whether to digitise or not sensitive documents such as personal files, which are undoubtedly interesting for the project, inasmuch as they could allow genealogical research. The website, it is still in construction; how to shape an accessible version of it is constantly debated with the Association and with blind and visually impaired people. Most recently, our project has been associated with another ongoing project, that of Maria Romeiras Amado and her team (Universidade NOVA de Lisboa). This project consists of the transcription, translation (into Portuguese if necessary) and critical edition of 165 letters (in French, English, Spanish and Portuguese) written in the 18th and 19th centuries between several institutions dedicated to blindness in different countries of the world. The objective of this project is to highlight, from these letters between pedagogues, doctors and administrators, the phenomenon of globalisation of the discourse on pedagogy and material adapted to blind pupils as well as their practical effects on the latter, not only through the digital and critical edition of these letters, but also through the constitution of a digital cartography of these circulations As these letters are located in the Valentin Hauy heritage library and are owned by the AVH, Maria Romeiras and her team have very generously agreed to integrate their work into our project, in exchange for permission to publish these letters on the NOVA University website.

Our academic experience in the field of both Disability Studies and Digital Humanities has shown that there is a huge interest for these archive materials. The link between both research fields has already been mentioned in several articles, for instance by Mulka Kurkarni, George H. Williams and Vandana Chaudhry. We are aware that our project has limits – it could be argued that a digital access to archives is no substitute for an exciting discovery of the object itself. The general stylesheets may miss some important and valuable information on the design of a document – selection, per se, is never a fully satisfying solution. We are nevertheless confident that our project will contribute to the fight against what Goggin and Newell (Digital Disability, The Social Construction of Disability in New Media, 2003) called “digital disability”. We truly believe that “by working to meet the needs of disabled people — and by working with disabled people through usability testing but also, and more importantly in our view, through their active participation in editorial choices — the digital humanities community will also benefit significantly as it rethinks its assumptions about how digital devices could and should work with and for people” (George H. Williams, Debates in the Digital Humanities, 2012).

Targeting an audience will be our next challenge: There could be various ways of doing - advertising in our academic networks as well as in the associative structures for blind people the association Valentin Haüy is in contact with. Or, as it is often the case for digitisation projects, by elaborating a newsletter giving words to the team responsible for the project, but also to readers, blind or sighted, to reflect upon the documents they would have access to. A tight collaboration between our academic institutions and the association Valentin Haüy has already opened up hopeful paths in preserving and giving a new life to the cultural and intellectual project of its founder, Maurice de la Sizeranne. Marion and I truly hope it will at length make accessible to anyone the unexpected cultural richness of blindness.

Websites dedicated to digitised blind archives:

https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb32809419q/date

https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb32886746c/date

https://www.perkins.org/archives/

https://louis.aph.org/aph-library/#/

https://www.afb.org/HelenKellerArchive

https://bvmm.irht.cnrs.fr/resultRecherche/resultRecherche.php?COMPOSITION_ID=21842

We would like to thank the librarians and curators Jennifer Arnott, Susanna Coit and Jennifer Hale from Perkins, Justin A. Gardner from the American Printing House for the Blind and Helen Selsdon from the American Foundation for the Blind, for having inspired us and even supported us in our project.

Overview of the collections from the library Bibliothèque patrimoniale Valentin Haüy:

• Periodicals (Le Journal des Soldats blessés aux yeux ; Le Mutilé des yeux…)
• Catalogues (Katalog des Museums des Blindenwesens in Wien…)
• Registers (Les Établissements généraux de bienfaisance placés sous le patronage de l’Impératrice…)
• Institutional correspondence (AVH, INJA, institutes abroad in Europe and accross the Atlantic…)
• Historical books (Léon Legrand, Les Quinze-Vingts depuis leur fondation, 1887…)
• Essays (Jacques Lusseyran, Ce que l’on voit sans les yeux, 1958 ; Valentin Haüy, Essai sur l'éducation des aveugles, 1786…)
• Biographies (Pierre Villey, Maurice de la Sizeranne, aveugle, bienfaiteur des aveugles, 1932…)
• Press clippings (Georgette Leblanc, « Hellen Keller, le miracle vivant », Candide, n° 688, 20 mai 1937…)
• Novels (Jacques Lusseyran, Le Silence des hommes, 1954...) Poetry (Jean-François Revoil, Souvenirs, Poésies, 1909…)
• Autobiographies (Jacques Arago, Souvenirs d’un aveugle. Voyage autour du monde, 1844 ; Martin Franquel, Comment je devins aveugle. Épisode de ma vie, 1910…)
• Published diaries (Marie Lenéru, Journal de Marie Lenéru, Précédé du Journal d’enfance, 1945…)
• Collected works (François Coppée, Œuvres complètes, 1886-1888, en 6 tomes…) Plays (Marie Lenéru, La Maison sur le roc, 1927…)
• Manuscripts (Edgar Guilbeau, Ma vie d’élève. Souvenirs sincères d’un octogénaire, 1890…)

References:

Goggin, Gerard, Newell, Christopher, Digital Disability: The Social Construction of Disability in New Media, Maryland, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2003. 

Williams, George H., "Disability, Universal Design, and the Digital Humanities", in Gold, Matthiew K., (ed.), Debates in the Digital Humanities, Minneapolis/London, University of Minnesota Press, 2012. (https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/read/untitled-88c11800-9446-469b-a3be-3fdb36bfbd1e/section/2a59a6fe-3e93-43ae-a42f-1b26d1b4becc)

Photograph (© Jacques Fournier) showing one of the corners of the Bibliothèque patrimoniale, whose two walls on either side house tall wooden cupboards, solid at the bottom and glazed at the top. Some of the library's books can be seen in these glass cabinets, as well as numerous blue files containing brochures, articles and manuscripts on blindness.

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Céline Roussel is scholar at Ludwig-Maximilians University München, Germany. Marion Chottin is scholar at CNRS/Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon, France.

Recommended citation

Céline Roussel/ Marion Chottin (2023): The Forgotten Room of the association Valentin Haüy in Paris, or How to Build an Inclusive Digitisation Project on the History of Blindness. In: Public Disabilitiy History 8 (2023) 5.

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Her manner appeared hard and ungracious, while her heart was dissolving with emotions - Harriet Martineau and Her Deafness

By Valerie Doulton

 

Martineau’s Childhood and the Beginnings of Deafness

Harriet Martineau was born in 1802, in Norwich, the principal city of the county of Norfolk, in England. Her family was of Huguenot descent and Unitarian, a type of non-conformist Christianity which Martineau rejected as an adult, eventually becoming an atheist. Early on in her life it was noticed that Martineau was musically gifted. But at twelve years old she began to notice a small but perceptible loss of hearing. By the time she was sixteen this had become considerably more pronounced, causing her considerable personal and social distress. In ‘Household Education’ (1828), she wrote about the onset of her deafness:

“Now and then, someone made light of it. Now and then, someone told her that she mismanaged it, and gave advice which, being inapplicable, grated upon her morbid feelings; but no one inquired what she felt, or appeared to suppose that she did feel. Many were anxious to show kindness and tried to supply some of her privations; but it was too late. She was shut up, and her manner appeared hard and ungracious while her heart was dissolving with emotions.” (Martineau 1861, 118)

Her writing describes that within her immediate family circle, Martineau had at aged 16, become alone and excluded. It also appears she received little sympathy, from either her parents or siblings. It was perhaps this realisation that she could not necessarily rely on other people which was instrumental in her decision to make her own life. In her later ‘Autobiography’ she writes:

“I must take my case into my own hands; and with me, dependent as I was upon the opinion of others, this was redemption from possible destruction. Instead of drifting helplessly as hitherto, I gathered myself up for a gallant breasting of my destiny; and in time I reached the rocks where I could take a firm stand. I felt that here was an enterprise; and the spirit of enterprise was roused in me!” (Martineau 1983, 76)

Figure 1 - Harriet Martineau and Her Ear-Trumpet

What we know of Martineau’s independence of mind, as shown in so much of her writing, was formed directly from her experience of coping in her own independent manner with the deafness that emerged in her childhood. Alongside, this she also developed a great self-discipline and at the age of twenty-eight, when she first began using an ear trumpet, she was able to greatly reduce the barrier which her hearing loss had created between herself and other people. This use of the ear trumpet was a visible sign of what some contemporaries would highlight as a disability. Erving Goffman defines it as a ‘stigma’. These critics portray Harriet as stigmatized by a disability and also marginalized by her gender. They exaggerate her appearance with the ear trumpet as grotesque and abnormal.

The 19th century politicians and commentators who did not want to accept Martineau as a significant writer and social theorist tried to socially disqualify her on account of both her deafness and her sex. The M.P. Lord Brougham dismissed her as ‘the little deaf woman from Norwich’.

In her 1834 Letter to the Deaf Harriet encourages the community she is addressing to nevertheless take up the ear trumpet:

“Yet how few of us will use the helps we might have! How seldom is a deaf person to be seen with a trumpet! How should I have been diverted, if I had not been too much vexed at the variety of excuses that I have heard on this head since I have been much in society. The trumpet makes the sound disagreeable; or it is of no use; or it is not wanted in a noise, because we hear better in a noise; nor in quiet, because we hear very fairly in quiet; or we think our friends do not like it; or we ourselves do not care for it, if it does not enable us to hear general conversation; or- a hundred other reasons just as good.

Now dear friends believe me, these are but excuses. I have tried them all in turn, and I know them to be so. The sound soon becomes anything but disagreeable; and the relief to the nerves, arising from the use of a trumpet is indescribable. None but the totally deaf can fail to find some kind of trumpet that will be of use to them, if they choose to look for it properly and given it a fair trial.” (Martineau 1838, 27-28)

Harriet Martineau’s Travels in the United States

Martineau valued her own ear trumpet to the extent that it accompanied her on her travels round America in the 1830s.She did not only travel as a tourist. She engaged actively in very contentious debates about racial segregation and the slave trade, writing passionately against both practices and as an outspoken abolitionist. That many of these extremely fractious engagements were entered into using an ear trumpet summons up a picture of immense courage and strength of character.

Life in the Sickroom

How fiercely and proudly Martineau made for herself a place in society. In doing so she also demonstrated that whole categories of supposedly gendered behaviours are insignificant if not obsolete. In her 1998 book Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain, Alison Winter argues that Martineau also overcame all the limitations of the sick room. For in addition to learning how to live best with her deafness, she also in later life suffered a long period as an invalid. In Invalidism and Identity in Nineteenth Century Britain, the literary historian Maria H.  Frawley argues that Martineau:

"… moves with evident assurance from an account of sights seen ‘through one back window’ to the ‘truths of life’ that such sights reveal to her."

She was confined for about 5 years in a room in Tynemouth, near Newcastle. During this time, looking through her window from her sickbed to the sea view beyond led her to dwell on macrocosmic truths. This she describes in ‘Life in the Sick Room’ published in 1844.

A Wider and Deeper Understanding of Life

Deafness can throw the individual into a profound interior world, which for some is a profound isolation. Martineau’s feelings about deafness were from a first-person perspective, a matter of ‘lived experience’, to which she always referred herself, and drew very individual conclusions. She did not adhere to the rationalist theory of body prevalent in medical authorities in western societies, in which the body is viewed as an ‘object’. In The Rejected Body: Feminist Philosophical Reflections on Disability (1997), Susan Wendell argues that this approach drives a wedge between doctors and patients – encouraging doctors to view the latter as no more than the physical manifestation of collections of symptoms. Perhaps even more significantly, it serves to alienate patients from their own experiences. (Wendell 1996, 136)

 
Martineau had extraordinary interior contact made more profound through deafness, and she came to analyse her body and its function as ‘lived personal experience’. This may have been a reaction to the complaint quoted above, which appeared in her 1828 book Household Education - that no one inquired what she felt, or appeared to suppose that she did feel. Feelings, as opposed to the rational, are often discussed by medical practitioners as ‘purely imaginative’. But Martineau believed that invalidism had equipped her and all fellow sufferers with powers of perspective unknown to the healthy. Harriet Martineau clearly wanted her readers to understand the subjective experience of illness- i.e., what the long-suffering felt and how they experienced life in the sickroom. She authored her book anonymously as ‘an invalid’ at times directing her remarks to a readership of ‘fellow-sufferers’ and ‘unknown comrades in suffering,’ a readership she had addressed earlier in her 1834 ‘Letter to the Deaf’. 

A Woman Ahead of Her Time

In this and her views on gender and other issues, Martineau was way ahead of her time. She argued that availability of education, which privileged her own mind, must become the standard for all women. She wrote,

"What we have to think of is the necessity – in all justice, in all honour, in all humanity, in all prudence – that every girl’s faculties should be made the most of, as carefully as boys."

She believed that the cultivation of the female intellect is a necessity. Neither her deafness nor her gender impeded her life’s work. Her critics saw both as her greatest liabilities. But they were the foundation of her courage, intellect, and the fulfilment of her life’s work. In other words, her empowerment. In our own time of long Covid, Harriet Martineau’s experience of long-term illness speaks to us very meaningfully today. 

    Hail to the steadfast soul,
Which, unflinching and keen,
    Wrought to erase from its depth,
    Mist and illusion and fear!
    Hail to the spirit which dared
    Trust its own thoughts, before yet
Echoed her back by the crowd!
    Hail to the courage which gave
    Voice to its creed, ere the creed
    Won consecration from time!

- Matthew Arnold, describing Martineau in his poem ‘Haworth Churchyard’ (1855)

This is an edited version of the Live Literature Company’s podcast on the nineteenth century polymath Harriet Martineau (1802-1876). Much of the information in this podcast was first given in a talk entitled Harriet Martineau and her Deafness- Disability or Empowerment? delivered to the 18th Martineau Society Conference in July 2012. The talk referenced Anka Ryall’s study, Medical Body and Lived Experience: The Case of Harriet Martineau (2000), as well as to Susan Bohrer’s paper, Harriet Martineau, Gender Disability, and Liability (2010), and to Vera Wheatley’s biography, The Life and Work of Harriet Martineau (1957). This is considered worldwide to be the first important biography of Martineau, and it is held in great esteem by members of the Martineau Society. In addition, Valerie Doulton, the author of this post, is Wheatley’s granddaughter, and Wheatley’s biography inspired her to join the Martineau Society. Doulton is also the founder and Artistic Director of The Live Literature Company (https://www.theliveliteraturecompany.co.uk)  The Company was founded in 2002 with the aim of creating high-quality drama that is accessible to the widest possible audience.

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References:

Harriet Martineau, Household Education (London: Smith and Elder, 1861 [first published 1828]), p.118.
Harriet Martineau, Autobiography (vol.1) with a new Introduction by Gaby Weiner, (London: Virago, 1983). p.76.
Harriet Martineau, A Letter to the Deaf (London: C. Knight and Co., 22 Ludgate-Street, 1838), pp.27-28.
Susan Wendell, The Rejected Body: Feminist Philosophical Reflections on Disability (New York/London: Routledge, 1996), p.136.

 

Recommended citation

Doulton, Valerie (2023): Her manner appeard hard and ungracious, while her heart was dissolving with emotions´: Harriet Martineau and Her Deafness. In: Public Disabilitiy History 8 (2023) 4.

 
   

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Inspiration Porn and Depictions of Impairment in Early America

 By Meg Roberts

Picture: An example of an almanac of a similar style and period as Daniel George’s. Entitled ‘The New-Jersey Almanack for the Year of our Lord 1779’, printed by Isaac Collins in New Jersey. Image sourced from Rutgers University Library and in the public domain.

In 1775, seventeen-year-old Daniel George, a ‘student in astronomy’ from Massachusetts, composed an almanac. In an eclectic fourteen pages of printed text and tables, he recorded the rising and setting of the sun and the moon, the location of the planets, the tides, the weather, Quaker Meetings, ‘Remarkable Days’, ‘Liberty Days’, and poetry. He also included ‘for the use of the gentlemen officers and soldiers in the American army’ a narrative of the Battle of Concord, recently fought at the outset of the Revolutionary War. George had studied mathematics and astronomy extensively, and the almanac was the result of painstaking calculations throughout the year. In August 1775, George and his father visited the Reverend Samuel Williams, who was known for his interest in astronomy. Seeing the quality of George’s work, Williams forwarded the almanac to Salem printer Ezekiel Russell, including a letter of recommendation. 

A shrewd marketer, Russell published George’s almanac in 1776 under the title: ‘George’s Cambridge Almanack … By Daniel George, a Student in Astronomy at Haverhill, in the County of Essex, who is now in the Seventeenth Year of his Age, and has been a Cripple from his Infancy.’ He also printed Reverend Williams’ endorsement, which included further details of George’s impairment. Williams began by noting his initial impression of George as ‘a singular object of pity and compassion’. However, the Reverend noted, ‘with all the disorders of body under which he labors, his mind does not seem to have been at all affected’. Williams went on to recommend the almanac’s publication and praised George’s intricate calculations as ‘equal to other compositions of that kind’ and indicative of ‘rising genius’, despite his ‘singular situation’. He closed his appeal: ‘…if you favour the productions of a Cripple, in the seventeenth year of his age, it must not only give pleasure to him, but to the benevolent and humane who wish success to the ingenious and comfort to the wretched.’

Russell’s choice of title and Reverend Williams’ short narrative places George’s achievement firmly in the context of his impairment, portraying his ‘genius’ as particularly impressive considering his ‘uncommon disadvantages’. Read outside of its eighteenth-century context, this framing of the almanac as the unlikely but remarkable feat of a young man with a physical impairment reads suspiciously like what we would now call ‘inspiration porn’. 

The term ‘inspiration porn’ was popularised by the late Stella Young in 2012, first in an article for the webzine Ramp Up and then in a 2014 TEDx talk. She defined the phenomenon as 

‘an image of a person with a disability, often a kid, doing something completely ordinary – like playing, or talking, or running, or drawing a picture, or hitting a tennis ball – carrying a caption like ‘your excuse is invalid’ or ‘before you quit, try’ (Young, 2012).

‘Since then, use of the term has expanded to incorporate any media which generally exploits disabled people as objects of pity or condescension to evoke an uplifting moral for the benefit of the non-disabled viewer’ (Ladau, 2019). Ubiquitous across the internet and painfully familiar to the disabled community, these depictions perpetuate a number of harmful tropes.

 

Caption: Stella Young’s 2014 TEDx talk: ‘Inspiration porn and the objectification of disability’

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxrS7-I_sMQ

The ‘inspiration’ fundamental to inspiration porn usually rests on the assumption that impairment is an entirely debilitating experience. Disabled people’s acts and achievements are therefore framed as automatically exceptional; by living with their impairment they are ‘overcoming’ it. Reverend Williams’ earnest assurance that Daniel George’s ‘mind does not seem to have been at all affected’ by his impairment, and that his almanac ‘seems to be equal to other compositions of that kind’, betrays his apparent low expectations for George’s abilities. Behind his need to convince the reader of the young man’s achievement is a distinct sense of both surprise and marvel – George’s ‘genius’ is all the more remarkable because of its unlikelihood due to his ‘uncommon disadvantages’.  

Central to contemporary criticism of inspiration porn has also been the repeated use of disabled bodies to deliver moral lessons and encouragement to non-disabled people. As Stella Young commented, ‘inspirational’ photos and videos of disabled people exist ‘so that non-disabled people can look at us and think "well, it could be worse... I could be that person"’ (Young, 2012). Indeed, her use of the word ‘porn’ in describing the phenomenon was quite deliberate, as its effect is to ‘objectify one group of people for the benefit of another group of people’. 

From his repeated emotive references to the ‘wretched’, ‘distressed, ‘unhappy Cripple’, it is clear that Williams was keenly aware of the marketable potential of George’s work – not simply due to its merit, but because ‘the singular situation of the author, bids fair to engage the popular attention’. Part of the novelty of the almanac, regardless of its quality, was in the fact that someone with a physical impairment had written it. This clear objectification of George’s impairment for the sake of intrigue is a starkly reminiscent of inspiration porn, where disabled people’s stories and achievements are exhibited for the benefit of an audience that is assumed to be non-disabled. Reverend Williams actually appeals directly to a readership of the ‘benevolent and humane who wish success to the ingenious and comfort to the wretched’, creating a clear distinction between the charitable able-bodied audience and the impaired object of their compassion. 

To a twenty-first-century reader, all too familiar with the tropes of inspiration porn, Williams’ portrayal of Daniel George seems to tick all the requisite boxes. But put back in its eighteenth-century context, it becomes slightly more nuanced. There have been countless intricate changes in the cultural depiction of impairment through history, not least in the last two hundred and fifty years. Most of the historical processes that converged to create both the phenomenon of inspiration porn and the wider disability/ability binary would have been alien to Daniel George and Reverend Williams. 

In eighteenth-century North America, the clear distinction between ‘ability’ and ‘disability’ that inspiration porn rests upon had not yet solidified. Historians of impairment in early America have engaged with the social model of disability to explore how cultural constructions of incapacity manifested in this period. They have noted that, though the word ‘disabled’ was often used in the eighteenth century, it did not become a defined or comprehensive social category in the United States until at least the early nineteenth century. This is not to say it was a ‘golden age’ for people with impairments. Daniel George’s physical condition clearly affected his experiences and interactions, and some harmful connotations accompanied the other emotive labels Williams gave him. However, in the eighteenth century an individual’s physical health was always vulnerable and the line between physical capacity and incapacity was tenuous. It was an era of debilitating epidemics, rudimentary sanitation, harsh climates, dangerous labour and an ever-changing medley of medical practices. George’s New England audience may not have read about him and thought ‘well, it could be worse... I could be that person’, because their own day-to-day experiences of precarious health did not induce them to distinguish so drastically between disabled and non-disabled bodies. 

The intended purpose of Reverend Williams’ endorsement is also crucial here. Though his wording is emotive and emphasises the peculiarity of George’s ‘uncommon disadvantages’ and ‘rising genius’, this was a fairly standard tone for a patron advocating for a protégé in need of financial support. Most eighteenth-century readers were familiar with various forms of physical impairment due to their everyday involvement in practical and financial support networks for local families, individuals and even strangers. Poor relief in the colonial era was based in the community, and routinely involved provision for people with illnesses and impairments who were partially or wholly unable to labour. Their livelihoods were often a mixture of sponsorship from the local government or private charity, with local churches frequently responsible for the collection and distribution of aid. It was therefore fairly usual for church ministers like Williams to appeal to a community’s sympathies and sense of religious moral duty to gain financial support for a local person in need. George himself thanked his ‘public-spirited Friends and Countrymen’ for purchasing his almanac because they were ‘helping one who is not able, or perhaps ever will have it in his power to help himself’. When Williams and George addressed the almanac’s readers, they did so not to ‘inspire’ a non-disabled audience, but to generate a livelihood. 

Furthermore, the devaluation of disabled people’s achievements that runs through inspiration porn was configured differently in the eighteenth century. The flexibility of the household economy and interdependency of local communities, especially in rural areas, often allowed early Americans with impairments to participate in various forms of labour adapted to their needs. Indeed, intense cultural expectations of industriousness from every member of a community required that people with impairments be seen to make some effort to use and develop their skills for the benefit of themselves and the community. George’s almanac was not impressive to Williams because it was ‘inspiring’, but because the young man was clearly conscious of his physical limitations and embracing an alternative avenue by which he could contribute to his community. 

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the almanac diverges from the contemporary standards of inspiration porn because Daniel George himself is not voiceless. Inspiration porn relies on the silence of the disabled object of inspiration. Listening to the perspectives of actual disabled people complicates the narrative that physical impairment is a terrible burden that people are bravely enduring every day. George is still somewhat constricted by the conventions of appealing for financial support within a deeply hierarchical eighteenth-century society, which required gratitude and deference to patrons. But after Williams’ introduction, George takes over with a page of prose and another twelve pages of astronomical calculations, an account of the Battle of Concord and a variety of monthly readings, important historical events and notices. 

This is a rare direct account from an eighteenth-century American with a physical impairment, which makes it all the more significant that George barely mentions his condition. Once he has thanked Reverend Williams and the printer Ezekiel Russell, and acknowledged the help that his ‘kind and generous Patrons who may venture to expend four pence’ would provide, he moves swiftly on. He describes in detail the ‘other excitements’ that may be more interesting to his New England readers than his impairment: the ‘heroic deeds of your brave and renowned Countrymen who so remarkably distinguished themselves in the late Battle of Concord’. For the remainder of the almanac, George is concerned only with providing calculations and observations ‘at least as useful and entertaining as any studied by Gentlemen of more riper years’. 

Daniel George’s almanac proved so successful that Russell printed a second edition with additional material. The following year, he composed a new almanac for two further printers in Boston and Newburyport. Between 1776 and 1787, George’s annual almanacs were distributed widely in towns across New England. His physical impairment never seems to have been mentioned beyond the first issue. George eventually moved to Maine and became a printer himself, as well as a schoolteacher and the owner of a small bookstore. In 1800, four years before his death, he became the sole owner of a Maine newspaper (Griffin, 1874).

Eighteenth-century disability history can be tricky to navigate. Many of the concepts and discourses generated by disability studies and disability activism – like inspiration porn – naturally engage with contemporary disabled experience. With this conceptual grounding, it can be easy to accidentally transpose modern concepts onto historical actors who would not recognise them. At first, Reverend Williams’ introduction to Daniel George’s almanac reads like a clear eighteenth-century manifestation of a twenty-first century phenomenon. But where this comparison falls short, we can see the areas where George’s experience did not structurally or culturally resemble contemporary experiences of disability. Inspiration porn, like so many other aspects of the modern disabled experience, is evidently a cultural choice rather than a historical constant. 

Meg Roberts is a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge, researching disability and caretaking during the American Revolutionary War.

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References: 

Altschuler, Sari, and Silva, Cristobal, ‘Early American Disability Studies’, Early American Literature 52, no. 1 (2017), 1–27. 

Blackie, Daniel. ‘Disabled Revolutionary War Veterans and the Construction of Disability in the Early United States, c. 1776–1840’, Doctoral Thesis, (Helsinki, 2010).

Daen, Laurel, ‘Revolutionary War Invalid Pensions and the Bureaucratic Language of Disability in the Early Republic’. Early American Literature 52 (2017): 141–67.

Daen, Laurel, ‘Beyond Impairment: Recent Histories of Early American Disability’. History Compass 17 (2019). 

Daen, Laurel, ‘To Board & Nurse a Stranger”: Poverty, Disability, and Community in Eighteenth-Century Massachusetts’, Journal of Social History 53 (2020), pp. 716–741. 

George, Daniel, George’s Cambridge almanack, American Antiquarian Society manuscript copy (Essex, 1776). 

Griffin, Joseph, History of the Press of Maine (1874), Book Collections at the Maine State Library, p. 36. 

Grue, Jan, ‘The problem with inspiration porn: a tentative definition and a provisional critique’, Disability & Society 31:6 (2016), pp. 838-849.

Ladau, Emily. ‘Beyond Inspiration: A New Narrative’. New Mobility (blog), 1 August 2019.

Turner, David M. Disability in Eighteenth-Century England: Imagining Physical Impairment (Routledge, 2012).

Young, Stella, ‘We're not here for your inspiration’, Ramp Up (2 Jul 2012).

Young, Stella, ‘Inspiration porn and the objectification of disability’, TEDxSydney (2014).

Recommended citation: Meg Roberts (2021): Inspiration Porn and Depictions of Impairment in Early America. In: Public Disability History 6 (2021) 6.

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Asylum “Ghost Tours” are Grotesque Tours

By Tracy Mack and Geoffrey Reaume 

Abandoned or renovated psychiatric asylums have inspired countless urban legends and ghost stories, overshadowing the lives of the people who lived, worked, and died there, with most of their histories remaining untold. Building on this folklore, ‘ghost tours’ of former psychiatric hospitals have become a popular attraction in which the historical lives of asylum inmates are portrayed as still being present, this time as “ghosts” haunting the grounds. These guided tours of asylum premises are presented as educational and entertainment but are actually exploitative and stigmatizing. Being a patient in a psychiatric facility is not an enjoyable experience. Not in the past. Not today. It is not fun to be feared, laughed at and held up as examples of voyeuristic glares by people because of one's psychiatric history. Yet, this is what happens with “ghost” tours. It encourages precisely this sort of prejudice. Even after previous protests, it is still happening.

 

Humber College is one of those institutions which has, and currently does, sponsor tours of the old psychiatric buildings that specifically link the site with ghoulishness despite the uproar by mad activists and allies. The Mimico Insane Asylum (now Humber College) was located in what is now Etobicoke, Ontario, Canada, the western part of Toronto. It operated under various names from 1890 until closing in 1979. By the early 2000s, it re-opened as a community college which included old asylum buildings which were renovated for educational and administrative purposes.

 

In re-using the old Mimico asylum grounds as an educational facility, a professor at Humber College has mystified its history in a way that promotes the worst stereotypes about psychiatric patients as people to be frightened of, like an other-worldly figure in a gothic horror story. This is a problem that goes far beyond this one former asylum. As reports from Sweden and the United States indicate, people who do not identify as having a psychiatric history use the grounds of old asylums to perpetuate voyeuristic, stereotyped views of what these places represent with so-called “ghost” tours. By focusing on the activities at one Canadian institution, the purpose of this blog post is to emphasize the ongoing discrimination towards people deemed mad and how it is reinforced every time a “ghost tour” occurs.

 

In 2010, “The Powerhouse of Terror,” a Halloween tour of the underground tunnels of the old Mimico asylum, was denounced by the mad community and allies, yet it still took place. In 2014, the tour was named the Lakeshore Tunnel Tours. Co-author Tracy Mack took notes from a 2014 tour (these quotes are from a recording of the tour and were then documented in 2014 in the effort to mobilize and stop the tour from occurring). Before the tour began, Professor Steve Bang, a business professor, self-declared “unofficial historic tour leader” told the group to look out for an orb, a round speckled object floating about which, in this case, is associated with ghostly apparitions. Bang was dressed in a black robe, a hat from around 1800 and a glass lantern. Bang stated that the orb was actually the nurse who hung herself after being caught having an affair with a patient.

 

Further down the hallway, Bang told the group that the patients built the tunnels themselves in order to be kept occupied. That patients built these tunnels is correct, but it took years of unpaid hard physical labour to construct the buildings and tunnels. Inmates also repaired the buildings, transported coal into the asylum, washed and mended clothing, worked on farms, and gardened all in the name of work therapy, but it was, in fact, outright exploitation of patients' unpaid labor.

 

Less than a mile away there are 1511 mostly unmarked graves, all inmates who died while institutionalized at this psychiatric hospital.  Yet, this was not ghostly enough to speak about during the tour attended by a co-author of this article. Upon seeing a series of indents above the walls, Bang explained that the indents were once windows. He stated that the hallways were lit by candles at night. Further down the hallway, we came across many rusted bolts in the wall. “Those bolts used to be for shackles,” said Bang. Patients were shackled to the wall when they were having an “episode”. Basically, “men and women sat with their hands banded together by shackles while they screamed in the glow of the candle-lit hallways”, he said. As the institution was separated by gender this could not have occurred, certainly not in the way described. Electricity was widely available in this part of Ontario by the early 20th century. Candlelight would not have been used during most, if not all, of this institution’s history, rendering this claim even more suspect – unless it helps to sell a “ghost” story which is “scarier” with an image of flickering candles in a dark, underground space. Next, participants saw a couple of caged cells in the walls. Bang said that “the jail cells were for the bad patients”, but never explained what he meant by “bad patients,” an extremely dubious term in the context of people confined in these institutions.  These tales are akin to folklore and made up ghost stories, though presented as historical facts. A serious tour would discuss controversial topics including the exploitation of unpaid patient labour; abuse and isolation of patients from the outside world; and the contentious nature of diagnostic categories which were influenced by biases based on class, race, gender and disability. In recent years, Humber College, through their interpretive centre, has offered a serious and respectful historical tour of the grounds which is distinct from the “ghostly” tour being critiqued here.

 

Yet, Humber College allows Professor Bang to continue to promote “ghostly” tours years after the criticisms expressed in this blog were first made public. On his website, dated 2021, he states:

you might find me leading a group of teachers, students or visitors through the attics and tunnels of the Lakeshore cottages in search of the ever elusive Ghost of the Asylum. For more information click on the links provided or send me an e-mail to arrange your own private tour.

In 2014, a Halloween tour was planned that would have continued the imagery that psychiatric inmates are people who are nothing more than titillating entertainment to get a good scare out of, or laugh at, on a night when fear is promoted as a source of fun.  The co-authors of this article met with the Principal of Humber College, Wanda Buote, and Professor Bang. They stated that it was not their intent to exploit this history but to allow their students to hear more about the history of their grounds. Although they admitted that there was some folklore, they emphasized that it was not something they focused on and that they were working hard to reduce the stigma around mental health. At one point during the meeting, Professor Bang was asked if Humber College had previously been a residential school, would he lead tours, adding in ghost stories to Indigenous history, while dressed up in Indigenous attire. He whole-heartedly said yes, without a second to think about the question’s implications. Humber did not cancel the tour due to this meeting, however, the event was cancelled the morning of the tour due to a protest that was going to occur by the mad community and allies.  Despite this, in 2015 the organizer had another ghost tour, just after Halloween, evident by the poster below in which he wears clothing while carrying an irrelevant prop – a glass lantern – that has nothing to do with the actual asylum history of this site. Instead, the image suggests a costume that might have been worn by a night watchman  about a century before the Mimico institution opened.

2015 poster advertising Mimico Asylum history tour.

 

Tours through old institutions that are respectful and sensitive of the history and experiences of the psychiatric inmates who were held there are extremely important.  We need to remember this past, the traumas it produced, and how institutionalization functioned as a disabling process contributing to the marginalization and oppression of people deemed mad and intellectually disabled. Yet, ongoing ghost tours contradict and undercut this important work around the history of institutionalization by promoting offensive stereotypes around people with mental disabilities and erasing the salient history of the institution by constructing the facility as "haunted." This transforms the old parts of the hospital from a mindful memorial into public amusement which erases abuses and reduces asylum inmates to passive silence when their memory is not otherwise being used to “scare” people.

 

History needs to preserved and the untold stories need to be respectfully heard. How do we memorialize pasts filled with abuse and torture? Algoma University in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, Canada is one example. The main building was the Shingwauk Residential School that closed in 1970. The university runs an archive on residential schools where they have gathered the records of many children who were incarcerated there and in other residential schools. The university offers not only courses but a degree program in Anishinaabe studies. In every class, in every department, Indigenous Studies are intertwined within the courses. Within the walls of that university, no one is permitted to speak ill of Indigenous people or their past. As a former student of Algoma University, co-author Tracy Mack left not only with a degree but with a wealth of invaluable knowledge regarding Indigenous issues that are ingrained in the overall learning process.  This is how histories filled with abuse and torture should be remembered and memorialized – with the greatest respect and care.

 

To link the histories of inmates who once lived, worked and died in former asylums with "frightening" imagery is to perpetuate the worst type of stereotypes and discriminatory attitudes towards one of the most marginalized disabled communities. Treatment in public institutions during the period when asylums like Mimico were operating were often horrific with well documented cases of physical, verbal and sexual abuse. It is inappropriate to turn such monumental human tragedy into ghost stories.  As educators, we have a responsibility to replace folklore with factual histories and in the process pay respect to those who lived and died there.

 

Ghost tours are grotesque tours which insult the memory of deceased psychiatric patients and inflict real harm on the daily lives of people experiencing mental distress today. People who lead such tours have to ask themselves – what is it about people who were in these institutions that permits their caricature as “ghosts” when, in another context, such scare-mongering mystification of a marginalized population would never be permitted?

 

Tracy Mack has a PhD in Critical Disability Studies at York University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Geoffrey Reaume teaches mad people´s history and disability history in the Critical Disability Studies program at York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. 

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Suggested readings:

Eghigian, G. (2010, September 15). Who’s haunting whom? The new fad in asylum tourism” Psychiatric Times, reposted to H-Madness: https://historypsychiatry.com/2010/09/15/september-psychiatric-times-post-whos-haunting-whom-the-new-fad-in-asylum-tourism/

Goar, C. (2010, October 26). Goar: Horror show for former patients. The Toronto Star. https://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorialopinion/2010/10/26/goar_horror_show_for_former_patients.html

Jackson, K. (2018). A textual analysis of newspapers, madness, and the Lakeshore psychiatric hospital. Critical Disabilities Discourses, 8: 98-126. https://cdd.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/cdd/article/view/39728/35970

Punzi, E. (2019). Ghost walks or thoughtful remembrance: How should the heritage of psychiatry be approached? Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy, 19(4): 242-249.

 

Recommended citation:  

Tracy Mack & Geoffrey Reaume  (2021): Asylum “Ghost Tours” are Grotesque Tours. In: Public Disability History 6 (2021) 3.

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