Being disabled in the medieval era

History of assistive technology

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0:30Welcome back to the History Extra podcast. Prosthetic legs, wheelbarrow wheelchairs and guide children were just some of the assistive technologies and body augmentations available to our medieval and early modern ancestors. From bionic knights to perspectical monks, Ray Gillibrand, lecturer in inclusive learning at the University of Leeds, highlights how bodily difference was understood in this pre-modern era and explores the medieval marketplace and community support that was available. Speaking to Emily Griffith, Ray reveals a world of ingenuity, adaptation and care.

1:05I'm so excited to be talking to you today. First and foremost, I think there's a perception that disability technology is something that only really came about after the First World War. Now, I'm curious, what is your opinion on that perception? You're totally right. Whenever I talk about my work and my research, you get this idea that, you know, this is all something that happened at the turn of the 20th century. And before that, it was just awful. Life was terrible. There was no assistive technology. Oh, I find that when I'm talking to people about my research, you get things like, it was all like the Hunchback of Notre Dame.

1:41Disney has a lot to answer for there. Or more Disney, Captain Hook in Peter Pan. You know, it's all this kind of perception. But that's just not true. So actually, there's a really long and rich history of assistive technology in the pre-modern period, which I'm excited to chat through with you today. Now, from your awareness, things that you've encountered in your research, how far does this history stretch back? Is there ancient stuff that you might point us to? Obviously, today we're talking about stuff that's slightly later than that. Absolutely. So my research focuses more or less on the periods from 1400 to 1600. So I think about that, that little like gap of time that people often forget about.

2:20We've got this sort of situation where historians say that the Middle Ages ended in 1500 and the early modern period started in 1500. But I don't think that people woke up on the 1st of January of 1500 and went, oh, you know, I'm feeling very early modern today. So, yeah, so I focus on that little overlap between those two periods. But the history of assistive technology goes back far further. So people have found ancient Egyptian mummies with prosthetic toes. The Etruscans in what would now be sort of Italy were making prosthetic teeth and dentures and that kind of thing.

2:51So there's a huge history that goes way, way back beyond the time period that I'm looking at. Amazing. Now, as you've said, we're going to be focusing on that very late medieval stroke, very early, early modern.

Language and medieval disability

3:02When we're talking about this period, does the definition of disability differ to when we talk about it today? Yeah. So the language around disability is super interesting. So in this time period, the word disability didn't exist in the way that we would understand it today. So the earliest known use of the word disability in relation to physical impairment is in 1545. So like right at the end of the time period that I'm looking at. And this is in the writing of a guy called Roger Asham. He was an author and a royal tutor, and he wrote this book on how to shoot guns.

3:36It's called The School of Shooting. And in this book, this is the first written record we have in English. He says, you know, there's this guy who can't learn how to shoot a gun. And he says it's not due to any disability. It's just due to his unwillingness to learn. So his laziness. And that's the first sense of disability being used in a way to mean physical impairment or bodily difference. But before this, the word disability was far more literal. So it took the literal form of like the prefix dis and the verb able. So when we add dis to a verb, it sort of reverses the meaning.

4:10So it meant to like prevent somebody from doing something. And we see this in other words, right, that we're probably more familiar with, like disown or dislike or something like that. And so it was used in the medieval period to mean things that were often more legal in nature. So preventing somebody from doing something or enjoying kind of rights or freedoms in a legal context. So in that way, there was no relationship between bodily impairment and disability in the medieval period. But I do think it's interesting that the word disability comes with these associations of like hindering or preventing.

4:41And it has those sort of negative linguistic etymologies, which I think, you know, is a conversation for another day. But it's something worth thinking about. So instead, people are identified by their specific impairment. So you might have people described as lame or crippled if they can't walk, deaf and dumb if they can't speak or hear, people being called lepers if they've got Paget's disease. And today those words are all, you know, considered to be, you know, rightfully so. Harmful or slurs, you know, they're not words that we would use in relation to modern disability.

5:12But when we're thinking about the pre-modern period, they don't carry the same stigma that we would associate with them today. They were just more depoliticised labels attached to certain kinds of conditions. And because of that, there's no real like collective disabled identity. It's just more of an identity amongst different kinds of bodily impairments. Now, this is an important piece of context I think we might need to cover straight off. Are there any boundaries to accessing the lived experience of this history? Yeah, in short, absolutely.

5:45So when you're researching pre-modern disability, the accessibility of the lived experience is so dependent on a whole range of things. So it can depend on like the stigma surrounding a certain condition, things like the status of an individual, whether that individual had the ability to read and write, if they even wanted to, you know, read and write as well. So plenty of us today who are living with disabilities can read and write, but don't choose to write about those conditions. So that's, you know, equally a problem in the pre-modern period. But then we've also got, especially for the time period that I'm looking at, the kind of social, political and symbolic meanings of disability and how they're publicly portrayed.

6:25So some conditions were more popular because they had religious connections. So things like needing to walk with a crutch, for example, show up more in visual representations of disability. And then, of course, we've got things like, does anything survive materially for us to look at? So a lot of my work is based on surviving material culture and skeletal evidence. So looking at the actual physical remains to see if there's anything there. And I'm sure we're going to touch on these as we talk.

Church views and daily life

6:55How did people of this pre-modern era approach disability? As we might think about it, obviously, with the complications of that word that we've just spoken about. Were they matter of fact about it? Were they empathetic or were people treated, as we might see, slightly less respectfully? It's always tough to speak in generalisations. So disability is so broad. It encompasses a whole range of different kind of conditions and lived experiences. And as we sort of touched on, things like age, gender, status, socioeconomic group, you know, that all plays into it as well.

7:30But when you look at pre-modern disability, there's an interesting kind of thing going on. So the Christian church was grappling with what disability meant at the time. Obviously not under the language of disability, but bodily difference. And it was considered by the church to be a kind of imperfection of the body, which isn't necessarily how we think about it today. But that's how the Christian church at the time was framing disability. But this caused a little bit of a problem, because if we think about disability as an imperfection, the Christian God is meant to be incapable of imperfection.

8:04So it was a real struggle trying to, like, align the two for these kind of big Christian thinkers. It's, you know, if God is perfect and can only create perfect things, why does disability exist within that medieval kind of situation? And so there was a big church thinker called St. Augustine who thought about this. He wrote a book called The City of God. And he says in this book that, you know, we have men in the world who have more than five fingers on their hands and more than five toes on their feet. But who are we to assume that God was mistaken and miscounted the number of fingers or toes?

8:40And so he's saying that this is intentional because God doesn't make mistakes. And so because of this, the church started to present disability as one of two kind of things. It was either an intentional thing that God inflicts upon someone to be a kind of spiritual trial. And this meant that through suffering in life, you would have to do less suffering in purgatory when you've died and you could get to heaven more quickly. So it was kind of a fast track through to heaven and a way to kind of bring you closer to God during life.

9:12It was also in this sense, a kind of necessary evil. So people have to have a reason to behave as good Christians. You have to have a reason to give charitably. So having people with disabilities, people who might need to beg, allowed the wealthy people who didn't have disabilities to take care of them and donate and give charitable arms and that kind of thing. The other idea that was really prolific at the time was this sense that disability was a kind of sign. And it was a sign either of God's displeasure with a particular couple by making their child disabled or with a community by having children in that community who were born with disabilities, or it was a physical marker of someone's inner character on their external body.

9:56So if somebody was inwardly evil, it would present in the form of physical difference and disability, which is obviously problematic by today's standards. But there was this very sort of particular correlation between disability and sin, or if not strictly sin, then definitely kind of God's displeasure. So this is what you see in a lot of the church literature and this kind of big thinkers. And I thought, oh gosh, that, you know, that must have meant that life was really hard. That was, that's really terrible. But this, as far as I can tell from my work, just doesn't translate into the day-to-day lives of every people.

10:28In the same way that we might have mainstream ideas about bodies and beauty culture and all these kinds of things that don't necessarily impact particular individuals on a day-to-day basis. So instead of this idea that, you know, people were inherently sinful or bad or worthy of charity, actually, we see people with disabilities having families and relationships and being loved and participating in the community, you know, receiving treatment, seeking cures and, you know, doing all the things that other people in society were doing.

11:00This kind of broad idea that the church is proliferating at the time doesn't, as far as I can tell, translate into the everyday lived experience. So communities actually really built around people with impairments or disabilities. Yeah, so we see so much in the way of family care. So things that people are doing for each other. One of my favourite examples of this is there was a big battle during the Wars of the Roses called the Battle of Tauton, which I won't get into, but it was especially brutal and bloody.

11:31And we found some archaeological remains from the Battle of Tauton of soldiers that were executed. And one of these soldiers is fascinating to me from the perspective of disability, because although he was killed at the Battle of Tauton when he was probably in his sort of 50s, so he was an older soldier at that point, he had this long life beforehand of being a soldier and fighting in battles. And on his skull, you can see across his jaw, there is a huge slash mark from a sword that is cut through the bone of his upper and lower mandible.

12:01But it's healed. And so with that kind of condition, he wouldn't have been able to eat properly by himself. He'd have probably been on liquid food. He, you know, as we suspect, had some of his tongue sliced off, so would have really struggled with speech and that kind of thing. And to recover from this, you're going to have to have around-the-clock care. You know, you don't want that wound to become infected. It's so close to, you know, your brain. It's in that part of the body. And so somebody was looking after him, you know, feeding him, making his food liquid, taking care of the wound itself, and it heals.

12:32And he recovered. And he went on to fight in however many battles afterwards. So people were just giving up. People were, you know, adapting and looking after the people that they loved. Fantastic example there. What other support could people seek in the community?

The medical marketplace

12:47Again, it's very dependent on who you are, what status you are, what money you have. But there's a system called the medical marketplace is what we call it as historians. So rather than having something like the NHS that we have today, which is, you know, kind of where you go and everything's filtered through that one institution. Because there was no NHS, you had to think about what your condition was and what kinds of care you wanted to receive in response to that. So for some people, that was family support. For other people, it might be going to seek a miracle cure.

13:19So miracles were a big form of healing in the Middle Ages. People would go to various different shrines belonging to different saints and would appeal to that saint for assistance in the hope that the saint would give them some kind of miracle cure. I should say those saints are often deceased. This is all, you know, from beyond the grave. It's very sort of spiritual. So the cures come in the form of miraculous healings, kind of the things that we see people talking about like lords today. So it might be, you know, somebody goes to a shrine and they can't walk and they pray at the shrine.

13:52They might leave an offering. Usually it's things like candles. But sometimes we see these really lovely wax limbs that are carved out of beeswax to represent the limb where there was an impairment or a health condition. And they're given to the shrine. And then hopefully that saint would be benevolent and would, you know, help a person with their impairment. So religion plays a huge part there in terms of the saints' shrines. But we also have hospitals in the Middle Ages. And these aren't hospitals like we would know them today. So they're not primarily medical institutions. They're more like care homes, I suppose.

14:27So they're often places where people who have long-term illness and not a lot of family or elderly people will go and kind of see out the end of their lives under the care of usually monks and nuns who are looking after them in these institutions. And that care isn't always necessarily strictly medical, as we think about medical, but it's things like feeding them, you know, helping them wash, staying clean, changing beds, and also the care for the soul as well, which was a big part of this. So ensuring that they got to say their prayers, hear mass and that kind of thing.

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15:28So we've spoken a little bit about the community, but what about animals?

Guide dogs and children

15:32When we think of assistant aides today, our minds might immediately be drawn to guide dogs, for example. Was there an early equivalent of this? Did people of this era put their trust in dogs? Yeah, some people did. So guide dogs is a really interesting one in relation to the medieval and sort of early, early modern period, because there's very little evidence for the use of guide dogs in written documents and very little archaeological kind of evidence for guide dogs existing.

16:05But there is some written evidence that suggests that people shouldn't use guide dogs, which I find really interesting, because I think whenever somebody says you shouldn't do something, it implies that it's going on. Something has to be happening for someone to say, don't do it. So there is a Franciscan friar and scholar called Bartholomaeus Anglicus, who's a little before my time period, but because the source material is so limited in this respect, he's one of the people I draw on. He was around in the 13th century. He writes that he feels bad for people who are blind because, you know, they have to trust a hound better than themselves.

16:42And so he says that, you know, this is not a good thing and you shouldn't have to put your faith in a dog. And he advises people to find alternative solutions. He's very concerned about blind people crossing bridges, being guided by dogs. So the very fact that he's concerned about this seems to suggest to me that he's seen this happening in order to have that concern. But for me, the most evidence I've found for guide dogs is in visual material. So in what we call medieval marginalia. So these are the little sort of drawing kind of doodles that we see in the edges of medieval manuscripts.

17:14And in these, I've found a number of people with dogs. And I think if you look closely at those people, you'll notice that they have some visual signifiers of blindness. So blindness in medieval artwork is normally depicted by a kind of closed eyes. Often people are represented as begging when they're blind as well. So there's a lot of imagery around beggars' bowls, tattered clothes that associate someone with begging and poverty. So we see these things all coming together. We see people with these kind of downcast eyes with a beggars' bowl, but then also with a dog on a leash helping them.

17:49And sometimes those dogs are also carrying the beggars' bowl in their mouth. So actively doing that job for the blind person, which I think is super cool. But I got thinking about this and I was like, why are all the people then in these images using guide dogs? Poor people. Why are they in rags and begging? Dogs weren't hard to come by. There's so much evidence for, you know, wealthy people having so many different kinds of dogs. So what's going on here? And I came back to Bartholomeus Anglicus, who says, you know, maybe don't trust a dog.

18:21He says, what you should do instead is get a child to be your guide. And I thought, ah, of course, it's the middle ages. We could have child labor. That's fine. So employ a child to be your guide child rather than having a guide dog because they're more reliable. And so Bartholomeus Anglicus goes on to say, you know, if you do have a child as a guide and you're blind, you have to look after them. You can't beat the child because then they will leave you alone in the middle of a bridge and not show you how to get off the bridge and you might walk over the edge. He's very concerned about bridges.

18:52So, yeah, the higher status up you get, the more you can afford things like servants and staff and children who work for you as guides and you don't need dogs. So guide dogs were actually really low status in the Middle Ages. And as a side note on that, what other ways did status or perhaps something like gender affect what assistive technologies or aids people had access to?

Prosthetic limbs for knights

19:15A really good example of this is thinking about prosthetic limbs and medieval knights. So one of my favorite things to talk about. In the period that I look at, there are some interesting things going on. So you've still got your kind of traditional knights on horseback fighting in battle, but the kind of warfare that they're engaging in is changing. So we've seen at this point the introduction of gunpowder onto the battlefield. And this leads to a whole new range of injuries that medieval armor wasn't functional against.

19:48So you think of your knight in your shining army, you know, your big suits of armor. And those suits of armor functioned so well against slashing damage. So if you're going to hit somebody with a sword, it's going to slide right off the armor and it's going to function really well. They were also really great against things like piercing damage. So if you're going to be very sort of stabby with the point of a sword, things like chainmail are effective against that. But when we start seeing guns and cannons, that kind of bludgeoning damage that you get from those gunpowder weapons, it doesn't function against that kind of high velocity gunpowder weapons.

20:19So because of this, we see a lot more battlefield injuries resulting in limb loss during this time than previously. This is also coupled with advancements in medicine. So people can also survive limb loss as well in a way that they might not have been able to as successfully earlier in history. So with the kind of medical innovation in terms of how we deal with limb loss and the greater need for dealing with limb loss because of the kind of warfare that people are engaging in,

20:49we suddenly see a lot of upper class men who need prosthetic limbs because they've succumbed to these kinds of injuries and then survived them. And those two things are kind of very specific to this period. And so we see the development of prosthetic limbs. I mean, we mentioned it a little bit earlier. When you think about prosthetic limbs in the Middle Ages, you think, you know, it's all hook hands, right? Or you think of like maybe Jamie Lannister from Game of Thrones having that kind of golden hand that's quite static, but it was so much more sophisticated than that. So these hands were fully mechanised limbs.

21:23They looked like hands anatomically. Some of them even went as far as painting the limbs, engraving little nails in them and little knuckle wrinkles. So they looked like biological hands. And they were sort of a kind of clockwork inside. So they were operated on a system of cogs so that you could bend the fingers in towards the hand and change the position of the fingers as you needed to for various different kinds of daily activities. So they were really sophisticated, but also really expensive.

21:55So if you were wanting one of these because you were, I don't know, a peasant who'd lost an arm in a farming accident, that's going to be far less likely as an option for you and in terms of what you have access to. So we begin to see this sort of tiering of accessibility of these assistive technologies. Now, while we're talking about prosthetics, these are far more sophisticated than fantasy and Disney would have us believe. But there's a certain German knight, I believe that you have researched, who can really tell us more about this particular part of the story.

22:27Would you mind introducing us to him? Yeah, so this is a knight called Gütz von Berlichingen. So he is a knight in the early 1500s and then moving through as he lives his life. And he's fascinating because he leaves behind so much evidence. We kind of get this holy trinity of evidence for Gütz. We have his autobiography. We have to think about that through the lens of autobiography and how he wants to present himself. So interesting things to think about there as well.

22:58But we also have his prosthetic limbs that survive. So two of them we have access to. So we know that he definitely had two prosthetics that were interchangeable. He may have had more. We don't know. And we also have his legacy. So we have the way that people have responded to his myth as well, which is really nice for thinking about broader representations of disability sort of beyond the Middle Ages and how people have responded to this character. And his story is really interesting. He was a young mercenary knight, which meant that, you know, he didn't have any particular allegiance or loyalty

23:29and he would fight for whichever side was paying him the most money. And he had a band of soldiers that worked for him as well. And so in 1505, he was at a battle called the Siege of Landshut. And at this battle, he writes in his autobiography that he was fighting. He was a knight on horseback in his armour and he was riding out towards the enemy lines. And he raises his sword above his head in his right hand to strike down on the foot soldiers below from off his horse. So he raises his sword up.

24:00And as he does that, his own men firing from behind him release a volley of cannonballs. And one of those cannonballs goes straight through his raised arm, which really bad luck with friendly fire for poor Gertz. And he says that he looks down, a quote from his biography says that he sees his arm dangling from a strip of skin, which can't be pleasant for anyone. But being the pinnacle of knightly masculinity that he presents himself as, he says that he pretended it didn't matter and that he turns his horse around

24:32and calmly returns back to camp. I'm not sure I believe him there. This ties back to autobiography and the problems that we face with autobiography. You know, he's wanting to present himself in a very particular kind of way here. It's all quite Monty Python as well. It's quite tis but a scratch. I think he's absolutely fine. He's very calm. But, you know, I think that also says a lot of really interesting things about disability and masculinity as well at the time and how, irrespective of how he actually behaved in that moment, what he wants us to think is that he was calm and detached and sort of gathered.

25:05You know, he wasn't emotional because emotions were very closely associated with femininity and rationality was associated with masculinity. So he's presenting himself here as, you know, very traditionally masculine. What's interesting is that then he has the arm amputated. He doesn't discuss this at all in his autobiography. And again, I think this is something to do with his representation of himself. So he probably doesn't want to say, you know, I went to the battlefield surgeon. I was screaming. It was awful. I passed out. You know, he doesn't want us to know that.

25:36So this all gets left out of the autobiography and he moves on to his recovery. He says that he's laid up in bed and he's thinking about his injury and he doesn't understand how he can go on being a knight and a man in his kind of social status and capacity with only one arm. And at this point, he wants to commit suicide, but he won't commit suicide because within the Christian faith at that time, it's considered to be damning.

26:06And so what he does instead is he sort of prays to God and pleads with God to let him die so he doesn't have to go on living without an arm. And it's this real sort of moment of vulnerability in the autobiography, which is quite a stark contrast, I think, from the previous kind of bravado on the battlefield. But what happens is he says that after he'd had these prayers and made these prayers, God doesn't quite give him a vision as such, but he remembers. He has this memory of another knight that he used to know who had a prosthetic arm. And this kind of comes to him in a flashback. And again, I find this fascinating because he never explicitly says that it's divine, but the way he positions it in the autobiography,

26:45he almost implies that it's a divinely sanctioned memory that he kind of has in that moment. And he says, so I decided to go and have a prosthetic made and went on living my life and everything was fine. And then after that point in the autobiography, he never mentions the limb again, except for one time where he says it got damaged and he had to take it to be repaired. But you'd think he might talk about the difficulties or the struggles. He talks about various activities that he was engaged in, but never does it come up as any kind of thing that he wants to talk about after that point.

27:21I mean, incredible story, and especially considering we have evidence that points towards his story as well. Yeah, the actual physical hands that survive are really cool. So there's one that we think is much earlier that we think is the one he had commissioned to begin with. And it's more basic. It's a little bit more rustic looking. There is less mobility in the hand. And then we think he had a second one made about 20 to 30 years later, which is far more sophisticated in terms of the flexibility of the fingers.

27:52The wrist can rotate. It has a much greater level of mobility. It would have been far more expensive. But of the two, the second one, which does a lot more and has a lot more functionality, looks like it's very rarely been used. And the first one that has more limited mobility and functions is used to death. And I think that this speaks a little bit to what people need their prosthetics for. So when he's on the battlefield, you probably don't want something that's got a lot of rotation or fingers moving because it's faffy, right?

28:22It's going to be difficult. You have to manage it. Whereas if he's got one that just does what it needs to do and is a little bit firmer, it's going to be way more practical for those kind of day-to-day activities. So I think of it as he's got his kind of everyday hand, his fighting hand, and then he has his kind of Sunday best that might be great for, you know, going to church or going for dinner parties, but otherwise is a little bit too much for every day. We're speaking here about the perhaps more physically practical prosthetics. What about the more cosmetic side of things? Him having his Sunday best arm might be similar, I guess.

28:57Yeah, I think that is far more of a cosmetic piece. And the fact that on one of his limbs, the earlier one, there's been some chemical testing done on the limb that's shown trace evidence of paint, which is really lovely. And it's a kind of red pigmented paint, which I think suggests that it was painted sort of akin to a Caucasian flesh tone. So he would have wanted to kind of disguise his hand and have it be a bit more cosmetic and fit with how he was looking as well. So they were decorated.

Crutches and wheelchairs

29:26My favourite example, though, of a cosmetic limb is this medieval prosthetic leg. And prosthetic legs were really, really rare in the Middle Ages. So at this point in time, people often couldn't survive an amputation above the knee. And so it was avoided at all costs. People had amputations sort of around the ankle. You know, you could have feet amputated, but anything above that, you're entering into sort of major artery territory, big risk of infection. It's a really risky surgery. So in my research, I've only found one metal prosthetic leg from this time period.

30:03And this metal leg is really interesting because it's proportionally wrong. If you look at it, it's called the stibet leg. And yeah, if you look at the proportions and you look at the proportions of a biological leg, it doesn't work. And it doesn't have quite the right amount of flexibility in the knee and the ankle to be able to walk on it. And it's also iron, so it's really heavy, not ideal for sort of lugging around. So I was thinking about this and I was like, what is going on here? I was reading some other work on the leg and some of the people's thoughts.

30:34And the historical consensus is that this leg was never intended for walking on. But it's actually fixed in the perfect position for riding a horse and going into a saddle and a stirrup. So the leg would almost be put on you whilst you were on horseback so that you had this image of completeness. And sort of a bit more balanced as well when you were on a horse in armour. But otherwise, just not functional for walking around. So I think that's almost purely cosmetic. It's all about looking good on horseback and looking kind of balanced rather than having any capacity for walking on it at all.

31:08I mean, it sounds the most difficult thing to be taking around with you. Iron, heavy, fixed in a certain position. Incredibly difficult, but at least you look good on horseback. Yeah, styling it out. Now, we're talking here about a time before. Things like lifts, like ramps. We're talking about a time where people imagined the cobbled pavings, things like that. What about assistive technologies like crutches? Was there a medieval equivalent of a wheelchair, essentially?

31:40Yeah, I know. So crutches were ubiquitous. Crutches are everywhere in the Middle Ages. They are cheap. You can make them yourself. They might not be the most comfortable. They're also something that you can repurpose as well. So once you're done with them, you can pass them on to somebody else or even use them as firewood if you need to. They're really flexible in terms of what they can be used for. There's lots of different types of crutches as well for different kinds of conditions. The only problem with crutches is they're so commonly made of wood, they just don't survive.

32:10You know, wood from 600 years ago doesn't show up in the archaeological record very often. I found some crutches that were from a church in France. But apart from this kind of batch, there's really not that many that survive. So we're forced to rely on images of crutches, descriptions of crutches, this kind of thing. But they do show up in the imagery all of the time because I think it's quite a potent symbol as well and appears a lot in religious imagery. But wheelchairs are fascinating because, like you say, it's not an accessible environment.

32:42We've got muddy streets. We've not got lifts to take you up to the second floor. So what do you do in this sense? And there's one wheelchair that we would recognise, I think, as a modern day wheelchair from this period that was owned by Philip II of Spain. And it was a chair for him to get around with his gout that had developed. So he had trouble walking on account of the gout because he was a king. He also had his own court surgeon and his court surgeon designed him this chair.

33:13And it mostly looks like a wheelchair today a little bit. So it's a sort of armchair, like a wooden armchair. It's got a cushioned seat and a cushioned back that were apparently stuffed with horsehair to make it nice and soft to sit in. It reclines a little bit as well. So you've got various sort of like ratchets on the side to move the position of the seat and the position of the backrest. So you can get a little bit more comfortable. And then on the bottom of each leg, so it's got four legs, the chair is a tiny little wheel, a little bit like a shopping trolley kind of little wheel on the bottom of each leg.

33:45So rather than the two big wheels that we've got used to seeing on the side, it's this little like wheelie chair kind of thing. And Philip would have been fine with this because he could hire staff to move him around. He was living in a palace that has smooth floors, so he didn't have to think about the kind of day-to-day accessibility problems of getting around. He had the money to improve his place where he lived and make it more accessible for a wheelchair. But aside from that one particular chair, which was custom made for him by his doctor, we don't have anything else like that really that survives in the historical record.

34:20But we do have lots of evidence for people using wheelbarrows as wheelchairs. And this, like today, we would think, that sounds horrendous. That's really derogatory. You can't go pushing your nan around in a wheelbarrow. But for the everyday people in the Middle Ages, it works. You know, it works on muddy terrains. It's functional. And what I really like is we see in some of the imagery, people beginning to adapt to wheelbarrows. So you get your kind of traditional sort of wheelbarrow, but then there's like a little cushion put in the back and a little lap bar to help you stay in the wheelbarrow.

34:55So these things are being adapted to make them more functional as a device for moving people rather than, I don't know, soil or rubble or whatever else you're using a wheelbarrow for. And we begin to see this almost like a medieval meme that is an image that was circulated across Europe that people found hilariously funny of an elderly woman being pushed in a wheelbarrow by her husband. And she is normally drinking beer out of a bottle and has a tree branch that she's hitting her husband with to, you know, persuade him to do what she says or push her faster.

35:29And she's sort of shouting at him and being unruly. And while this was a bit of a meme and a sort of critique of unruly women and ageing women who weren't, you know, following expectations of feminine behaviour, from a disability history perspective, it's a really nice way into also seeing, you know, this way of moving people around. Might we expect that people also would have been moved around, say, horse and carts? I think that's the typical medieval, when you imagine medieval travel, that's the look. Yeah, if you can afford it and afford it both in terms of, you know, having the horse, stabling the horse, purchasing the cart, but also giving up use of the horse.

36:07So if you if you do have a horse and you're a labourer, you're going to be using it on the farm. So also, yeah, not just affording it in terms of the actual cost of these things, but the cost in terms of time and labour. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. There is so much here that is tied into what you could afford, what is appropriate to be having for your status. And that's a really important factor to think about when we're talking about this. Are there any other aids you would like to direct listeners to to actually investigate or have a look at or that you just want to talk about?

Glasses and dentures

36:39Yeah. So a part of my research is trying to encourage people to think more broadly about what we would consider to be assistive technology. So we've touched on a lot of the stuff that we might think of as assistive technology today. So things like wheelchairs, prosthetic limbs, crutches, you know, all sorts of things that we see pretty frequently in modern life. But in discussions of pre-modern disability, we really forget the things that are common and overlooked today. So things like dentures, things like spectacles, eyeglasses that today we don't consider as a disability technology because it's so accessible.

37:17And the way that society has kind of developed means that these things are not hard to come by, that we don't consider things like short-sightedness of disability by today's standards. But if we think about the Middle Ages and, oh, I don't know, imagine that you are a woman who has to do a lot of embroidery to sell or repairing clothes or you're a merchant who has to take notes about his trade. Suddenly having that short-sightedness and not being able to do that fine work is disabling.

37:49It prevents you from doing your job. And so things like glasses are really interesting to me as a pre-modern disability aid in the way that they facilitated people and allowed people to do their work. Again, I think when people think about glasses, they think of them as a more or less modern sort of technology, but they were invented at the end of the 1200s. So they have this really, really long history. And when they were first invented, they were predominantly taken up by monks and people who worked in scriptorums.

38:21And this is because these were the people who were most likely to be impacted by sight loss. So these monks would spend long, long, long hours sat in a scriptorum reading and writing medieval manuscripts. And this was often done throughout the day. So sometimes you would have good light, but sometimes you'd be relying on candlelight and you'd be writing in the gloom. I think we've all had that moment where someone tells us, you know, don't look at your phone in the dark. Don't read your book in the dark, you know, that kind of thing. You'll damage your eyes. But it's true, you know, you do.

38:53And so this was happening to these medieval monks as they were working in the scriptorums. So they had a need for glasses and they were one of the first people to sort of take up glasses as an assistive technology to be able to keep producing those manuscripts. And because these were like the learned people in society, this is where this correlation between glasses and learnedness originates from. So we've seen it, you know, everywhere in popular media, you've got like, oh, Velma in Scooby-Doo, who's the smart one, who has the glasses, who loses the glasses.

39:24And, you know, and this kind of trope that still really persists today goes way, way, way, way back to the first people using glasses being those educated people in society who needed them. We're really busting popular perceptions along the way here, aren't we? We are. I'm also so curious about dentures. Thinking of dentures as this assistive technology, it's just not something we encounter at all today. It's not even thought about in that way. Yeah. So with dentures, when you think about the importance of teeth, I think, again, today we take it for granted.

39:57We have mostly access to OK diets, to dental care. We, you know, think more about teeth cosmetically, I think, in terms of like having a good smile, having white teeth, you get that kind of celebrity culture thing. But when we think about teeth in the pre-modern period, you need your teeth to eat. You need your teeth to chew food. Otherwise, you're going to be struggling and wanting to have a more liquid diet. But you also need teeth to be able to talk clearly. So it's kind of a social disability to lose your teeth.

40:28You might not be able to articulate yourself properly. You might be slurring. You might be struggling to eat food at banquets and that kind of thing. So, again, it ties back into status. All of these things that you're expected to do as a high status person, you then might struggle with without your teeth. So in this way, I think that teeth and dentures become a disability aid because disability isn't just about kind of physical activity. It's about being socially disabled as well and how you're perceived in society because of something that your body is or isn't doing.

40:58So dentures fulfil this need to address those social disabilities, which I think is really interesting.

Reflecting on the past

41:06As a final question to you, are there any other popular perceptions, myths, dare we say, that you'd like to bust or just something you'd like to leave listeners with that's important in this story? I think for me, it's all about seeing ourselves reflected in the past. And I think thinking about pre-modern disability, not as this aspect of the dark ages. I hate the term the dark ages, but it's, you know, it's not. There is sophistication. There is care.

41:37People are thinking about each other and wanting to take care of their families and their friends. People are seeking assistance from the saints. You know, it's all happening. It's not this sense of you have a child who's born with a disability and you abandon them. You know, that wasn't something that was going on. And so I think this also helps us to think more positively about disability and the lived experience today by thinking, you know, this kind of stigmatisation that still really does exist and is a huge problem. If we look back to the past, we can see these solutions, you know, that that stigmatisation was being addressed sometimes better and more positively in the pre-modern period than we might do so ourselves today.

42:15So I think, yeah, by looking to the past, we can help advocate for a better and fairer future. That was Ray Gillibrand speaking to Emily Briffitt. Ray is a lecturer in inclusive learning in the School of History at the University of Leeds. To find out more about her research, be sure to check out her website at raygillibrand.com.

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