摘要：Within the last two decades, those declaring an interest in the history of disability have formed themselves into small but growing and vibrant cross-disciplinary communities of researchers, working to offer fresh perspectives on disability and its representations, and often within an explicitly political framework that seeks to give voice to this ‘disenfranchised’ group of marginal and exploited individuals. Such lofty motivations brought Iain Hutchison to this field, the preface to A History of Disability in Nineteenth-Century Scotland indicating his overriding wish to place the disabled themselves ‘centre- stage, and not on the periphery,’ and to give ‘voice [to] how they felt about their lives, their circumstances, their frustrations and their aspirations’ (p. vi).
