Technology and Culture

abstract:

Early nineteenth-century America's robust trade in medical and health care products is richly documented, yet many scholars have overlooked just what role people with impairments played in that industry as inventors and retailers, forming relationships with clients based on their shared experiences of disability. A study of newspaper advertisements, patents, organizational records, medical accounts, and objects suggests that many impaired and formerly impaired producers marketed products to impaired consumers, creating an organic and unselfconscious network of disabled people who made, sold, and bought knowledge and devices about and for disability. Recovering this world of disabled inventors, retailers, and their clients reveals how disability fueled innovation in early nineteenth-century America, expanding scholarly understandings of who participated in and profited from the burgeoning medical and health care economy. This study also suggests that the market was an early venue of disability community where people came together around their common bond.