Response

DOUGLAS C. BAYNTON

FIRST, MY THANKS TO the commentators for their thoughtful responses to my paper. All of them touch on, in various ways, the important question of historical context. Amy Fairchild observes that early federal immigration law served an expanding industrial economy. Catherine Kudlick suggests that the dominance of a medical rather than social model of disability has shaped both immigration policy and the histories written about it. David Gerber notes that if disability is a social construction, so is normality, and asks us to consider the aesthetic and functional standards for a normal and acceptable human body at the time. Alan Kraut calls for greater contextualization of the state of medical knowledge and warns of the perils of presentism.