Comment: Historicizing the Notion of Disability

AMY FAIRCHILD

I SEE THIS PROVOCATIVE paper as driving home the critical importance of historicizing the notion of disability. Baynton alerts us to the need to pay attention to language. Thus, I was struck by Baynton's reference to Victor Safford's conception of the task of the Public Health Service (PHS) officer as being "to detect poorly built, defective or broken down human beings." In order to further contextualize this language—which might as easily be used to describe a machine as a human being—to understand how what public health and immigration officials otherwise would have termed a "slight ailment" is transformed into a physical defect or "disability which may affect the ability of the alien to earn a living," our analysis must take place against the broader backdrop of industrial capitalism.