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Recent Books of Interest to Disability Historians
[Editor’s Note: the books profiled below offer but one indication of the diverse topics and approaches to the field of Disability History. If you would like to review a book or have one profiled in the Newsletter, please contact me at cjkudlick@ucdavis.edu]
Douglas C. Baynton (Associate Professor of History, University of Iowa) reviews Kenny Fries, The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin's Theory, New York: Carroll and Graf Publishers, 2007. (XVII, 206 pages.) $14.95
“We anchor in Tagus Cove off Isabela, the Galapagos island where Charles Darwin landed on September 30, 1835,” begins the first chapter of Kenny Fries' latest memoir, an idiosyncratic and fascinating reflection on disability and evolution.
“‘Take off your shoes,’ Dr. Mendotti says,” begins the next, with Fries recounting a medical examination required by Social Security to determine if he is “still disabled.” He gazes at the institutional looking clock on the wall, which transports him back to his third-grade classroom where Mrs. Krimsky is explaining “survival of the fittest.” Her words, “sharp to my skin as a surgeon's knife,” he remembers, threw him into a panic: “Forget about dreams, with these deformed legs and feet. How will I survive?”
Next chapter and we are back to the Galapagos, where Fries is wondering “what is a five-foot-tall man without fibulae in both legs doing at the top of this mountain.” Fries' readers are also wondering where Fries is taking them, a question that first arose when they saw the book's odd and enchanting title. Fries has two stories to tell: on the one hand, Darwin's voyage of discovery on the Beagle, the subsequent years of his struggle to understand the meaning of all that he had found, and his relationship with the younger, less privileged, and less accomplished Alfred Lord Wallace; on the other, Fries' own life journey, his struggle to understand the meaning of his unusual feet and the shoes made to fit them, and his relationship with his partner, Ian.
It is a surprising juxtaposition at first, and yet what could be more clearly related to the questions raised by disability than an evolutionary theory based on chance variation, complex webs of interdependence, and a never-ending process of adaptation? All of these are key not only to Darwin's theory, Fries maintains, but also to his life and to his success as a scientist. Darwin knew well to what extent he stood on the shoulders of other scientists such as Thomas Malthus, Joseph Hooker, and Charles Lyell. He knew also that his inherited wealth and supportive family afforded him leisure to research, think, and write (in a way never available to Wallace), even as he struggled with recurrent illness, disability, and the death of a beloved daughter. Variation, interdependence, adaptation were everywhere and helped him make sense of what he saw in nature.
Fries suggests that they can also help us make sense of disability. His partner's everyday life is often complicated by his Attention Deficit Syndrome, yet the characteristics that give people such trouble in modern societies may have once been adaptive, perhaps just the ticket for a successful hunter:
This scene will be repeated many times throughout the afternoon: Ian, ahead of me beckoning to the guide, motioning me to be as quiet as I can be, pointing to where only he can see what we have come to see: an entire family of rare and endangered black monkeys. In the jungle, Ian's brain is firing on all cylinders, full of color, sound, light, and movement.
(p. 139)
Other trouble-causing characteristics may have suited past environments but not our present one. Fries notes that just as beginning to walk upright held both advantages and disadvantages for humankind, certain genes that predispose us to illness and disability have fitness benefits as well, such as the genes for sickle-cell anemia, Tay Sachs disease, and cystic fibrosis. Fitness and disability are all about context. He tells, for example, of when he was unexpectedly better able to climb a mountain trail than Ian: “Because of the shape of my shoes I was able to transform metal rungs stuck in the side of a cliff into footholds” (p. 13). At first it seems a stretch to suggest that the variations we call disability and the variations that drive evolutionary change are similar or even analogous. Most disabilities are not heritable, in any case, contrary to the fears of the eugenicists (or perhaps to their hopes?). Surely there is no argument to be made that disability plays any significant role in producing adaptive change over time.
Yet what Fries reminds us by the comparison is that variability itself, regardless of what we might think or say about any particular variation, is the rule everywhere and necessary for the continuance of life. We might not think so of this deviation or that abnormality. Why a foot at a 45 degree angle to the leg sans ankle, as in Fries' case? There was a time, Fries writes, when he “could not stop asking why at birth I was missing bones in my legs. Chance, the fuel of natural selection, was not at that time a satisfactory explanation” (p. 114). It was not a fruitful question, he eventually came to realize. Perhaps this variation or that freak of nature, this anomaly or that sport (as Darwin and others of his day termed spontaneous mutations), this illness or that injury will play no productive part in the development of the species. But variation itself is the force that drives adaptation, providing the raw material of evolutionary change. There cannot be variation in general without variations in particular, nor productive variations without unproductive ones - not that we are capable of telling the difference in any case. Evolutionary change is inscrutable and those who think they can see through the veil have invariably (a word I use advisedly) done harm.
Laurent Clerc, a deaf man and one of the founders of the American Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb, said something much the same in an address to the Connecticut legislature in 1818: “Every creature, every work of God is admirably well made; but if any one appears imperfect in our eyes, it does not belong to us to criticize it. Perhaps that which we do not find right in its kind, turns to our advantage without being able to perceive it.” Clerc puts in a religious context what Fries puts in a secular one, yet the point is much the same. “Everything,” Clerc concludes, “is variable and inconstant.”
Many of Fries' observations follow well-worn paths for those of us in disability studies, though couched in pleasantly unfamiliar terms and fresh contexts. This is not a fault in a book one hopes will gain a wide and general readership. Thankfully, there are ideas that insiders might find challenging as well, as when he writes about help, sympathy, and dependence, topics of high emotional and intellectual charge. Fries does not offer many answers. This is not a book of arguments. It is rather an absorbing walk among questions and intriguing juxtapositions, a walk well worth taking.