Omsorg och Kontroll En handikapphistorisk studie 1750- 1930

Care and Control
One of the prime media at the disposal of the Academy of Science was
its series of Transactions, first published the same year the Academy was
founded. In them were published a number of illustrated articles about individuals
suffering from various kinds of bodily damage or handicaps. The
articles (comprising the bulk of the source material for the third chapter)
provide today´s reader with an image of the knowledge and perceptions of
people with functional disorders and impairment extant among the educated
during the latter half of the eighteenth century. They were intent upon
demystifying the existence of impaired senses and physical deformity, thereby
helping combat prejudice through rational problemitization.
Essays by three physicians are representative of the scientific perceptions
and knowledge of the period. The articles provide detailed descriptions
of the lives of two ”cripples” and a blind man and an essay on the
education of a deaf youngster. Common to all is the desire to enlighten
and the necessity of a conscientious, suitable upbringing for functionally-disabled
children, particularly those born into poor families. They
furthermore shared a perception about ”nature´s compensation” for impaired
physical function, and the belief that physically-impaired individuals
could be molded into valuable citizens, working bodies, and thereby
contribute to their own upkeep and the development of society as a whole.
The main legacy of the eighteenth century to the nineteenth was the
”thought figure” that people with functional disability were educatable
and possessed a greater capacity for work than what had been presumed.
The scientific gaze was directed toward the body and the senses while the
authors simultaneously emphasized the decisive influence of social status,
poverty and ignorance. The solution at which they arrived was upbringing
and education overseen by experts at special schools. Such institutions had
begun to be established for the blind and the deaf in Germany and France,
which was well-known to late eighteenth-century Swedish scholars.
At the outset of Chapter Four, I discuss the social factors and conditions
which facilitated the establishment of special classes for blind and deaf
children. I also discuss the problems confronted during the initial phase
and the opinions of various actors. The first special school in Swede n, the
National Institute for the Blind and Deaf-Mute was officially opened in
Stockhom in 1809. It was the brainchild of Pär Aron Borg (1776–1839), a
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