Relational Disability and Invisible Illness in Industrial Britain

Recent historiography has questioned the validity of an "industrialization thesis" that directly links disability to the industrial revolution and the exclusion of nonstandard bodies from factory work. In this article I defend the industrialization thesis by showing how an expanded version of it can reveal the disabling impacts of labor and illuminate the extent to which medical and legal standards diverged from lived experiences in the context of occupational disablement. Consideration of variance between compensated disability and experiential disability in conditions associated with disbelief, blame, and invisibility in both the historical and historiographical record highlights the value of using history of science approaches in epistemic considerations of disability in history.