We do, just not in those terms. They pop up in literature all the time. Homer and other major Greek literary figures are described as being blind. Mentions of mobility problems (lameness), blindness, and chronic illness abound. There’s a disabled character in the famous children’s book Heidi—in fact, one of the major problems for modern readers of that book is that ‘fixing’ Clara, curing her disability, is a major plot point and an opportunity for the wholesome country characters to prove their goodness. ‘Consumption’ and other chronic illnesses are common features of 19th-century English-language memoirs, diaries, and letters as well as fiction.

If a story or record mentions mental illness or cognitive problems, it’s usually in very negative terms. Stories of people kept locked in attics are not uncommon. The trope of the ‘village idiot’ exists for a reason. What do you think happened to people who had high-support-need autism, or Down syndrome?

Many people born with disabilities didn’t survive childhood. However, many who did lived with powerful stigma and an expectation that they would be kept hidden. The words used to describe them were loaded, and are often used today as pejoratives. Kin and neighbours of disabled people were discouraged from openly discussing them, let alone listening to them or including them in social life. And most troubling of all, many people with disabilities were regarded as unable to speak for themselves or pursue education, so we just don’t have many own-voice narratives about the experience of disability, especially from eras before widespread literacy. If there’s a 12th-century equivalent of Anne Sullivan or Helen Keller, I haven’t encountered them.

PK Longmore taught disability history at San Francisco State University. His published work, including articles and reviews, may be a helpful starting point for more research. Here’s one piece:

Longmore, Paul K. Review of Uncovering the Hidden History of People with Disabilities, by Hugh Gregory Gallagher, Harlan Lane, Peter L. Tyor, and Leland V. Bell. Reviews in American History 15, no. 3 (1987): 355–64. https://doi.org/10.2307/2702029.

Fantastic question- I'm working on my dissertation on early American disability history so I have a lot to say, but the main reason I'll point to is the understanding of disability now and in the past. TLDR- Disability as we understand it today was not how people in the past thought about bodies.

First, what is disability? Disability is a massive umbrella for a lot of different things- blindness, chronic fatigue, ADHD, mobility impairment, etc... Its a wide range, and until the 19th century the term "disability" wasn't a description used the way "disability" is used today. Disability as a coherent term for a class of people, ie "the disabled", and creating a unity across types of disability is more recent with 20th century disability rights activism.

Today, the definition of disability is also extremely debatable. For a working definition- disability is a state of physical, cognitive, or sensory difference that is subjective and fluid based on societal or environmental barriers that create inaccessibility. There is no one type of disability and it isn't that a person and their body is disabled, rather something else is created without consideration of accessibility. For example, certain physical conditions prevent people from walking up stairs, and a building with only stairs is inaccessible to a wheelchair user who lost their legs in a car accident. However, a building with only ramps instead of stairs may prove inaccessible to a person born with tendons that cannot walk on an incline. Inaccessibility is created by making a wheelchair friendly building. Both these people may have 20/20 vision and see the entrance without issue whereas an older person with age related vision loss may have a hard time seeing the Enter sign to the building.

None of these hypothetical people are more or less disabled than the other, but each experiences a different form of inaccessibility related to their individual condition and the decisions about what conditions and impairments are accommodated. They also represent the three ways disability occurs- by an accident/event, by birth, and by age. It is subjective when and how disability manifests since it is a decision to not account for accessibility. However, accessibility for one form of disability may prove disabling for others: installing ramps and stairs in public locations is an easy solution, but all text communication may help certain kinds of cognitive disabilities and prove less accessible to another.

Its also important to note that identifying as disabled is a specific choice. A lot of Deaf people would not consider deafness to be a disability or identify themselves as disabled, but a lot of people do associate deafness/being hard of hearing with disability. Someone who wears glasses may not identify as disabled, but if their socio-economic class does not allow them to visit an optometrist then they are much more likely to be disabled by impaired vision.

Overall, there is no one way to identify disability and a lot of other factors matter when describing disability. Even in the late-19th century as the United States industrialized people were not necessarily disabled, rather they were economically mismatched- you just needed to find a job their body could do. But how do historians deal with this subject?

A crucial point is that historians cannot and should not diagnose disability by any medical standard. We are not medical professionals, we do not have the person in front of us seeking a diagnosis, and fitting a historical actor into a modern definition neglects their lived experience. The words "distracted" or "melancholy" show up in the past, and while a historian can check the boxes in the DSM-IV, our contemporary understanding of a cognitive disability is irrelevant. We cannot push past people into a box to identify them by their disability.

What can historians do? The Idea of Disability in the Eighteenth Century by Chris Mounsey offers the term "variability" instead of disability. There is no such thing as an able-body. There is an imaginary norm all bodies are judged against, but all bodies deviate from this norm in some capacity. At a certain point of deviation, that variable of difference is akin to disability since certain bodies in the past were noted for their difference. When George Jacobs Sr. was accused of witchcraft during the Salem Witch Trials, the accusers often mentioned his canes. At the time, certain deviations from the ideal body suggested evidence a person consorted with Satan and therefore was a witch. Not every person with a disability was accused nor were the canes the basis of the accusations against him, but the variable difference of his body made him a more likely suspect. We can read into Jacobs' case prejudice in a time prior to the vocabulary of disability and ableism and understand Jacobs as someone with an embodied otherness without him identifying with/as our contemporary concept of disability.

Historians need to seek out these examples of embodied forms of otherness to find disability, but since disability was not a unified idea as we conceive it, it also means we can't find the "change over time" narrative and argument that most histories cover. There is no continuity between variable bodies before disability was a concept as we know it even though disabled people existed in all times.

I was on The AskHistorians Podcast not too long ago talking about early American disability history if you're interest in hearing more here and I'm happy to answer follow up questions.

I also recommend Jennifer Van Horn's article "George Washington's Dentures: Disability, Deception, and the Republican Body", the 2017 Early American Literature special issue on Early American Disability Studies, Sari Altschuler's article "He that Hath an Ear to Hear': Deaf America and the Second Great Awakening," and Nielsen's A Disability History of the United States.