Blind in Early Modern Japan: Disability, Medicine, and Identity
Presentation: This presentation, which is partly based on his 1st book, will discuss a broad methodological question: What questions do/should we ask when we study disability history? Historical sources, if they mention disability at all, do not reveal everything about disability. It is up to the historian to probe the context of those sources, and the context of those times, to find illuminating clues. I will discuss how early modern Japanese sources and later sources can be productively examined to piece together fragments of evidence on historical ideas about blindness and, more generally, disability.
Bio: Wei Yu Wayne Tan is Associate Professor of History at Hope College. He is the author of Blind in Early Modern Japan: Disability, Medicine, and Identity (University of Michigan Press, 2022). He is interested in disability studies/history, especially in the intersection of disability history and the history of science, technology, and medicine in early modern and modern East Asia.
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