Helada i invalidnost
Ancient Hellas and Disability

Summary/Abstract: What did the Greeks, at the classical peak of their history, think about the disability and what was the social position of the disabled people in their city-states? And why it is so important for us, so remote in time from the days when the Hellenic civilization had reached its apogee, to know that? The author has treated "the disability problem" as an integral - though somewhat neglected - part of the classical antiquity's entire social history, not as the special subject of the medicine history. He points to the confusing complexity of the classical Greek world, comparable in this respect to the otherwise quite different world we know today, and warns that the simplicity in which the classical Greeks are presented to us iis the direct result of the fact that we lack so many essential details enriching and enlivening the picture of contemporary world. He has examined the two extreme cases of the attitudes and practice relating the disability - the Spartan and Athenian one. At the same time these are the only states whose behavior towards disabled people is illuminated by some historical sources. It is pointed out that the Greek contradictory experience of the disability as one of the unpleasant but necessary facts of human fate had the deep and permanent impact on modern sensibility.

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