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Before pursuing further the gradual evolution of the relief afforded the crippled and the deformed, it will pay to consider the use which ancient and medieval society made of these unfortunates.

As it developed in luxury and culture, antiquity found a characteristic employment for some types of the deformed, especially for the dwarfed and the grotesquely shaped. There are extant ancient Greek representations of comic figures of this sort -- forerunners, possibly, of the medieval court fool. Attic comedy made constant use of actors padded to simulate various types of deformity. The tradition that has come down to us with regard to Aesop presents the author of the fables as born to slavery and deformity; and although modern historians seem to be doubtful as to whether Aesop ever existed or not, it is significant that tradition has created such a personality and that the oldest writer to mention his person speaks of his appearance and his voice as contributing as much as his stories to the amusement of his company.

But this comic exploitation of deformity, brutal as it must seem to us, is the brighter side of the picture. Seneca has left an appalling record of how some Roman masters exploited deformed slave children as beggars. If, as they grew older, their deformities were not conspicuous enough to excite compassion, the poor creatures were intentionally crippled to an even greater extent: their arms were cut off, their shoulders twisted so that they became humpbacked. If the day's earnings were not sufficient, the master rebuked the wretches, saying: "You have brought in too little, bring hither the whip; you can weep and lament now. Had you appealed thus to the passer-by, you could have had more alms and you could have given me more."

The Middle Ages, like antiquity, exploited the appeal that physical deformity makes to a primitive sense of the comic. The court fool or jester was to be found almost universally in the retinues of princes and often in the households of noblemen. The type literature has seized upon and immortalized was characterized less by physical deformity than by a certain superficial quickness of wit and power of repartee; by far the greater number, however, consisted merely of creatures who by reason of deformity of mind or body were calculated to excite heartless laughter or ridicule. The institution was firmly entrenched for many years, despite many tendencies operating to improve the situation. Even a number of decrees passed by the Reichstag in the sixteenth century failed to obviate the practice. Not until the Enlightenment was the final stage reached and the custom abolished.

Even after this time, the court fool was still in vogue in the Russian court, Peter the Great having so many jesters of this type that it was necessary to divide them into classes. When the Spaniards under Fernando Cortez accomplished the conquest of Mexico, court fools and deformed human creatures of all kinds were found at the court of Montezuma.

Seneca's picture of the inconceivable brutality of some Roman masters has its medieval pendant in the picture drawn by Sebastian Brant in his "Narrenschiff." This German satire was done into English by Alexander Barclay in 1509, under the title of "The Ship of Fools." The following is a slightly modernized quotation from Barclay's version:

Some other beggers falsly for the nones
Disfigure their children, God wot, unhappily,
Mangling their faces, and breking their bones
To stir the people to pity that passe by.
There stande they begging with tedious shout and cry,
Their own bodies turning to a strange fashion
To move such as passe to pity and compassion.

Heartless ridicule, inhuman exploitation, and, with it all, "pity and compassion." Add to this the superstitions -- the belief in "changelings," in the "evil eye," in satanic paternity, which the medieval mind generally advanced by way of "explaining" deformity -- and the strange picture is complete.

If space permitted, it would be instructive at this point to consider in detail the role the cripple has played in literature. Allusion has already been made to Thersites, who serves Homer not only as a foil to the heroic splendor of Achilles and Ulysses, but also as a maker of trouble and sower of discord. In the Siegfried saga, the dwarf Mime plays a similar part. And in Shakespeare's Richard III we have a classic presentation of the cripple as "villain." In the opening monologue of the play, Shakespeare gives us a glimpse of the psychology of the cripple as he conceived it:

But I, that am not shap'd for sportive tricks,
Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass;
I that am rudely stamp'd, and want love's majesty
To strut before an ambling wanton nymph;
I that am curtail'd of this fair proportion,
Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,
Deform'd, unfinish'd, sent before my time
Into this breathing world, scarce half made up,
And that so lamely and unfashionable
That dogs bark at me as I halt by them;
Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace,
Have no delight to pass away the time
Unless to see my shadow in the sun
And descant on mine own deformity.
And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover
To entertain these fair well-spoken days,
I am determined to prove a villain
And hate the idle pleasures of these days.
Plots have I laid, inductions dangerous.
By drunken prophecies, libels, and dreams.
To set my brother Clarence and the King
In deadly hate the one against the other;
And if King Edward be as true and just
As I am subtle, false, and dangerous,
This day, etc.