Where Paralytics Walk and the Blind See: Narratives of Sickness and Disability at the Juncture of Worlds

 Where Paralytics Walk and the Blind See is a book in two registers, at once a historical inquiry into the meanings made of sickness and disability—what Dunn calls “embodied difference”—in early modern French Catholic Canada and at the same time a meditation on history as a practice of encounter. At the foundation of the book, furnishing the raw materials for analysis are four discrete primary sources specific to the French colonial context: the Jesuit Relations, the Histoire de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Quebec, the Vie de la Vénérable Mère Catherine de Saint-Augustin, and the twenty-one stories of miraculous healing inscribed in the Actes du très dévot Frère Didace Pelletier.
   
   Where Paralytics Walk and the Blind See probes these primary sources, listening to stories told about embodied difference, as a means of not only of understanding the past and its people, but also of hazarding responses to questions of contemporary urgency—questions about how to live with the facts of sickness and the inevitability of disability. Born of sustained reflection on the circumstances of the author’s own life, this book pushes back against the truncated stories of sickness and disability constrained by the modern biomedical context, stories that figure sickness and disability as problems in need of solution alone. Where Paralytics Walk and the Blind See deliberately engineers the encounter between two kinds of narratives—the one gleaned from the French Canadian Catholic past and the other reaped from the contemporary modern West—as a means of unsettling both and making room for interpretative agency.
   
   At once a prescription for and a bold enactment of historiography as an exercise in encounter, Where Paralytics Walk and the Blind See ultimately argues in favor of narrative as a powerful medium of meaning making. What this book shows is that the meanings made of sickness and disability are historical accidents, dependent on the particularities of discrete life worlds, the idiosyncrasies of genre, the intentions of authors, the dispositions of audiences. The lesson here is not that bodies are infinitely malleable, that sickness is merely discursive, that disability is just constructed—but only that these durable material facts of embodiment—like history itself—can always be made to signify otherwise.
   
https://press.princeton.edu/books/ebook/9780691233239/where-paralytics-walk-and-the-blind-see