The History of "Impairment"

Impairment is a key term in Anglophone disability studies and medical discourse, referring to physical difference, limitation, or injury. Yet its history has been obscured or misunderstood. When disability scholars and activists critique the definition of impairment, they generally place the concept in the genealogy of medicalization and in-appropriate pathologization. This article, in contrast, traces the development of the impairment concept to the offices of modern American corporations, where actuaries played a key role alongside doctors as they employed new information technologies to quantify risk. Life insurance companies defined impairments, established surveillance systems to discover them, and created databases held by secretive institutions such as the Medical Information Bureau (MIB), with the help of early computing innovators including Melvil Dewey and Herman Hollerith. Beneath the seemingly objective measurement of physical traits, impairments ultimately signified to private corporations the possibility of financial loss or a justification for discrimination.