History is not, in fact, a story where stuff was bad and then it got good. Empathy with and love for our disabled comrades has always existed. It's overtly fascist to pretend otherwise and has nothing to do with accuracy.
I think what a lot of people forget or don't want to accept or face is that so many disabilities are acquired through life, in medieval or prehistoric times that possibility may even have been much higher. Everyone was a valuable member of the community and worth saving.
They can concoct an incredibly specific of fantastical rules that make disabled people non entities all they want but they can't then argue we don't know exactly what they're doing and why. A historical excuses aren't going to cover for sad fiction eugenics.
It kinda does say something that Richard III wasn’t made to unexist in his childhood…
Fascists also like to pretend history is a story whete stuff was good and then it got bad. The un-fascist view, I suppose, is basically that stuff always was (and continues to be) a mixed bag.
There's a prosthetic arm built into a suit of armour in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge that wants a word with the OP...
You see this too with the argument that high infant mortality and routine pandemic deaths meant that people used to be much more hardened to their children dying. Of course, this is bullshit.
There is an exhibit in one of the Smithsonian museums in DC that really got me. Thousands of years ago some kid took a really bad hit to the head, his skull looked pretty fucked up. He wasn't left to die, no survival of the fittest bullshit. No, his community cared for him. He lived a long life.
In fact given it’s the way society works which creates disability, it’s always a complex picture. Prosthetics have been around for a long time, as have canes. Horses are great mobility aids.