ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Technological Embodiment: Examining Experiences of Calliper Usage Among British Polio-Disabled Individuals, 1950-2025

• In Event: Disability's Conscription in British History

English Abstract

Polio is highly culturally evocative, of vaccines on sugar lumps, of lifetimes spent in iron lung respirators, of children in callipers. However, the cultural, academic, and sociomedical significance of callipers as an assistive technology has long been overlooked. This paper examines experiences of calliper usage among British polio-disabled individuals, drawing on oral history interviews, conducted with ten polio-disabled individuals who use(d) callipers between 1950 and 2025, to provide a ‘history from below’, foregrounding marginalised perspectives which are largely historiographically absent. Using the lens of “technological embodiment”, it explores the integration of callipers into lived and bodily experiences, shaping perception, movement, emotion, identity, and even bodily boundaries. Additionally, it frames callipers, the polio-disabled body, and the embodied self as “co-constructed”, examining how technologies shape bodily capacities and subjectivities and how users in turn shape meanings and uses of technologies. It examines: [1] callipers and the body as co-constructed, through impacts on sensations, movement, and boundaries; [2] callipers and emotions as co-constructed, with emotions also impacted by socio-culturally structured (self-)silencing; and [3] calliper usage as changing through time, impacting life course expectations, especially in childhood and later adulthood. Thus, it reveals the embodied, historical, cultural, and emotional significance of callipers and the long-term cultural impact of polio-disability through its overlooked material afterlife

Author

• Charlotte Stobart, University of Cambridge