Chris Mounsey's Sight Correction: Vision and Blindness in Eighteenth-Century Britain is the debut publication in Peculiar Bodies: Stories and Histories, a series established by Mounsey with Carolyn Day and Wendy J. Turner to examine historical, literary, and philosophical dimensions of bodily experiences in all their variety across time and space. Rejecting binary distinctions between “disability” and “able-bodiedness,” Mounsey is concerned with what he terms “variability”—a flexible concept that recognizes the uniqueness of individual experiences and puts it at the center of the analysis. As Mounsey argues in his earlier publication, The Idea of Disability in the Eighteenth Century (2014), variability is made up of three interrelated elements: a person's unique physical capacity; his or her capability to come to terms with his or her difference; and how these are affected and shaped by encounters with others. Exploring visual impairment through the lens of variability reveals commonalities of experience of eighteenth-century blind people, but also differences. For Mounsey, himself visually impaired, variability is at the root of our common humanity, linking past and present.

This engaging book is arranged into three sections. The first, “Philosophy,” explores the conceptual frameworks for understanding sight and blindness in the eighteenth century. It begins by exploring the relationship between blindness and disability. Mounsey traces the history of the word disabled, showing how during the first half of the period it was not used to describe an irreparable or incurable object or person, but instead to describe one currently unfit for service, though amenable to repair or cure. He suggests that there was much tolerance or acceptance of imperfect bodies. The expectation that people with impairments would continue to work if possible suggests that in the eighteenth century there was no concept of compulsory able-bodiedness, and that blindness and other impairments were not considered disabilities in the modern sense. Mounsey goes on to examine the overlapping philosophical, medical, optical, and religious contexts in which sight and blindness were understood, focusing in particular on the role of vision in debates about the foundation of empirical knowledge.

The second section, “Medicine,” discusses surgical approaches to correcting vision in this period. While establishment figures such as William Cheselden, appointed queen's oculist in 1727 and a founder of the new Company of Surgeons, are discussed, Mounsey devotes more attention to itinerant practitioners. Dismissed at the time as quacks or mountebanks, and marginalized in modern histories of medicine, these figures were no less pioneering in developing medical specialism in ocular correction. Sir William Read, whose advertisements were ridiculed in the Spectator, developed expertise in treating a variety of eye complaints through his tours of the country. Mary Cater, vendor of “eye water,” drew on a tradition of folk medicine to create a product that contained antiseptic, antibacterials, local anesthetic, and skin salve to ease eye discomfort, which placed her ahead of mainstream medical knowledge by decades. A chapter is devoted to the life and career of John “Chevalier” Taylor, a colorful character who became the most successful itinerant oculist in Europe. His son, also called John Taylor, established a permanent practice in London's Hatton Garden, providing what might have been the first specialist eye hospital. Here, Taylor provided eye care that was free for the poor blind, funded by financial subscriptions from London parishes, and by the fees paid by middle-class patients. This provided a regular income for Taylor and provided treatment that permitted some visually impaired paupers to return to work so that they would no longer have to live on charity.

However, cure was not a prerequisite to blind people's working and becoming economically independent. The final section of the book discusses the lives of three blind people who earned a living through their writing. By piecing together fragmentary biographical information, and through an analysis of their work, Mounsey explores how each reflected on their experiences of visual impairment and sought out a “place of safety” constructed through “a sense of economic independence and social responsibility” (199). Thomas Gills of St Edmunds-Bury in Suffolk produced pamphlets and poems that provided a source of income that enabled him to provide for his family. John Maxwell's poems about gardens reflected a desire for a place of retreat from a world in which he felt that he was always being watched and whose inhabitants he could not fully trust. The final chapter discusses Priscilla Pointon's attempts to make her way in a world where the usual route to financial security for women—marriage—was imperiled by her blindness. Although she did eventually marry James Pickering, a tradesman from her native Chester, her place of safety was the house she was able to buy with the proceeds of the sale of her poetry.

Despite advancements in the cure of disabling conditions such as cataracts during the eighteenth century, none of the three blind people examined in the book expected to be cured or were oppressed by a prevailing ocular normativity. Instead, they all used their “gifts of blindness to work towards their own personal goals and achieving them” (275). What makes them interesting, Mounsey argues, is their ordinariness, although as the book does not consider the experiences of blind people who were not published writers, the three case studies may be atypical. With the concept of variability, however, what matters is the uniqueness of everybody that makes us the same but different. More remains to be written about the experiences of blind people in the eighteenth century, but Mounsey has provided new ways of noticing disabled people in history, of understanding them in the context of their own times rather than via the lens of modern theory, and for celebrating our common humanity.