LAUSR

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 themost 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.