This chapter illuminates the historical and literary contexts of disability in Defoe’s time. The essay argues that, though disability is a modern category, Defoe’s writing demonstrates trans-historical continuity by representing it as the product of social relations with political consequences. For instance, in A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), contracting disease transforms characters in highly visible ways, challenging Cartesian views of mind/body duality. At the same time, impairment and epidemic disease facilitate an imaginative reworking of kinship. All of this foregrounds Defoe’s political views about how England should confront the plague. Meanwhile, in The Dumb Philosopher: Or, Great Britain’s Wonder (1719), Dickory Cronke’s vocal disability enhances his virtue and intellect, culminating with his attainment of speech at the end of his life and his political prophecies. Defoe’s wide-ranging depictions of disability reveal its capacious social and political values, a configuration which still resonates today.