In a March 2021 essay on the Covid-19 crisis and ‘crip time’, the literary theorist Elizabeth Freeman suggests that the pandemic had expanded to the masses the distinctive, non-normative experiences of time engendered by disability and chronic illness. For Freeman, crip time describes not only foreshortened lifespans or the ‘lost time’ in everyday experiences of disability, but also forms of transhistorical solidarity. Freeman writes:

Freeman's essay exemplifies the political value of analysing health conditions in historical perspective and of drawing attention to the social and cultural dimensions of illness across space and time. If government responses to the Covid-19 pandemic have often seemed to naturalize the connections between chronic illness or disability and isolation, this vision of ‘crip time’ emphasizes the inescapable collectivity of illness. As such, it is an apposite way to introduce the five essays in this section, which all work to unveil the social and political worlds that shape definitions and experiences of critical health conditions, moving beyond the disease conception of illness by attending to the material contexts that are often rendered invisible by the focus on the individual patient in discourses of critical health. Whether looking at the twentieth-century epidemics of polio and AIDS, the emergence of ‘obesity’ and major depressive disorder as contested diagnoses or the production of cancer under capitalism, these chapters open up the various economic, cultural, industrial, legal and emotional forces that shape the politics of critical health conditions.

In the first chapter of this section, Stephen Mawdsley tracks the history of anti-vaccination attitudes during the polio epidemics of the twentieth century.