The Ancient Era: 1500 B.C - 475 A.D.
In the Ancient Era, people struggled to explain their world. Natural phenomena were attributed to gods… higher beings. The Norse god, Thor, is associated with thunder, lightning, and storms; the Roman god Neptune presided over the ocean and earthquakes.
The year 1552 B.C. marks the first recorded reference to disability was scribed in an obscure document called the Therapeutic Papyrus of Thebes. Unlike today, the Ancient Era had no historians recording the lives of persons with disabilities.
People became rational thinkers, using reason and logic to explain one another. The great Greek philosopher Socrates (470-399 B.C) was concerned primarily with ethical questions, with an orientation towards human living and what makes the best life for human beings
The Greeks, and Romans in particular, held very different views of self - the Romans as practical, disciplined, and straightforward; the Greeks as pretentious, vain, and clever. With their respective contributions to art, philosophy, literature, and science, they saw themselves as superior to everyone else. Physical differences, such as gender, race, ethnicity, or disability, were seen as a mark of inferiority.

Rome
Early Labels
There are few references to disabilities, and nowhere in writing did the Ancients ever ponder what could be done to make living with a disability manageable and more acceptable. The Greeks referred to people with intellectual disabilities as idiots .
Rational Explanations
Around the fourth century B.C., new, rational explanations were offered for the physical world – including the causes of disabilities.
Until this time, people who had seizures, for example, or "fits" as they were called, were often said to be "touched by the finger of god" and considered sacred. Hippocrates (460-357 B. C.), the "Father of Medicine," challenged this notion by speculating that seizures were the result of physical causes, not divine intervention .
As to the cause of epilepsy, Hippocrates wrote "It is not, in my opinion, any more divine or more sacred than any other disease, but has a natural cause, and its supposed divine origin is due to man's inexperience and to their wonder at its peculiar character." For Hippocrates, care of the body was in the hands of man rather than the gods.

Hippocrates
Children with Disabilities
Aristotle (384-322 B.C.), another of the great Greek philosophers, wrote over 400 books on every branch of learning, including logic, ethics, politics, metaphysics, biology, physics, psychology, poetry, and rhetoric. He studied movement, analyzing the degeneration of muscles and defective development in human beings. Aristotle believed, as did most others in Ancient Greece, that man was the most highly evolved being, and that woman was one giant evolutionary step below, representing "the first step along the road to deformity." Aristotle also recommended that there should be a law "to prevent the rearing of deformed children." In his Politics, Aristotle wrote "As to the exposure and rearing of children, let there be a law that no deformed child shall live."
In Rome, children with disabilities were treated as objects of scorn. Children who were blind, deaf, or "mentally retarded" were publicly persecuted and reported to have been thrown in the Tiber river by their parents. Some children born with disabilities were mutilated to increase their value as beggars, while other children born with disabilities were left in the woods to die, their feet bound together to discourage anyone passing by from adopting them. In the military city of Sparta, the abandonment of "deformed and sickly" infants was a legal requirement.
Objects of Humor
In Rome, it was not unusual for the wealthy to keep a person with a physical or a mental disability, referred to as a "fool," for their amusement. Later, royal courts commonly kept "fools" or "court jesters" as playthings.
Christianity and Disability
With the rise of Christianity, there was a gradual influence on how persons with disabilities were treated. Jesus Christ (6 B.C. - 30 A.D.), called "The Great Physician," showed compassion for persons with disabilities. In the New Testament, Jesus is frequently credited with showing kindness and performing miraculous cures of those who were "lame, blind, and otherwise disabled". St. Paul the Apostle, a Roman citizen and early Christian leader, directed Christians to "comfort the feeble-minded."
By the fourth century A.D., the rise of Christianity led to more humane practices toward persons with disabilities. Infanticide (the practice of killing children) ceased and helping "the afflicted" became a sign of strength.
Physical Causation
The Greek physician and scholar Galen (130 -200 A.D.) developed ideas that dominated medicine until the Renaissance. Of particular importance to the history of disability, he recognized the brain as the central organ of the nervous system and the seat of intellect. This provided further evidence for the physical, natural causes of disability.
Difficult Living Conditions
Living conditions for persons with disabilities were brutal during this period. Their survival was often dependent on the kindness of relatives or on handouts from strangers, who provded food and shelter. Most, however, were not so fortunate as intolerance, sickness, and disregard for persons with disabilities as unworthy meant death, or at most a very low quality of life.

Court Jester