Disability is not only a different way of being in the world, it is also a different way of knowing the world. The Victorians were fascinated by the idea of the epistemological difference engendered by disability. This is the era in which a young deaf and blind girl called Laura Bridgman became a celebrity in Boston and beyond in the 1840s, in which John Kitto and Harriet Martineau documented their experiences as deaf people. The artifacts in this section provide a window into how sensory experience--hearing, seeing, touch, smell and taste--informed the experience of daily life in the nineteenth century.