The 1901 census is back online after an eight month hiatus due to technical problems. While you can search for a person for free, you can’t get much information from the database without online payment. I think this is pretty fair considering the quality of information and the amount of work required to make it available online. Intrigued, I decided to pay the 5 GBP minimum payment to find some information about my ancestors. I downloaded a digitised version of one of the census documents which contained a large table of information, hand scrawled by some census officer eagerly awaiting the invention of Tip-pex. One of the information fields concerned disability, and had the following options:

Thankfully, our understanding of disability has changed somewhat during the last 101 years. If this doesn’t illustrate the benefit of modern science to humanity, I don’t know what does.