The ancient world's approach to disability and chronic illness reveals attitudes toward the body, productivity, and social worth that were often brutal but also more varied than a simple narrative of exclusion would suggest.

Spartiate with physical disabilities were denied full citizenship status. The exposure of infants with visible defects was accepted practice in most ancient societies. The Stoic ideal of the undamaged rational body as the basis for virtue and civic participation excluded those who deviated from it.

At the same time, ancient sources document blind scholars (Didymus the Blind taught at Alexandria), deaf individuals who communicated effectively, and individuals with mobility impairments who held religious and intellectual positions. The Emperor Claudius, who had a limp and a stammer that ancient sources treated as signs of intellectual deficiency, was in fact by most assessments an effective administrator and serious scholar.

Ancient medicine's approach to disability was predominantly curative rather than accommodative — the goal was restoration of function, not adaptation of environment. But ancient cities also created physical environments (paved streets, public fountains at accessible heights, theater seating with varying grades of access) that accommodated varied physical capacities as a side effect of general civic design rather than deliberate accessibility planning.