Are You a Sensitive?

There were very different expectations placed on men and women, for example. A member of a peasant family who was expected to be a manual laborer born without speech or hard of hearing wouldn't have struggled in the same way. For them, a physical impairment such as a damaged or lost limb would have been much more disabling. In some cases, there's an epigram that tells of a farmer named Mindon who was cutting down an olive tree on his property when he was bitten on the foot by a spider lurking in the undergrowth. And the bite turned gangrenous and his leg had to be amputated, so he turned the wood from the tree into a prosthetic leg.