A note in my scripture study of 25 Jan 2021:
'Have ye any that are lame, or blind, or halt, or maimed, or leprous, or that are withered, or that are deaf, or that are afflicted in any manner?' 3 Nephi 17:7
Disabled people are able to do amazing things due to interventions that are available, making them less of a handicap.
I suspect that we consider a lot of things to mean quite different things now to what they would have meant 2000 years ago.
There are many people that we might classify as 'lame, or blind, or halt, or maimed, or leprous, or that are withered, or that are deaf, or that are afflicted in any manner'. I would not be surprised if a number things which man has developed - interventions such as spectacles, hearing aids, wheelchairs, walkers, crutches, leg braces, laser treatment, surgery, transplants, prosthetic limbs, medication and any number of corrective practices - enable us to consider those afflicted people to be relatively capable now.
Those that have developed these interventions have been instruments in the Creator's hands enabling many to be healed, to varying degrees, of their afflictions. Do we give the credit to the Master or to the instrument? Do we praise the chisel or the artist for the sculpture?
A consequence of our interventions quite probably has resulted in an increased frequency of these conditions in the population. In previous millennia many of those conditions that are genetically inherited might have been less likely to have been passed on to future generations because individuals with these conditions would not have survived to an age of having children. Some conditions would have caused mates to not have been selected. So, have we enabled those conditions to proliferate? We enable inherited our non-inherited conditions to have less impact, and afflicted people can have greater ability to function. In a way this increases our personal responsibility to do and be more than we might have been capable of doing hundreds of years ago.
