In a particularly evocative chapter, ‘Archive and Anatomy of Disability Myths’ of his book, Disability Rhetoric, Jay Dolmage contends that ‘[j]ust as a loaded gun shown in the opening scenes of a movie will eventually be fired, a disabled character will have to be “killed or cured”’ by the end of the work in which he/she appears.’ Disability is something that, according to Dolmage, ‘must be eradicated in one of these two ways’. In texts from Medieval Spain the kill principle in Dolmage's equation is relatively infrequent, except in cases where the impairment is a result of punishment, whether secular or divine. Sometimes the fate of the disabled individual is unspecified or there is a reference to suffering for some extended period of time. In other instances, the impaired individual may simply be used as part of a larger moral lesson in which the ultimate fate of the disabled is not central to the argument. While the impaired individual may be socially isolated, as in the case of Teresa de Cartagena because of her deafness, or stigmatized due to blindness or physical deformity, in the texts examined in this study, these characters are rarely eliminated. Even though the kill part of Dolmage's equation does not play as prominent a role in texts from Medieval Spain as it does in the novels and movies he surveys, the cure principle looms large. Whereas, in contemporary works the cure of the disabled may involve surgery, drug treatment, or some elaborate prosthetic device, the reversal of a disability in Pre-Modern texts is most often attributed to divine intervention. Medical treatises provide little information about permanent physical impairments beyond some references to palliative care for the disabled. The ‘cures’ proposed in some Medieval medical manuals were most likely only effective in cases where paralysis, blindness, or deafness was the temporary result of an illness or accident. The overriding hope for cure lay with miraculous intervention. Hagiographic literature and collections of Marian miracles contain litanies of cures for all kinds of physical impairment and there were enduring beliefs about the efficacy of prayer, pilgrimage, fasting, or other manifestations of devotion as the means of relief from a disabling condition.