A session from Yale's course The Nature of Genius examines how physical and mental disabilities intersect with exceptional creative achievement. The lecture works through cases where impairment and innovation appear linked rather than opposed, asking whether conditions that limit ordinary functioning can also reshape perception in ways that feed original work. Expect discussion of how creative fields have historically responded to figures whose difference from typical cognition or physiology became part of their output rather than an obstacle to it. The lecture stays within the course's broader project of testing popular assumptions about genius against actual biographical and psychological evidence, rather than treating disability as a side note or inspirational footnote. Nineteen minutes long, it functions as one segment of a longer Yale lecture series rather than a self-contained survey, so it assumes some familiarity with the course's running argument about what genius actually consists of.