The World Health Organization (WHO) defines disability, in very broad terms, as the difficulty an individual may have relating to his or her surrounding environment. Nonetheless, since the eighteenth century, Spanish literature has portrayed disability as a metaphor for deficiency, imperfection, monstrosity, disorder, and even excess. In this sense, the grotesque amputation suffered by the protagonist, Tristana, in Benito Pérez Galdós's famous homonymous novel written in 1892 can be interpreted as a settling of accounts of society with a woman who was too independent and intellectually ambitious for her time. Literary production became in that sense a reflection of a society that wove together a series of prejudices regarding disability, resulting in the stigmatization and invisibility of these individuals.