An estimated one billion people around the globe live with a disability; this number grows exponentially when family members, friends, and care providers are included. Various countries and ...international organizations have attempted to guard against discrimination and secure basic human rights for those whose lives are affected by disability. Yet despite such attempts many disabled persons in the United States and throughout the world still face exclusion from full citizenship and membership in their respective societies. They are regularly denied employment, housing, health care, access to buildings, and the right to move freely in public spaces. At base, such discrimination reflects a tacit yet pervasive assumption that disabled persons do not belong in society.
Civil Disabilitieschallenges such norms and practices, urging a reconceptualization of disability and citizenship to secure a rightful place for disabled persons in society. Essays from leading scholars in a diversity of fields offer critical perspectives on current citizenship studies, which still largely assume an ableist world. Placing historians in conversation with anthropologists, sociologists with literary critics, and musicologists with political scientists, this interdisciplinary volume presents a compelling case for reimagining citizenship that is more consistent, inclusive, and just, in both theory and practice. By placing disability front and center in academic and civic discourse,Civil Disabilitiestests the very notion of citizenship and transforms our understanding of disability and belonging.
Contributors: Emily Abel, Douglas C. Baynton, Susan Burch, Allison C. Carey, Faye Ginsburg, Nancy J. Hirschmann, Hannah Joyner, Catherine Kudlick, Beth Linker, Alex Lubet, Rayna Rapp, Susan Schweik, Tobin Siebers, Lorella Terzi.
With US soldiers stationed around the world and engaged in multiple conflicts, Americans will be forced for the foreseeable future to come to terms with those permanently disabled in battle.At the ...moment, we accept rehabilitation as the proper social and cultural response to the wounded, swiftly returning injured combatants to their civilian lives. But this was not always the case, as Beth Linker reveals in her provocative new book, War's Waste. Linker explains how, before entering World War I, the United States sought a way to avoid the enormous cost of providing injured soldiers with pensions, which it had done since the Revolutionary War. Emboldened by their faith in the new social and medical sciences, reformers pushed rehabilitation as a means to "rebuild" disabled soldiers, relieving the nation of a monetary burden and easing the decision to enter the Great War. Linker's narrative moves from the professional development of orthopedic surgeons and physical therapists to the curative workshops, or hospital spaces where disabled soldiers learned how to repair automobiles as well as their own artificial limbs. The story culminates in the postwar establishment of the Veterans Administration, one of the greatest legacies to come out of the First World War.
This essay explores the multiple sites where disability appears in the history of medicine and suggests ways in which medical historians can self-consciously incorporate a disability perspective into ...their own work. Just as medical historians have much to learn from disability historians, disability historians could benefit from looking more closely at the history of medicine. While disability cannot (and should not) be reduced to disease, the fact remains that some forms of disability are brought about by disease processes, and some require daily regimes of home health care, therapy, and pain management. How the disabled have interacted with health care institutions, caretakers, and the medical establishment is too significant to be written out of its history.
World War I is believed to have ushered in modern medicine and the modern hospital, but an equally important contribution was the establishment of rehabilitation medicine, a specialty that helped ...pave the way for the creation of the Veterans Administration.
Nearly a century after the United States entered World War I, we can appreciate more than ever its profound effect on medical practice. For many people, World War I conjures up images of men with shell shock, trench foot, and influenza. The burden of these conditions hastened the development of a host of new medical specialties as well as the construction of many hospitals and clinics. For these reasons, some historians believe World War I was responsible for ushering in modern medicine and the modern hospital.
1
An equally important — yet often overlooked — part of this history was the . . .
In 2004, the US Preventive Services Task Force called for an end to scoliosis screening in US public schools. However, screening endures, although most nations have ended their screening programs. ...Why? Explanations range from America's unique fee-for-service health care system and its encouragement of high-cost medical specialism to the nation's captivation with new surgeries and technologies. I highlight another, more historical, reason: the persistence of the belief that spinal curvature is a sign of a progressive disease or disability. Despite improved health and the mid-20th-century discovery of antibiotics and vaccines that all but eradicated the diseases historically associated with scoliosis (e.g., polio and tuberculosis), the health fears associated with spinal curvature never fully dissipated. Scoliosis is still seen as a "dangerous curve," although the exact nature of the health risk remains unclear.
Full text
Available for:
CEKLJ, FSPLJ, ODKLJ, UL, VSZLJ
The Body Politic in Pain Linker, Beth
Perspectives in biology and medicine,
2017, Volume:
60, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
In his 2015 book Pain: A Political History, Keith Wailoo demonstrates how a medicalized condition became central to defining party politics in the United States from World War II down to the present. ...Drawing on sources ranging from postwar Congressional hearings concerning the veteran welfare state to debates surrounding Rush Limbaugh's OxyContin addiction, Wailoo offers a fresh analysis of both U.S. political history and medical history, showing how today's highly polarized party system emerged in part from debates surrounding the existence and worth of pain, as well as its management.
Despite their missing limbs, these soldiers had "overcome" their injuries to the point of being able to fight once again in what was then considered the manliest of all martial arts: hand-to-hand ...combat.
PDF
