Beth Linker

Strength and Science: Gender, Physiotherapy, and Medicine in the United States, 1918-35

This article explores the development of post–World War I allied medical professions in the United States, and more specifically the rise of physiotherapy as it was used to rehabilitate maimed soldiers. Unlike other female health care professionals of the time, physiotherapists engaged in intra–gender conflicts with white–collar women rather than attempting to gain independence from medical men. Driven to be distinct from other female professionals, physiotherapists created a unique post–Victorian identity, defining their practice as requiring both strength and science, which challenged the convention of seeing women as the weaker, more nurturing sex. Their story, however, is not one of simple triumph. Eager to medicalize and professionalize their field, by 1935 they subordinated themselves to physician supervision, losing what little professional autonomy they had acquired during the 1920s. Yet, by extending their professional sphere of influence over disabled soldiers, these therapists became physical manipulators of the male body and purveyors of knowledge regarding the definition and treatment of disability.

Civil Disabilities: Citizenship, Membership, and Belonging

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 Disabilities challenges 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 Disabilities tests 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.

Shooting disabled soldiers: medicine and photography in World War I America.

This article challenges conventional theories about the role of medical photography in the early twentieth century. Some scholars argue that the camera intensified the Foucauldian medical gaze, reducing patients to mere pathologies. Others maintain that with the rise of the new modern hospital and its state-of-the-art technologies, the patient fell from view entirely, with apertures pointing toward streamlined operating rooms rather than the human subjects who would go under the knife. The Army Surgeon General’s World War I rehabilitation journal, Carry On: A Magazine on the Reconstruction of Disabled Soldiers and Sailors, problematizes these assumptions. Hoping to persuade a skeptical public that the Army’s new programs in medical rehabilitation for disabled soldiers provided the best means of veteran welfare, the editorial officials at Carry On photographed patients fully clothed, wounds hidden, engaged in everyday activities in order to give the impression that the medical sciences of the day could cure permanent disabilities. In the end, Carry On shows us that medical doctors could, and did, use photography to conceal as well as reveal the reality faced by injured soldiers. In doing so, they (like other Progressive reformers at the time) hoped to persuade the public that rehabilitation had the power to make the wounds of war disappear.

The Great War and Modern Health Care

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.

Beware of the One-Armed Soldier

At the height of the Great War, as many as 12,000 still photographs were taken every day, and each shot—whether taken by an official military photographer of the Signal Corps or by a private photographer with a government permit—had to pass the censorship standards set by the newly created Committee on Public Information (CPI). Photographs of the war dead were prohibited, as were images of military formations, war …