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Throughout time from antiquity, the major objective of crutches was to restore, as close as possible, the functional capacity formerly held by a limb deficient person. The crutch is probably the oldest tool of the orthopaedist. It is probably also the most neglected in terms of progress from antiquity until the 20th century. The aim of this paper is to give a view of the different crutches used in this period by different people and to observe the influence of this period on the progress of the design of crutches.

This article focuses on the unique and hitherto unknown history of disabled ex-servicemen and civilians in interwar Poland. In 1914, thousands of Poles were conscripted into the Austrian, Prussian, and Russian armies and forced to fight against each other. When the war ended and Poland regained independence after more than one hundred years of partition, the fledgling government was unable to provide support for the more than three hundred thousand disabled war victims, not to mention the many civilians left injured or orphaned by the war. The vast majority of these victims were ex-servicemen of foreign armies, and were deprived of any war compensation. Neither the Polish government nor the impoverished society could meet the disabled ex-servicemen's medical and material needs; therefore, these men had to take responsibility for themselves and started cooperatives and war-invalids-owned enterprises. A social collaboration between Poland and America, rare in Europe at that time, was initiated by the Polish community in the United States to help blind ex-servicemen in Poland.

When caregivers address the positive aspects of illness or disability, there is a risk of patronising the sufferer. It is equally problematic when secondary gain is judged in a negative light and impedes an effective doctor-patient relationship. Changing attitudes, and particularly the negative perception of a patient's gain from illness, are reflected in biographies of artists, philosophers and other creative individuals. In contrast, some memoirs about illness feature a retrospective discussion of the positive features of the experience - from one who is now free from the ordeal. The experience of continual sufferers may be more instructive. We examine contemporary examples of unanticipated advantage or gain arising from ongoing disability or illness. The contribution of disability/illness to remarkable achievement promotes enhanced self-appreciation for patients and may foster in others a better understanding of what it means to suffer and live with disability.

The article describes attitudes to disability and physically disabled people, taking into account the aspect of ethical and social location, what physically disabled meant in societies, and ways to solve the problems of disability. The article is based on studies of disability and historical sources. Christ's attitude shown in the Gospels changed the traditional cultures of the ancient treatment of disability in terms of it being seen as a penalty of the divine. The development of Christianity caused a gradual expansion of the ideas of charity, at the same time stepping up care and material support to all those physically disabled in need. Care of the disabled is based mostly on charity. Church activities supported, by the structure of the State and private individuals, was of paramount importance. Medieval society felt responsible for disabled people.

Between 1839 and 1853 several petitions have been addressed by inmates of the Haina hospital (Hesse, Germany) in order to save them from being transferred to the Anatomical Institute of the University of Marburg for post mortem dissection. In 1855, exemptions were granted in certain cases. Initially, the petitioners' strategies of argumentation and procedure have been analysed; then--referring to the application being sent in December 1847 and signed by 30 persons--the focus goes to the formation of this group and their opportunities for action. As a result it can be stated that inmates being physically ill or impaired or with impeded visual sensory perception tried to withstand unsuitable restrictions of their liberty of action as well as their personal rights induced by the routines of every-day hospital life. Guiltless for depending on public assistance they were not willing to accept unjustified curtailing of their personal and moral integrity. The attempts of being saved from anatomical dissection are part of the inmates' self-assertion.

While, historically, the disabled body has appeared in literature as "monstrous," burgeoning psychological theories of the Victorian period predicated an unusual shift. In a culture of sexual anxiety and fears of devolution and moral decay, the physically disabled and "weak" are portrayed as strangely free from moral corruption. Unlike the cultural link between deviance and disability witnessed in the medical literature and eugenic approach to generation, authors of narrative fiction-particularly Charles Dickens, but Wilkie Collins, Charlotte Yonge, and others as well-portray disabled characters as "purified," and trauma itself as potentially sanitizing. This present paper argues that such constructions were made possible by developments in the treatment of insanity. "Curing 'Moral Disability': Brain Trauma and Self-Control in Victorian Fiction," examines the concept of trauma-as-cure. Throughout the Victorian period, case studies on brain trauma appeared in widely circulated journals like the Lancet, concurrently with burgeoning theories about psychological disturbance and "moral insanity." While not widely practiced until the early twentieth century, attempts at surgical "cures" aroused curiosity and speculation-the traumatic event that could free sufferers from deviance. This work provides a unique perspective on representations of disability as cure in the nineteenth century as a means of giving voice to the marginalized, disabled, and disempowered.

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.

The history of the Nazi "euthanasia programme" named "Aktion T4" has been examined from a biopolitical perspective for some time. However, these studies have not focused on the analytics of biopolitical practices of subjectivization as an essential element of the Foucaultian concept. The use of such a theoretical approach can be used in combination with new and substantial empirical research results. The Heidelberg DFG research programme evaluated the "T4" medical records statistically in order to conclusively determine which features had significant importance for selection by the "T4" experts. The inability to work or having an incurable mental illness were the criteria by which psychiatrists and "T4" experts subjectivized patients as "lives not worth living". Considering these new results and a biopolitical approach as starting point, it is time to reconsider the Nazi "euthanasia" propaganda movie "Ich klage an" ("I Accuse", 1941). When scholars began to study the production process of the movie in the 1980s, they looked at the narrative and the movie characters from an instrumental perspective. In other words, they examined how the "T4" protagonists and filmmakers sought to create a film which affected the viewers' opinion in a specific way intentionally influenced by them. According to that line of thought, the character Hanna was neglected because she was considered to be the morally inoffensive disguise of the intended propaganda massage. However, two works from the 1990s which were gender history-oriented finally focused on Hanna and the way the film narrative turns her into a subject "not worth living". Based on these considerations, this article states its thesis. The criteria of the film to subjectivize Hanna share many basic characteristics with those of the subjectivization process of the "T4" victims. To prove this statement, the analytics of the movie are combined with the results of the DFG project. Through the combination of both types of sources, the examination of the subjetivization process of the "T4" victims is expanded upon through the incorporation of discursive and imaginative procedures. For this reason, the film is analysed from a narratological and aesthetic perspective. The article starts with a description of the spatial structure of the narrative, which serves to establish an ideal of a "life worth living". Subsequently, the analysis focuses on the staging of Hanna's body and her self-description - both mean to show Hanna's regression from the norm of a "life worth living". Then, the case of Hanna is contextualized by the "T4" subjects. Due to the fact that incurable illness was a necessary feature of the victims, Hanna's husband's search for a cure for multiple sclerosis is also examined. The final part of the article deals with the research controversies regarding the importance of racial hygiene for the "euthanasia programme". Even in regard to this last question, which is also important in order to understand the subjectivization of the "T4" victims, the film offers interesting answers.

Background: The history of ethical guidelines addresses protection of human rights in the face of violations. Examples of such violations in research involving people with intellectual disabilities (ID) abound. We explore this history in an effort to understand the apparently stringent criteria for the inclusion of people with ID in research, and differences between medical and other research within a single jurisdiction., Method: The history of the Helsinki Declaration and informed consent within medical research, and high-profile examples of ethical misconduct involving people with ID and other groups are reviewed. The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities is then examined for its research implications. This background is used to examine a current anomaly within an Australian context for the inclusion of people with ID without decisional capacity in medical versus other types of research., Results: Ethical guidelines have often failed to protect the human rights of people with ID and other vulnerable groups. Contrasting requirements within an Australian jurisdiction for medical and other research would seem to have originated in early deference to medical authority for making decisions on behalf of patients., Conclusions: Stringent ethical requirements are likely to continue to challenge researchers in ID. A human rights perspective provides a framework for engaging both researchers and vulnerable participant groups., (© 2012 The Authors. Journal of Intellectual Disability Research © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.)

Charles Dickens' ( 1812- 1870) works, were for a long time, a solid background for social, historical, psychological, literary and medical 19th century studies. In this article , some light is casted on Dickens, medicine and disabled people in his works, especially on paraplegics.

Introduction: Literature has always been attracted to neurological pathologies and the numerous works published on the subject are proof of this. Likewise, a number of physicians have been fiction writers and have drawn on their scientific knowledge to help develop their stories., Aims: The study addresses the appearance of neurological pathologies in a sample of literary works and examines the description of the disease, its treatment, the patient's view and the relationship between healthcare professionals and the socio-familial milieu., Development: We review some of the greatest literary works of all times that deal with neurological pathologies, such as Don Quixote, Julius Caesar, David Copperfield, The Idiot or Miau, and many of them are seen to offer a very faithful portrayal of the disease. Similarly, we have also reviewed works that provide a personal account of life with neurological diseases and the ensuing disability written either by the patients themselves or by their relatives, examples being The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, My Left Foot or One Chance in a Thousand., Conclusions: Literature has helped to offer a realistic vision of neurologically-based pathologies and the healthcare professionals who work with them; there are many examples that portray the experiences of the patients themselves and the importance of support from the family is a feature that is constantly underlined.

The importance of social comparison in shaping individual utility has been widely documented by subjective well-being literature. So far, income and unemployment have been the main dimensions considered in social comparison. This paper aims to investigate whether subjective well-being is influenced by inter-personal comparison with respect to health. Thus, we study the effects of the health of others and relative health hypotheses on two measures of subjective well-being: happiness and subjective health. Using data from the Italian Health Conditions survey, we show that a high incidence of chronic conditions and disability among reference groups negatively affects both happiness and subjective health. Such effects are stronger among people in the same condition. These results, robust to different econometric specifications and estimation techniques, suggest the presence of some sympathy in individual preferences with respect to health and reveal that other people's health status serves as a benchmark to assess one's own health condition.

Disability history is a comparatively new field of study, and to date little use has been made of the British census as a source because of its perceived difficulties. This article shows that it is possible to study a local, disabled population in the second half of the nineteenth century from this source, even thought the way in which individuals' disabilities are described can sometimes vary from one census to the next. Age distribution for each condition and was found to vary between those with congenital and those with acquired conditions. Among those with a handicap of sight, hearing or speech a higher proportion remained unmarried. Disabled people were likely to remain in the parental home until their late thirties, and when their parents died they moved in with siblings or became a lodger or inmate. Although few of the disabled children seemed to be receiving education, over 60 per cent of the adult males were found to be working and almost 25 per cent of the adult females. Disabled people, it appears, were viewed not merely as statistics, but were included as members of the local population, and not always dependent members.

This essay review examines three books dealing with the founding and subsequent activities of Walter Reed Army Medical Center (WRAMC) and the evolution of military medicine from 1909 to 2009 recently published by the US Army's Borden Institute. Established by fellow army doctor William Borden to honor Walter Reed himself, WRAMC, located in Washington, DC, soon became the public and professional face of medical care for American soldiers. The discussion highlights the ongoing issue of the care and treatment of combat amputees; aspects of gender within military medicine; and WRAMC's function as an educational and research facility. Also discussed are the archival and documentary bases for these books and their utility for historians. Complimentary analysis of two of the books which are, in particular, explicitly about the history of WRAMC is contextualized within the celebration of the centennial of this army post contemporaneously with its closure, amalgamation, and relocation primarily to Maryland., (© The Author 2010. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.)

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 Author 2010. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.)

Samuel Beckett and Jorge Luis Borges have presented 20th century literature with a distinctive gallery of solitary figures who suffer from a series of physiological ailments: invalidism, decrepitude, infirmity and blindness, as well as neurological conditions such as amnesia and autism spectrum disorders. Beckett and Borges were concerned with the dynamics between illness and creativity, the literary representation of physical and mental disabilities, the processes of remembering and forgetting, and the inevitability of death. This article explores the depiction of physically and mentally disabled characters in Borges' Funes the Memorious (1942)--a story about an Uruguayan gaucho who has been left paralysed after a fall from a horse which simultaneously endowed him with an infallible memory and perception--and Beckett's Trilogy: Molloy (1951), Malone Dies (1951) and The Unnamable (1953). It examines the prodigious memory of Funes and the forgetful minds of Molloy and Malone with reference to influential neuropsychological studies such as Alexander Luria's twofold exploration of memory and forgetfulness in The Mind of a Mnemonist (1968) and The Man with a Shattered World (1972). The article demonstrates that in contrast to Beckett's amnesiacs and Luria's brain-damaged patient, who are able to transcend their circumstances through cathartic writing, Borges' and Luria's mnemonic prodigies fail to achieve anything significant with their unlimited memories and remain imprisoned within their cognitive disabilities. It reveals that medical discourses can provide invaluable insights and lead to a deeper understanding of the minds and bodily afflictions of literary characters.

This article examines the discourse about physical disability led by the German 'Krüppelfürsorge'. It deals with the exhibition GeSoLei (Gesundheitspflege, soziale Fürsorge and Leibesübungen), which took place in Düsseldorf in 1926. The GeSoLei was one of the most popular platforms of the healthy and aesthetic body in the 1920s. It stood in the context of the German 'national recovery' after World War I and collected all types of medical, social and athletic professionals to expose their work to a broader audience. Also representatives of the so called 'Krüppelfürsorge' presented themselves and at the same time their perspective on people with physical disabilities on this exhibition. The article points out the ambivalent character of their perspective and shows the mixture of including and excluding people with physical disabilities, which was typical for the view of the 'Krüppelfürsorge'. It demonstrates that the 'Krüppelfürsorger' on the one hand were quite progressive towards people with disabilities, but on the other hand showed a striking openness towards eugenic values.

The 1920s in the United States are commonly remembered as the Jazz Age. Although historians have focused on the African American origins of the music, another theme was also prominent in the public discourse surrounding jazz: disability. Critics saw jazz and its associated dances as defective, causing both mental and physical impairments in their devotees. In other words, jazz music and dance were disabled and disabling. Proponents of jazz responded in kind, asserting that jazz did not cause impairments, it cured them; similarly, jazz was not defective music or dance, but a revitalisation of the art forms. On the one hand, these reactions might have been expected, given the long history of belief in a relationship between music and health. However, the importance of health issues such as eugenics and rehabilitation in the 1920s also clearly influenced the responses of opinion leaders, politicians, academics, music professionals, and others to jazz music and dance.

Exploring literary sources from the first century BCE up to the eleventh century CE, this article demonstrates how the history of disabilities in antiquity can go further than just collecting 'interesting case histories'. Using a model developed by Michel Vovelle, the sources are interpreted on different levels, taking into account both the cultural context in which the text arose and the intentions of the author.

This article examines how the field of college health has evolved over time to address the needs of an increasingly diverse student population. The central argument is that college and university health programs developed in conjunction with shifting standards of medical care and public health practices in the United States. The author reviews the role of college health programs as public health agencies for campus communities, and describes contemporary public health challenges facing college campuses. She shows how the history of college health is intertwined with the history of diversity in higher education. In particular, the author outlines how the growth of health services made higher education accessible to women, racial minorities, veterans, and persons with disabilities.

This essay looks at the representation of disability in the recent Spanish film "Yo, también" through the lens of disability studies, understood as a political project. The film's portrayal of a character who is, like the actor who plays him, Europe's first university graduate with Down syndrome, is unique. Moreover, "Yo, también" provides the opportunity to assess the state of the struggle for rights for persons with disabilities both in the film's narrative arc and also in the wider Spanish (and global) society. Among other sources, specific articles of the United Nations's recent Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities are incorporated into the essay. Both essay and film coincide in emphasizing the need to grant disabled populations greater autonomy in the spheres of love and work.

In 1981, Spain was threatened by the sudden appearance of an epidemic-like disease, one which was unknown to that date. The Toxic Oil Syndrome, as it was later named after the oil that caused it, thus demanded a response that became conditioned by the fact that the biological nature of the disease was unknown, but also, significantly by the complex situation in the country at that time. Spain was immersed in process of great political change, as well as a difficult economic situation, the authorities were obliged to react in not ideal conditions and in accordance with the very values that the new model of social relations that was being developed. This paper aims to look at the way in which the Toxic Oil Syndrome acted as a catalyst and accelerated the healthcare reform that, already prior to the outbreak of the epidemic, had been deemed necessary. This work focuses mainly on the response of the health system regarding those affected by the epidemic, as it was forced to treat a group of people with severe physical side effects which would lead to disability within a new framework of social relations. It thus aims to illustrate how many of the measures adopted were in accordance with the main ideas behind the reform, and also how these measures were precursors of those which were later applied to the population as a whole.

The author presented an earlier version of this historical article to the Disability Section of the American Public Health Association (November 2009). It is part of his ongoing research in the social and cultural history of medicine as the field intersects with the history of disability, veterans, and public health, as well as current issues that touch all of these areas. This article introduces readers to perspectives on disability held by the British novelist John Galsworthy (1867-1933), which he developed primarily through his philanthropic support for and his compositions about rehabilitation programs for British and American soldiers disabled in the First World War (1914-1918). Readers will learn that Galsworthy's perspectives are as much about his identity as an individual with disabilities as they are about men disabled in the "war to end all wars." The rediscovery of Galsworthy's experiences and words more than 90 years after the end of World War I reveals how history is present today at the intersection of disability and public health. Indeed, the story of Galsworthy ultimately seeking to forget his own experiences during the "Great War," as well as the very physical and psychological disability caused by that conflict, can inspire public health professionals and disability rights advocates today to remember-indeed, to advocate for-men and women who served in battle and have returned home to realize renewed health and social participation despite permanent physical and psychological wounds. Readers will note that language used throughout this article to describe disability is period-specific and therefore not keeping with current conventions., (Published by Elsevier Inc.)

At the turn of the twentieth century, social attitudes toward disability turned sharply negative. An international eugenics movement brought about restrictive immigration laws in the United States and other immigrant nations. One cause was the changing understanding of time, both historical and quotidian, that accompanied the advent of evolutionary theory and a competitive industrial economy. As analogies of competition became culturally ubiquitous, new words to talk about disability such as 'handicapped', 'retarded', 'abnormal', 'degenerate', and 'defective', came into everyday use, all of them explicitly or implicitly rooted in new ways of thinking about time. The intense fear of disability that characterised the eugenics movement grew, in good part, from this new and unsettling vision of time.

In Oscar Wilde's two volumes of fairy tales, "The Happy Prince" and Other Tales (1888) and A House of Pomegranates (1891), many central characters meet with premature death or physical disfigurement after learning a bourgeois moral lesson. In an attempt to explain this unconventional phenomenon in the fairy tale tradition, this essay examines Wilde's stories through the lens of his aesthetic ideology and demonstrates how the superficial morality of the Victorian bourgeoisie corrodes each tale's aesthetic integrity, causing the characters to either deny morality outright, assume the guise of Christian philanthropy, or die as the result of their moral reformation.

The auction of Brueghel's 'Fight between Carnival and Lent' is the reason for a survey of a group of cripples painted by Brueghel. In the late middle ages and early modern times, cripples and the handicapped who could only move with the aid of crutches were virtually excluded from society. Begging and making music were often the only way they could make a living. Their injuries were not always genuine, often they were feigned to gain sympathy and obtain money more easily.

This introduction proceeds in five steps. First, it briefly considers the etymology of the term "suffering," as well as the way in which scholars from different disciplines have approached it conceptually and empirically. Second, drawing on the contributions to this issue, it raises general themes emerging from the study of the Thirty Years, Franco-Prussian and First World Wars, with particular attention to gender, the disabled, and Jewish-German veterans. Finally, it considers the most politically contested field of German suffering - the Second World War - and reflects on how that suffering can be narrated and understood without running into the intellectual dead ends of either self-pity or collective guilt.

While characters with disabilities appear frequently in Victorian fiction, deaf characters, specifically, are almost entirely absent. In fact, the only deaf characters who use sign language in Victorian fiction are Madonna Blyth in Wilkie Collins’s Hide and Seek and Sophy Marigold in Charles Dickens’s “Doctor Marigold.” Grounding its analysis in these two texts, this article contends that it is, in particular, a deaf character’s relationship to language that disqualifies him or her from conventional representation in Victorian fiction. Through reading Hide and Seek and “Doctor Marigold” in the context of Victorian deaf history, Collins and Dickens’s realist aims, and Victorian generic conventions rooted in transcribing orality, this essay argues that the absence of deaf characters reveals the investment of mid-Victorian fiction in a particular and normativized relationship between bodies, spoken language, and textuality.