Introduction: Health and DisabilityAuthor(s): Russell L.

Johnson
Source: Health and History , Vol. 13, No. 2, Special Feature: Health and Disability (2011),
pp. 2-12
Published by: Australian and New Zealand Society of the History of Medicine, Inc

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Introduction: Health and Disability
Russell L. Johnson
The articles in this special issue of Health and History derive from
a multi-disciplinary symposium on disability studies held at the
University of Otago in August 2010. From about the mid-1980s
increasing numbers of scholars in history, literature, sociology,
anthropology, and other fields have been articulating the view that
disability, despite its (frequently) physically apparent manifestations,
is socially constructed. This scholarship argues that physical
difference, impairment, or functional limitation is not disability.
Instead disability results from the constraints that the dominant culture
consciously or unconsciously places upon people who physically,
intellectually, or psychologically differ from some arbitrarily defined
‘normal’. In short, biology is not destiny for people with disabilities
any more than it is for women, racial and ethnic minorities, or any
other group subordinated or marginalised in western cultures. As one
of the Otago symposium’s keynote speakers, Catherine J. Kudlick,
noted in a 2003 article, disability studies scholarship thus asks
questions basic to the humanities and social sciences: ‘[W]hat does
it mean to be human? How can we respond ethically to difference?
What is the value of a human life? Who decides these questions,
and what do the answers reveal?’ These are central questions for the
study of health and history, as well.1
To begin to answer these questions, one has to understand the
history of disability and responses to it. In broad strokes, ancient
civilisations—Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome—understood
disability as evidence of the gods’ whims, or of their active favour
or disfavour toward individuals. Disabilities, especially congenital
malformations, were beyond the realm of human beings. Hence, in
Greece and Rome, the practice of exposing newborn infants deemed
malformed—they were being returned to the gods. The ancient
Egyptians left behind extensive evidence of their interest in disability,
including the first recorded references to deafness. Egyptian treatment
ideas tended toward the magical, but early physicians in Greece
and Rome, Hippocrates and Galen among them, developed some
treatments for disabilities that continued to be used into the twentieth
century. The replacement of the many gods of the ancient world with
one God in Jewish and early Christian civilisations changed little
regarding the status of people with disabilities. Disability remained

2 Health & History, 2011. 13/2

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 Introduction: Health and Disability 3
an individual affliction caused by God, although whereas the Jews
tended to see disability as evidence of God’s punishment, early
Christians saw it as indicating closeness to God and an opportunity
for charity. After the fall of the Roman empire, people with disabilities
melted into the great mass of poor in European medieval societies.2
What some disability scholars refer to as the moral model
governing responses to disability in ancient and medieval times
increasingly gave way from the late eighteenth century in western
civilisation to a medical model of disability. Strongly influenced
by advances in medical knowledge and the professionalisation of
medicine, disability lost its mystical connotations and was equated
with illness. Approaches to disability then focused on curing or fixing
people with disabilities. If a cure was impossible, segregation and
isolation, either in families or in institutions, tended to be the answer.
In the early twentieth century, the large numbers of disabled soldiers
from World War I and the rising costs of institutional care prompted
interest in rehabilitation within the medical model. Recognising that
some impaired bodies (and minds) were beyond repair, rehabilitation
stressed education and vocational training which would enable as
many people with disabilities as possible to enter the workforce and
become economically productive and self-supporting. The medical
model thus clearly defined disability as an individual problem or
tragedy to be overcome. Disability lost any positive connotation it
sometimes held in ancient and pre-modern times.3
The medical model held sway through the first half of the
twentieth century, though not without some challenges. Then,
during the tumultuous decades of the 1960s and 1970s, women,
racial minorities, gays and lesbians, and other groups subordinated
by western culture’s traditional definition of the normal citizen as
male, white (even Anglo-Saxon), heterosexual, and middle class,
confronted and overturned the political, legal, economic, and cultural
arrangements that oppressed them. Likewise, though initially perhaps
not as obviously, people with disabilities began to question their own
oppression. They especially took exception to the medical model of
disability, which they saw as doing things to and for disabled people
instead of empowering the disabled to act for themselves. By the
late 1970s full-blown disability rights movements had emerged in
the United States and the United Kingdom articulating a new social
model of disability. Noting the historical and cultural contingency that
marks responses to disability, the social model stresses the difference
between impairment, a functional limitation of the body or mind,

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4 RUSSELL L. JOHNSON

and disability, the product of the interaction between people with

impairments and their social, cultural, and physical environments.
Whereas the medical/rehabilitative model addresses misalignments
between the functional abilities of individuals and their environment
by realigning the individual, the social model argues that the
environment must change, not the individual.4
As the women’s and other rights movements helped spark
academic studies programmes at universities throughout the world, so
the disability rights movement has spawned an academic discipline,
disability studies. In those nations where it emerged first and most
strongly, the United States and the United Kingdom, disability studies
took on slightly different shapes. In the United States, it emerged
primarily in the humanities and has been heavily influenced by
cultural studies approaches. In contrast, disability studies in the United
Kingdom came out of the social sciences, and is more empirically
focused and often explicitly materialist or Marxist. Further, the
presence in the United Kingdom of a more highly developed welfare
state than in the United States led British disability studies to focus
more on the relationship between people with impairments and
social provision. As befits American circumstances, the field there
tends to emphasise identity issues or identity politics, often explicitly
articulated as a minority group model of disability.5 Australia and
New Zealand have tended to follow the British practice in disability
studies rather than the American, though the difference between the
two has grown less important over time. In fact, disability scholars in
different parts of the world have begun to argue for the need to ‘move
away from the preoccupation with binary understandings’6—medical
and social models, impairment and disability, British and American
approaches, and even normal versus disabled. New modes of analysis
with names like the human variation model, Constructive Functional
Diversity, and Critical Disability Studies have been mooted.7
Whichever model prevails, in the academy disability studies
seems to be here to stay and should only grow more significant in
years to come as it matures as a field and challenges researchers
to rethink their assumptions. Although some predictions about the
numbers of disabled people—such as one from American disability
scholar Harlan Hahn in 1983 that the disabled population of the
United States would equal its nondisabled population by the year
2000—have proved exaggerated, estimates in developed nations
such as Australia, New Zealand, the United States, and Western
Europe commonly place the percentage of the population which is

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 Introduction: Health and Disability 5
disabled at 20 percent.8 To put this in some perspective, according to
the United States census in 2000, Hispanics were the largest minority
group at 12.5 percent of the population.9 As medical technologies,
treatments, and general health care improve, more and more people
will live longer; in some countries average life spans of a hundred
years are perhaps no more than a generation away. Moreover, better
medical care will ensure the survival of increasing numbers of people
with impairments that not very long ago would have been fatal. In
sum, few people will not experience disability from both unimpaired
and impaired perspectives, a fact that makes disability very
different from other research areas such as gender, race, and sexual
orientation.10 Disability scholars make the point succinctly when
they refer to unimpaired individuals as ‘TABs,’ or the Temporarily
Able-Bodied.11
In August 2010, a wide range of scholars, activists, educators,
practitioners, policy makers, and artists—some disabled and some
TABs—gathered at the University of Otago for a two-day symposium
on disability studies. While most of the participants came from New
Zealand, symposium speakers arrived from Australia, Canada, and
the United States as well. Participants clearly found the sessions
stimulating. Discussions on the individual papers always exceeded the
time allotted, challenging the moderator’s ability to allow everyone
to have their say and yet adhere to the schedule, and attested to the
usefulness of exposure to alternative perspectives. Three speakers
from Otago’s College of Education, for example, described their
attempts to incorporate the social model of disability into teacher
training and education programmes for people with disabilities.12
Other groups of speakers focused on the theory, development, and
practice of disability studies in New Zealand and offered specific
discussion of policies such as the social-model driven New Zealand
Disability Strategy adopted by the Labour government in 2001.13 And
Suzanne Cowan’s presentation on her experiences as a dancer with
a disability, paraplegia, captivated everyone. Cowan imaginatively
placed herself in the situation of a denizen of a nineteenth-century-
style freak show. Performing as ‘Ava the Spiderwoman’ and wearing
a costume with four extra legs attached to it—legs which had just as
much feeling as her own—Cowan and her able-bodied dance partner
highlighted the interrelationship of western norms of the body,
acceptable human physical difference, and the grotesque.14
Some papers for various reasons could not be included in this
special issue, and they deserve particular mention, as they relate

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6 RUSSELL L. JOHNSON

closely to the concerns of medical historians. The symposium began

with a keynote address by Catherine J. Kudlick from the University
of California at Davis. Professor Kudlick is one of the foremost
disability historians in the world and has worked hard to bridge
the divide between the history of medicine and disability history;
for instance, she gave a keynote address at the Social History of
Medicine conference in Glasgow in 2008. In her Otago keynote,
Kudlick talked about a new project on the history of smallpox in
France. She began by noting that although the disease only killed
one-third of its victims, histories of smallpox (and other epidemic
diseases) focus on mortality and the development of a cure. Kudlick,
however, encouraged her audience to think about the much larger
number of people who survived smallpox. The questions she asked
about smallpox—what was the status of the survivors, most of whom
would be impaired in some way? What, then, does it mean to be
‘healthy’, and what did people fear most about disability as a result
of small pox?—can be applied with equal force to a host of diseases.
A focus on the survivors thus has the potential to reshape the history
of epidemic disease as well as promote dialogue between medical
and disability history.15
In passing, Kudlick noted that, along with epidemics, wars are
the greatest producers of disabled people. She intended to reinforce
her point that epidemic disease had not been studied from a disability
perspective whereas disabled soldiers, relatively speaking, receive
a great deal of attention from historians. Yet the symposium heard
from two speakers who showed war and disability in a new light
by stressing not the disabling results of battles and camp diseases,
but the disabling effects of the recruitment process. Nic Clarke from
Canada’s University of Ottawa looked at the characteristics of the
men rejected as unfit when they attempted to enlist in the Canadian
Expeditionary Force in World War I. Armies are great record keepers,
and Clarke found a treasure trove of information related to the
medical examination of Canadian volunteers in Library and Archives
Canada. As was the case elsewhere, Canadians were surprised by the
numbers of individuals judged unfit for service, and many people
who had thought of themselves as ‘fit’ now had to accept that they
were not. As Clarke notes, however, often little apparent difference
existed between one man who was accepted for service and another
who was rejected. Moreover, a number of men rejected in the first
instance were accepted later in the war as manpower demands bit
more deeply into Canadian society. What he found, in other words,

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 Introduction: Health and Disability 7
was that disability and fitness are very fluid, historically contingent
categories, raising again the question Kudlick asked in her keynote
address: what does it mean to be ‘healthy’?16
In her paper, also about a group of prospective soldiers and
highlighting a medical connection, Joanna Welson from the University
of Otago, the only undergraduate speaker at the symposium, also
asked what it means to be healthy. Her case study, however, reversed
the terms of Clarke’s Canadian example. In the mid-1960s, United
States Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara decided to lower the
intelligence requirements for service in the United States Army. In
other words, rather than a way to exclude men from the military,
McNamara’s Project 100,000 sought to enlist men who previously
would have been rejected as mentally unfit. This would enable him to
meet the army’s manpower needs while avoiding more difficult policy
decisions like mobilising the National Guard or eliminating student
deferments from the military draft. Welson found that the so-called
‘new standards men’ were disproportionately poor and black—in an
army that was already disproportionately poor and black. Further,
once in the army the new standards men struggled, being more often
punished for rule infractions than other soldiers. They were also more
likely to be sent to Vietnam and to be killed or wounded once there.
Although Welson was unable to follow the new standards men into
civilian life for her symposium paper, her sources hinted that they
experienced not only higher casualty rates in the army but also higher
rates of post-traumatic stress disorder after their service.17
What Kudlick, Clarke, Welson, and other disability historians
suggest is that a slight change of perspective opens whole new
opportunities for research and a better understanding of the past. The
articles chosen for this special issue showcase the range of historical
questions and topics which can be illuminated using disability as
a category of analysis. Each article in its own way demonstrates
the central theme of disability studies in the humanities and social
sciences: that despite the tendency to think about it in biological
terms, disability is, in fact, a social, cultural, and historically
contingent construction. The particular articles in this special issue
were selected for their greater relevance to historians of medicine
than some of the other symposium presentations. The articles come
roughly in chronological order.
Associate Professor Douglas C. Baynton of the University of
Iowa, the author of important interpretations of deaf history in the
United States and restrictive American immigration laws, gave a

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8 RUSSELL L. JOHNSON

keynote address at the Otago symposium. In it, he turned his attention

to one of the big questions of disability history: why did ideas about
the disabled turn sharply negative—as expressed in social and
educational policies, legislation, and language—around the turn of
the twentieth century? Often believed to reflect merely the increasing
influence of the medical model over ideas about disability, Baynton
sees the change deriving from larger developments in the conception
of time from around the mid-nineteenth century. He describes two
especially important changes in the understanding of time. The first
is the shift from a God-created world, where everything existed as
it did because God intended it that way, to an evolutionary concept
of creation in which life became a competition for existence akin to
a race, the ‘race of life’. Secondly, the pace of daily life quickened;
speed and efficiency were the chief values of an increasingly industrial
society. Through a close look at language, Baynton shows how both
changes—evolution and speed—negatively affected reactions to
people with disabilities. Baynton’s arguments derive from his work
on American history, but his discussion of the changing conceptions
of time and the resulting emphasis on life as a competition has
resonances in New Zealand and Australia.18
The second article, by Russell L. Johnson of the University of
Otago, asks innovative questions about the relationship between
health and music, specifically early jazz. Despite the massive
popularity of jazz (a term applied to a broad range of popular
music) in the 1920s, reactions to the music in various published
sources, including newspapers and popular and scholarly magazines,
were overwhelmingly negative. The critics raised two particular
complaints. First, as music and dance, jazz was disabled because
it violated long-established western norms. Secondly, jazz caused
physical and mental disabilities in people who listened and danced
to it. Meanwhile, defenders of jazz disputed both of these claims,
arguing jazz was not disabled or disabling but rather revitalising.
Hence, like Baynton, Johnson calls attention to the way in which
the language of disability—or ‘able-ism’—permeates how people
in the west view difference, right down to the very language they
use to express aversion, disgust, or abhorrence. Moreover, Johnson
connects reactions to jazz to the long history of making linkages
between music and health as well as to other contemporary health-
related developments in 1920s America: the decade was the heyday of
eugenics and saw the beginnings of government-funded rehabilitation
programmes.19

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 Introduction: Health and Disability 9
In the third article Dave Earl, a PhD candidate at the University
of Sydney, analyses the activism of parents of mentally impaired
children in Australia after World War II. From modest beginnings
among a handful of parents in Sydney in 1946, Earl notes that by the
early 1960s parent groups operated day schools, sheltered workshops,
and even a couple of farm colonies across Australia—over thirty
institutions in all. Parent groups rose up in the post-war period
because of the ad hoc and overcrowded nature of special schools
and other institutions for the mentally impaired; these places seemed
particularly inappropriate for children whose impairments were not
severe. Philosophically, parent groups stressed ‘realistic expectations’
for the children. Thus even the parent groups accepted the ideas of
classification and exclusion that dominated state services, and the
children ultimately suffered, leaving their full potential unrealised.
Earl argues, though, that the real significance of the parent groups was
in taking what had long been considered a private problem—rearing
a mentally impaired child or being a mentally impaired individual—
and raising public consciousness until it became a point of national
interest. In other words, although the parent groups continued to do
things to and for their disabled children, rather than enabling the
children to act for themselves, their organisations helped to break
through the individualisation of disability, seeing it as a social issue,
not merely a medical one.
The final article, by Jane Buckingham of the University of
Canterbury, looks at the experience of segregation and isolation
for leprosy-affected people in the Pacific Islands. From 1911, when
Fiji passed a leper ordinance requiring isolation, to 1969, when the
ordinance was repealed, Makogai Island, Fiji functioned as a leper
colony, used as such by other Pacific Island nations, not just Fiji.
Buckingham’s story is not about the care provided, but instead
she focuses on the experiences of the people isolated on Makogai.
She argues that life on Makogai destabilised the stigma attached to
leprosy in a number of ways. For one thing, on Makogai leprosy was
the norm; leprosy-affected people were not a stigmatised minority
but a substantial majority of the population. Moreover, the fact that
some patients were able to be discharged as ‘cured’ and returned to
their home communities (even before effective antibiotic treatments
became available to treat leprosy in the late 1940s), and the fact that
it was reported that no nurse on the island had contracted the disease,
also helped reduce the stigma attached to leprosy. Buckingham
concludes that collective isolation on Makogai became a form of

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10 RUSSELL L. JOHNSON

community, and by interviewing a number of former Makogai

residents or their descendents, she brings her story up to the present,
showing the continuation of that community. Buckingham’s analysis,
therefore, offers a case in point regarding the value of understanding
and studying the history of infectious disease as a history of survivors
and disability.
Western conceptions of time, jazz in America, voluntary
organisations in Australia, disease in Fiji—these four articles
demonstrate the truth of Baynton’s observation that ‘[d]isability is
everywhere in history, once you begin looking for it’.20 At particular
historical moments, and in different geographic locations, society may
single out groups for very different ends. People sent to Makogai—
marked out by their leprosy—entered a community where those
without the disease were the minority. New imperatives of time at
the close of the nineteenth century ‘disabled’ those unable to keep up,
just as compulsory schooling ‘disabled’ children whose development
did not fit an age-standardised educational system. New music, often
entrancing the senses of the young, constantly threatens ‘disablement’
both of the listeners and wider society. What it means to be healthy is
at the heart of the case studies presented here.

University of Otago

Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank Professor Barbara Brookes for her comments and input
into this Introduction.

1. Catherine J. Kudlick, “Disability History: Why We Need Another Other”, American

Historical Review 108 (June 2003): 763–93, quote from 764. Simi Linton, “Disability Studies/
Not Disability Studies”, Disability & Society 13 (September 1998): 532 discusses the idea that
‘biology is destiny’.
2. For disability in the ancient world see, e.g., Margret A. Winzer, The History of Special
Education (Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 1993), 6–86; Martha L. Edwards,
“Construction of Physical Disability in the Ancient Greek World: The Community Concept”,
in The Body and Physical Difference: Discourses of Disability, edited by David T. Mitchell
and Sharon L. Snyder (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 35–50; M. Lynn
Rose, “Deaf and Dumb in Ancient Greece”, in The Disability Studies Reader, 2nd ed., edited
by Lennard J. Davis (New York: Routledge, 2006), 17–32; Henri-Jacques Stiker, A History of
Disability, translated by William Sayers (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 23–
64; Hector Avalos, Sarah J. Melcher, and Jeremy Schipper, eds, The Abled Body: Rethinking
Disabilities in Biblical Studies (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2007).

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 Introduction: Health and Disability 11
3. Linton, “Disability Studies/Not Disability Studies”, 525–40; Michael Oliver, The Politics
of Disablement (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990), 4–6, 46–54; Richard C. Drimmer, “Cripples,
Overcomers, and Civil Rights: Tracing the Evolution of Federal Legislation and Social Policy
for People with Disabilities”, UCLA Law Review 40 (June 1993): 1345–59; Deborah S. Metzel,
“Historical Social Geography”, in Mental Retardation in America: A Historical Reader, edited
by Steven Noll and James W. Trent Jr (Albany: New York University Press, 2004), 420–30;
Stiker, History of Disability, 121–71; Ana Carden-Coyne, “Ungrateful Bodies: Rehabilitation,
Resistance and Disabled American Veterans of the First World War”, European Review of
History: Revue Européenne d’Histoire 14 (December 2007): 543–65.
4. For an early challenge to the medical model see, e.g., Paul K. Longmore and David
Goldberger, “The League of the Physically Handicapped and the Great Depression: A Case
Study in the New Disability History”, Journal of American History 87 (December 2000):
888–922; and with regard to the concept of ‘norm’ in western civilisation see Rosemarie
Garland Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture
and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 64. For disabled activism
and the social model: Sharon Barnartt and Richard Scotch, Disability Protests: Contentious
Politics 1970–1999 (Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 2001); Oliver, Politics
of Disablement, 9–11, 22–4, 78–94; Martin Sullivan, “Philosophy, Ethics and the Disability
Community”, in The Handbook of Social Research Ethics, edited by Donna M. Mertens and
Pauline E. Ginsberg (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2009), esp. 70–3; and Adam
Samaha, “What Good Is the Social Model of Disability?” University of Chicago Law Review
74 (Fall 2007): 1280–5. And for medical versus social models, see: Samaha, “What Good Is the
Social Model”, 1255–62; Jared D. Cantor, “Defining Disabled: Exporting the ADA to Europe
and the Social Model of Disability”, Connecticut Journal of International Law 24 (Spring
2009), esp. 402–6 [404 for image of ‘realigning’].
5. A useful comparison between disability studies in the United States and the United
Kingdom is Helen Meekosha, “Drifting Down the Gulf Stream: Navigating the Cultures of
Disability Studies”, Disability & Society 19 (December 2004): 721–33. For the civil rights
model in the United States see, e.g., Drimmer, “Cripples, Overcomers”, 1355–9; Leonard
Kreigel, “Uncle Tom and Tiny Tim: Some Reflections on the Cripple as Negro”, The American
Scholar 38 (Summer 1969): 412–30; Harlan Hahn, “Paternalism and Public Policy”, Society
20 (March/April 1983), esp. 38–9.
6. Helen Meekosha and Russell Shuttleworth, “What’s So ‘Critical’ about Critical
Disability Studies?” Australian Journal of Human Rights 15, no. 1 (2009): 47–75, 50.
7. For questions about the social model and proposed replacements see, e.g., Samaha, “What
Good Is the Social Model”, 1262–9; Tom Shakespeare and Nick Watson, “The Social Model of
Disability: An Outdated Ideology?” Research in Social Science and Disability 2 (2001): 9–28;
Richard K. Scotch and Kay Schriner, “Disability as Human Variation: Implications for Policy”,
Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 549 (January 1997): 148–
59; Philip Patston, “Constructive Functional Diversity: A New Paradigm Beyond Disability
and Impairment”, Disability and Rehabilitation 29 (October–November 2007): 1625–33;
Meekosha and Shuttleworth, “What’s So ‘Critical’?”
8. The 20 percent (or one-in-five) number is fairly common; see, e.g., Sullivan, “Philosophy,
Ethics”, 81.
9. Data from the 2010 United States census were not available at the time of writing, but
for 2000 data, see “Disability Status: 2000”, Census 2000 Briefs and Special Reports Series,
[Link] and “Overview of Race and Hispanic Origin:
2000”, Census 2000 Briefs and Special Reports Series, [Link]
[Link] (accessed 18 June 2011).
10. Hahn, “Paternalism”, 37.
11. See, e.g., Kudlick, “Disability History”, 768; also Paul K. Longmore, “A Note on
Language and the Social Identity of Disabled People”, American Behavioral Scientist 28
(January/February 1986): 423.
12. Gill Rutherford, “‘I Wasn’t Trained to Teach Kids Like That’: Why Disability Studies
Needs to Become an Integral Part of Teacher Education”; Michael Gaffney, “Disabling
Participation or Participating in Disability? Notions of Student Engagement in School Life”;
and Denise Powell, “Identifying Deaf Students’ Learning and Participation Experiences Within

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12 RUSSELL L. JOHNSON

New Zealand Tertiary Institutions”.

13. Examples include: Martin Sullivan, “Doing Disability Studies in Aotearoa New
Zealand”; Hilary Stace, “Social Justice, the Social Model and Disability Policy in Aotearoa/
New Zealand”; and Chris Ford, “The New Zealand Disability Strategy—Living Up to
Expectations?”
14. Video footage of Cowan’s dance, titled Grotteschi, can be seen on YouTube: http://
[Link]/watch?v=AaSkzKnusI0 (accessed 20 June 2011).
15. Catherine J. Kudlick, “Disability and Survival: The Hidden Lives of Epidemics”,
unpublished manuscript, in author’s possession; a version of this talk is forthcoming in a
volume on the future of disability history edited by Susan Burch and Michael Rembis.
16. A version of Clarke’s symposium paper has since been published: Nic Clarke, “‘You
Will Not Be Going to This War’: The Rejected Volunteers of the First Contingent of the
Canadian Expeditionary Force”, First World War Studies 1 (October 2010): 161–83. For
disabled soldiers (post-service) in the historiography see, e.g., Disabled Veterans in History,
edited by David A. Gerber (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000)—a collection of
essays which geographically covers Europe and the United States and chronologically ranges
from ancient Greece to post–Cold War Russia; also Marina Larsson, Shattered Anzacs: Living
with the Scars of War (Sydney: New South Wales Press, 2009); and Beth Linker, War’s Waste:
Rehabilitation in World War I America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).
17. Joanna Welson, “Young Men with Intellectual Disabilities: The Perfect Soldiers? Project
100,000 and the Vietnam War”, unpublished manuscript, in author’s possession. In World War
I, the United States began administering intelligence tests to all prospective soldiers as a means
of assigning men to appropriate roles in the army and weeding out the unfit. See, e.g., Daniel
J. Kevles, “Testing the Army’s Intelligence: Psychologists and the Military in World War I”,
Journal of American History 55 (December 1968): 565–81.
18. Baynton’s most important publications include: Douglas C. Baynton, Forbidden Signs:
American Culture and the Campaign Against Sign Language (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1996); and Douglas C. Baynton, “Defectives in the Land: Disability and American
Immigration Policy, 1882–1924”, Journal of American Ethnic History 24 (Spring 2004): 31–
44.
19. For ‘able-ism’, see Linton, “Disability Studies/Not Disability Studies”, 533 [as
‘ableism’]. For more on language and disability see, e.g., Kudlick, “Disability History”,
765–66 [as ‘ablism’]; Longmore, “A Note on Language”, 419–23; Irving Kenneth Zola, “The
Language of Disability: Problems of Politics and Practice”, Australian Disability Review
(1988), online at The Disability History Museum, [Link]
htm (accessed 22 August 2011).
20. Douglas C. Baynton, “Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American
History”, in The New Disability History: American Perspectives, edited by Paul K. Longmore
and Lauri Umansky (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 52.

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