Abstract
During the 1920s and 1930s, disabled polio survivors initiated a campaign which made them active, dissenting subjects in public discourse about disease and disability. Its source was a core of Warm Springs patients who wanted more than a healing refuge. They were well aware of the need to construct a new image of the disabled, and saw the resort's high public profile as a potent weapon in a cultural war to remake popular images of the disabled, whether as pathetic charitable objects or as horrific movie villains. Drawing on their own, disheartening experiences, this group of activists boldly critiqued the medical care offered most disabled patients as well as the training and attitudes of doctors, nurses and physical therapists. Protesting the narrow, medicalized definition of rehabilitation, they provocatively posed the need to "rehabilitate" prejudiced, able-bodied employers and health professionals. And most of all, they consciously designed the polio center at Warm Springs to function not as an inward-looking refuge but as an exemplar of the way polio survivors and other disabled people should be allowed to live, work and love. This story begins and ends in the 1930s. It traces a rise and fall: the rise of an activist community at the rehabilitative center at Warm Springs; and its decline with the creation of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (known popularly as the March of Dimes) in 1937.
Highlights
During the 1920s and 1930s, disabled polio survivors initiated a campaign which made them active, dissenting subjects in public discourse about disease and disability
Its source was a core of Warm Springs patients who wanted more than a healing refuge
The National Patient Committee’s first president was John Ruhrah, a wellknown pediatrician who had been traveling in Europe when he was paralyzed by polio and arrived in Warm Springs in April 1931
Summary
The 1931 polio epidemic, which occurred while Roosevelt was governor of New York, was the nation’s worst since 1916, and spurred the transformation of Warm Springs from social refuge to political base.[32]. (July 1931), Announcing the New National Patients Committee, Polio Chronicle. (August 1931), National Patients’ Committee of the George Warm Springs Foundation, Polio Chronicle. Families could buy an electric stair chair and diverse kinds of wheelchairs.[55] Beyond these individualist techniques, the National Patients Committee began to promote what it called the «Lovewell Plan,» a campaign to make public buildings more accessible to the disabled. The Committee proposed a National Roll of Honor to recognize those public buildings which met a minimum requirement: handrails on both sides of one or more public entrances where steps occurred, and a ramp entrance somewhere around the building.[56] The elements of this campaign were first articulated in a series of articles by Warm Springs patient Reinette Lovewell Donnelly, a journalist already published in McCall’s and other family magazines. To make what seemed like a special interest demand into a public right, these Polio Crusaders set out to develop a public persona that moved away from pathetic supplication toward feisty, hedonist demands for an emotional and independent life
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