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Article ID: CBB000931890

Polio Chronicles: Warm Springs and Disability Politics in the 1930s (2009)

Asclepio: Archivo Iberoamericano de Historia de la Medicina
Volume: 61, no. 1
Issue: 1
Pages: 143-174
Publication date: 2009
Language: English

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Public health Rehabilitation Poliomyelitis Balneology Disabilities; disability; accessibility Public understanding of medicine 20th century, early Georgia (U.S.) United States

During the 1920s and 1930s, disabled, polio survirvors 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, the consciously designed the polio center at Warm Springs to function not as an inward-looking refuge but as an exemplar of the way polio survirvors 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. PALABRAS CLAVE: Polio. Warm Springs. Rehabilitation.

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