Reconstructing Lives (Edinburgh, until February 2013)

Current exhibit at Edinburgh Castle: 

Reconstructing Lives

National War Museum
Fri 9 March 2012 - February 2013
Free with admission to Edinburgh Castle

From the official description:
"Reconstructing Lives takes a fascinating and moving look at the experiences of those who have lost limbs in war, whether military or civilian, and the technology which helps rebuild their lives....On display you'll find prosthetics, ranging from a 16th century iron hand to  a modern i-limb hand developed by Touch Bionics."

Here's a report with photos, by someone who visited the exhibit.  And here are blog entries about the exhibit, by museum staffers.

Disability Blog Carnival #69 is up NOW!

And has been up for a while--but I was away from the internet on a family vacation and couldn't post about it until now. Thanks to Kali at Brilliant Mind, Broken Body, who has gathered a nice collection of links around the theme of "distance." Go have a read, link away, and leave a comment too.

Next month's edition will be hosted by Astrid at Astrid's Journal, who writes to me that the "theme will be identity, and the deadline for submissions will be Sept 21." Watch for that carnival on Sept 24. And submit a great link! A community of contributors makes the hosting job more enjoyable.

Vacation pictures? Sure! An accessible self-catering lodge in rural Scotland, ours for a few days of a family trip--worked for us, anyway:


[Visual description: exterior of a stone one-story building with a long ramp to the door; a picnic table and a patch of green grass are nearby.]

May 10: John Louis Clarke (1881-1970)

John Clark Carving Bear (LOC)
Originally uploaded by The Library of Congress

Born on this date in 1881, woodcarver John Louis Clarke, aka "Cutapuis." He was born in Highwood, Montana Territory, to Blackfoot parents (one of his grandparents was Scottish). The family was devastated in 1883, when five sons died from scarlet fever; the sixth son, John, age 2, survived with deafness; he did not learn to speak after that. He attended schools for Indian and deaf children in North Dakota, Montana, and Wisconsin. In Wisconsin, he began working at a factory that made carved church altars. He opened his own carving studio in 1913, and had his first show in Helena in 1916.

Clarke's highly detailed carvings of animals were exhibited widely and popular with buyers. Clarke's wife Mamie acted as his agent until she died in 1947, when their daughter Joyce took over that role so Clarke could concentrate on his carving. The story goes that he had his carving tools with him in the hospital room when he died at 89.

January 5: Thomas Pringle (1789-1834)

[Image description: engraved head-and-shoulders portrait of Thomas Pringle as a young man, balding, with long sideburns and a high-collared white shirt, head resting on one hand.]

Scottish poet, editor, and abolitionist Thomas Pringle was born on this date in 1789, on a farm in Blaiklaw, Roxburghshire. As a baby, his hip became dislocated, and the dislocation went untreated; Pringle used crutches throughout his life thereafter. From his memoirs:

"My early reminiscences reach back to a period when I must have been about three years old, or little more. I remember of being carried to Kelso when about that age, and being tormented by doctors examining my limb, and making me wear a red morocco boot, with steel bandages to keep it in some prescribed position. These appliances were of no advantage, and were, ere long, superseded by a pair of crutches. The latter I soon learned to use with such ease and adroitness that, during my boyhood and youth (when I generally enjoyed robust health), I felt but little incommoded by my lameness."

Pringle's later adventures included a six-year stint as a librarian in South Africa, where he was an early publisher of English-language news and literary publications. His work in publishing and abolition led to his role as the recorder of Mary Prince's narrative, which was published in 1831. Pringle died three years later, from pneumonia, age 49.

New Image Database from the NLM

[Image description: Stylized portrait of a man, standing at a podium, wearing a powdered wig, ruffled white shirt, and dark glasses.]

The National Library of Medicine has significantly changed their website titled Images from the History of Medicine-- and the over 60,000 images (portraits, photographs, drawings, caricatures, posters, etc.) include a lot of images of interest to historians of disability. In a quick riffle, I found 1838 drawings of "idiots" in Paris, 1791 diagrams for slings and prosthetic devices, and of ear trumpets, and the lovely 1796 portrait at left, of Dr. Henry Moyes (c1750-1807), a noted Scottish chemistry lecturer who was blind after surviving smallpox as a small child. There are many more recent (1970s and later) photographs and posters and pamphlet covers and such as well.

November 9: Walter Geikie (1795-1837)

[visual description: a memorial plaque that reads:

Walter Geikie RSA 1795-1837
Deaf Artist of Renown Co-Founder of the World's First Deaf Church and Society
Beloved of all in this Parish and City
Installed by his fellow deaf Scots of the Donaldsonian Association 6th April 1996
His true memorial may be seen in our city art galleries and in the quality of life and dignity accorded to deaf citizens of Edinburgh today
'Come join wi' me, folk of Auld Reekie
To weave a wreath for glorious Geikie'

engraved in gold lettering on dark stone]

Scottish painter Walter Geikie was born 9 November 1795, in Edinburgh. When he was two years old, he survived a serious illness with total deafness; because of his early age at the time, he didn't develop spoken language, either. Geikie's father, a wigmaker, believed the boy could learn, and taught Walter to read and do basic math. At 15, Walter was admitted to the new Institute for the Education of the Deaf and Dumb in Edinburgh, but soon his skills prompted a transfer to the Trustees' Academy of Industrial Design.

Geikie studied drawing at the Academy, and became a successful artist, specializing in scenes of urban life. He exhibited paintings in Edinburgh to critical acclaim. He also published two volumes of etchings. Walter Geikie was voted into the Scottish Academy of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture as a academician in 1834.

Geikie is also remembered, as the memorial plaque above indicates, for co-founding the first deaf church in Scotland (or maybe anywhere), where scriptures were discussed and sermons delivered in sign language, by and for deaf believers. (An offshoot of the church, the Edinburgh and East of Scotland Society for the Deaf, still exists.)

Geikie died suddenly from typhoid fever at the age of 41. A posthumous collection of his works, titled "Etchings Illustrative of Scottish Character and Scenery," was popular and helped keep his name before Scottish audiences through the mid-nineteenth century.

For further reading:

Elizabeth Bredberg, "Walter Geikie: The Life Schooling and Work of a Deaf Artist at the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century," Disability & Society 10(1)(1995): 21-39.

Archibald Geikie, "Brief Sketch of the Life of Walter Geikie, Esq., R. A. S., Edinburgh, Scotland," American Annals of the Deaf and Dumb 7(4)(July 1855): 229-237.

Harry G. Lang and Bonnie Meath-Lang, Deaf Persons in the Arts and Sciences: A Biographical Dictionary (Greenwood Publishing 1995): 141-143.

October 1: Margaret Blackwood McGrath (1924-1994)

[Visual description: Margaret Blackwood, seated at a desk, in a blue checked vest and white blouse, in front of a shelf of books.]

"I spoke to more MPs. I shouted at them at their election meetings. 'You haven’t mentioned the disabled! Are we a dirty word?' I broadcast on the radio and on TV. I wrote to every newspaper I’d heard of. The time was ripe. Hundreds of people were getting in touch with me. When at school, I had been so timid I used to tremble when I read at prayers and begged to be excused. Now there was no stopping me. I was passionate."

The founder of Scotland's Disablement Income Group (DIG-Scotland), Margaret Blackwood was born on this date in 1924, in Dundee. She was diagnosed with muscular dystrophy in her early teens, with discouraging prospects. She finished school in 1943, but found few job opportunities. "I sank into despair," she recalled.

When she was in her early 40s, she learned about the DIG founded by and for disabled people in Surrey in 1965. Soon Blackwood began a similar effort in Scotland, and, as she describes in the quote above, became a "warrior in a wheelchair." In 1978 she married fellow disability rights activist Charles McGrath, while he was in an intensive care unit. Charles died two weeks later.

Today, the Margaret Blackwood Housing Association, based in Dundee and named in her honor, manages accessible and affordable housing for disabled tenants all over Scotland.

[Thanks again to Iain Hutchison for giving me the delicious Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Women, where I first learned of Margaret Blackwood McGrath.]

Back from the Disability History Conference

Spent last week on a combination family vacation and conference trip, to the Disability History Conference at SFSU. It was a good conference, small, no book display or anything, just two sessions running concurrently, probably 50-100 people? (I'm bad at guessing such numbers.) I was on two panels, one for the forthcoming Encyclopedia of American Disability History (Facts on File 2009), and one for my project about Marion Brown (1843-1915), with Iain Hutchison (more on that here). Iain brought me a wonderful gift: The Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Women (Edinburgh University Press 2007). It has an entry on Marion Brown in it (written by Iain), but it has loads of other great stories, and if you're a longtime reader of DS,TU, you know I'm already scanning it for post subjects. Better than popcorn.

One example, for starters: Christian Gray (1772-c1830) was a farmers' daughter from near Perth, who became blind when she survived smallpox as a little child. She was read to, daily, for her education; in time, she began composing poetry, and her first volume of poems was published in 1808. She pointed to Milton and Ossian as her predecessors, and wrote poems about being blind (I can't find any of those verses online yet, though).

October 26: Sarah Broom Macnaughtan (1864-1916)

I am rather surprised to find how little the quite young girls seem to mind the sight of wounds and suffering. They are bright and witty about amputations, and do not shudder at anything. I am feeling rather out-of-date amongst them. (38-39)

Scottish novelist Sarah Broom Macnaughtan, born in Lanarkshire this date in 1864, worked as a volunteer nurse during wars in the Balkans, South Africa, and Belgium. Her diaries of her war work were published posthumously as My War Experiences in Two Continents (1919), available online, full-text, open-access at Project Gutenberg. More eye-witness passages:

Now I have got to work at the hospital. There are 25,000 amputation cases in Petrograd. The men at my hospital are mostly convalescent, but, of course, their wounds require dressing. This is never done in their beds, as the English plan is, but each man is carried in turn to the "salle des pansements," and is laid on an operating-table and has his fresh dressings put on, and is then carried back to bed again. It is a good plan, I think. The hospital keeps me busy all the morning. Once more I begin to see severed limbs and gashed flesh, and the old question arises, "Why, what evil hath he done?" This war is the crucifixion of the youth of the world. (198-199)

I heard a voice behind me say, "The blind are coming first," and from the train there came groping one by one young men with their eyes shot out. They felt for the step of the train, and waited bewildered till someone came to lead them; then, with their sightless eyes looking upwards more than ours do, they moved stumbling along. Poor fellows, they'll never see home; but they turned with smiles of delight when the band, in its grey uniforms and fur caps, began to play the National Anthem. These were the first wounded prisoners from Germany, sent home because they could never fight again—quite useless men, too sorely hurt to stand once more under raining bullets and hurtling shell-fire—so back they came, and like dazed creatures they got out of the train, carrying their little bundles, limping, groping, but home. After the blind came those who had lost limbs—one-legged men, men still in bandages, men hobbling with sticks or with an arm round a comrade's neck, and then the stretcher cases. There was one man carrying his crutches like a cross. Others lay twisted sideways. Some never moved their heads from their pillows. All seemed to me to have about them a splendid dignity which made the long, battered, suffering company into some great pageant. (201-202)

[Image, above: a WWI-era American Red Cross poster from the Minnesota Historical Society's Visual Resources Database.]

September 1: Violet Kennedy-Erskine Jacob (1863-1946)

September 1 was the birthday of Scottish writer Violet Kennedy-Erskine Jacob (pictured at left), who wrote historical novels, children's literature, poetry, a history of her family's estates, and letters from India. She illustrated her diaries with her own watercolors. Her imaginative writings often involve heavy but authentic use of the Scots dialect. Here's an example, about a disabled WWI veteran and the changed dynamics observed in his marriage after his return from war:

KIRSTY'S OPEENION

FINE div I ken what ails yon puddock, Janet,
That aince wad hae her neb set up sae hie;
There's them that disna seem to understaun it,
I'se warrant ye it's plain eneuch to me!

Mibbie ye'll mind her man-a fine wee cratur,
Ower blate to speak (puir thing, he didna daur);
What garred him fecht was jist his douce-like natur;
Gairmans is bad, but Janet's tongue was waur.

But noo he's hame again, ye wadna ken her,
He isna feared to contradick her flet;
He smokes a' day, comes late to get his denner,
(I mind the time she'd sort him weel for that!)

What's garred her turn an tak a road divairgint?
Ye think she's wae because he wants a limb?
Ach! haud yer tongue, ye fuil-the man's a sair-gint,
An there's nae argy-bargyin wi him!

[In sum, a neighbor, Kirsty, says that Janet used to be snobby and domineering to her husband, but since he's come home from war she's sweeter to him, and he smokes and comes in late, without suffering her wrath. Kirsty says it's nothing to do with his missing limb; Janet's husband is just less afraid of her, after his military experience.]

Giants in Edinburgh

The GIANTS exhibit was originally organized in 2003 by the Disability Rights Commission, supported by the Mayor of London, and produced by Shape, an arts charity. It features photos by David Hevey (director of the 1996 documentary Freak Out), designed by Helena Roden. The exhibit features three sections--Unseen, Being Seen, and Being--to chart the move from institutions to activism to community life.

It'll be in Scotland this month: at the North Edinburgh Arts Centre (8 August-19 August), at the Whale Arts Agency (22 August-26 August); at Craigmillar Community Arts (29 August - 1 September); and Scotland Yard (5 September -9 September).

June 3: Robert Tannahill (1774-1810)

Scottish poet Robert Tannahill was born on June 3, 1774. He was known to be sensitive most of his life, with a melancholy that would now probably be labeled depression. Here's how David Semple described Tannahill's state of mind in an 1875 edition of his works:

The Poet, it will be observed from our preceding remarks, was sinking under constitutional disease, and the symptoms of aberration of mind were developing. His mental strength had been overworked, and his mind, like a musical chord brought to its fullest tension, was ready to snap. His fine feelings were overcome by unjust criticism, and the sensibility of his nature overwhelmed with captious remarks. Both diseases were rapidly increasing, and his reason hung like the beam trembling in the balance. His relations observed the progress of the physical disease, but they were loth to believe he was suffering from a disorder the most calamitous that can afflict the human race.

The "constitutional disease" mentioned here was tuberculosis, which had already taken the lives of his father, his sister, and three of his brothers. Just before he turned 36, Tannahill slipped from his family's house in the night, and drowned himself in the Paisley Canal. Few of his unpublished poems survive--he burned the manuscripts shortly before his death, after a publisher rejected his work. The Complete Tannahill is an online archive of his verse.

The Voices

While clicking around the excellent The Voices Recordings map at the BBC site, I lucked onto the dot over Edinburgh. Each dot on the map leads to a page of sound files of people conversing in that place--so you hear Scots women in Ayrshire talking about shoes, or a family of Kentish fishermen talking about the weather, that kind of thing. They're usually talking about language, whether it's quirks of local vocabulary or accents or the power of certain epithets. Anyway, the Edinburgh dot brings you to a page with five sound files of three actors with cerebral palsy, discussing disability terminology and disability culture. James McSharry, Robyn Hunt, and Malawi Logan are the wonderfully candid, articulate, and frank participants--if you get a chance, have a listen. On childhood taunts, for example, McSharry says, "Somewhere along the line, that language creates a stereotype that it's ok to throw a stone at me."