Just catalogued: Hall Carpenter Archive at LSE

Out of the Box, the blog for the London School of Economics Archives, announced recently that they've completed further cataloguing in the Hall Carpenter Archives, a collection of materials related to the history of gay activism in Britain. Among the items of ephemera they chose to highlight the holdings is this cover from the Winter 1983 issue of the Gay Men's Disabled Group newsletter:


Looks like they have eight consecutive issues of this newsletter, from 1982-1985, available at LSE Archives, if you're looking for a primary source to spur or enhance a disability history project. Community materials like this are often a goldmine, and also too often lost ("it's just a newsletter").

More Items from the Connecticut Historical Society Library

They've been cataloging cataloging cataloging at the Connecticut Historical Society Library lately, if their blog is any indication. Another recent addition relevant to disability history:

The Retreat for the Insane account book (Account Books/Ms 56441). "Opened in 1824, the Retreat is now Hartford Hospital’s Institute for Living. The account book lists patients from 1824 to 1853. Each patient’s entry contains their name, date of admission, date of discharge, residence, principal on bond, surety on bond, weekly rate for board and medical attendance and by whom payable (bondsman, state, or town), total board, total of other expenses, number of weeks and days spent at the Retreat, and remarks. Remarks included “discharged recovered”, “restored”, “much improved”, and “no improvement”. Additionally, some patients died while still admitted."

Remember, this is a newly cataloged item--so if you're looking for a 19c research project and you're in New England, maybe a visit to Hartford is in order.

Taking the Water Cure, Brattleboro VT, 1845

New materials just cataloged at the Connecticut Historical Society Library include a journal from a mother/daughter trip to "take the cure" in Vermont:

In 1845 Sarah Coit Day and her daughter Catherine traveled to the Brattleboro (Vermont) Water-Cure for treatment. Day kept a journal (Ms. 47047), writing about taking tepid baths, walking, the view of the Connecticut River, and other people who were also at the facility. Though not mentioned in the journal, the Brattleboro Water-Cure was attended by many well-to-do people, including Harriet Beecher Stowe and her sister, Catharine Beecher.

If you're in New England and looking for a small history project, this journal--an inside report from a treatment facility in the 1840s--might be worth a visit.

This is also in the same list of new catalog items at the same library:

...[T]he Boston and Albany Railroad Co. Surgeon’s record (Ms. 36423). This is a record of incidents occurring on railroad property. Each entry contained the name of the injured individual, their position with the company, what happened,and where they resided (if they survived). Injuries reported included fingers being crushed, ankles being twisted, and more gruesome occurrences, such as bowels being torn open.

Might be a very useful source on occupational injuries, and with names and addresses it might be linkable to other sources, and the start of a nice study.

Website: Hidden Lives of the Waifs and Strays

[Image description: a black-and-white photograph of ten smiling English girls in 1915, at least three of them (in front) seated in wheelchairs.]

A remarkable website has come to my attention (hat-tip to Jennifer Bazar). Hidden Lives Revealed is a "virtual archive" preserving the photographs, publications, stories, and sometimes extensive case files of British children in care, 1881-1918. The personal names of the subjects have been removed, but you can access transcripts of correspondence as well as facsimile images. And, because "disability" is one of the keywords in the index, you can find the stories (and there are many such) in which a child's or a parent's disability is a factor in their care arrangement.

Take, for example, J., whose file runs over fifty items. J was born in 1870, and the very first boy in the Society's care. A childhood fall and an accidental burn resulted in physical "deformities." The boy was working as a streetsweeper at age 10; a health inspector removed him from his "wretched and degraded" family and placed him in care. At age 12,

He is now able to run about but a year ago he was compelled to lie on his back & was considered by several doctors in a very precarious condition he is naturally a very good, quiet, little boy & where-ever he has been he was evidently a great favourite. He is decidedly ignorant & can read & write very little.

J. was featured in a Society publication in 1901, as a success story. At the time, the thirty-year-old was working at a printing firm, married, the father of a little girl. But the case file continues for years past this happy ending: there are letters from J himself, and poems he wrote for Society publications. There's a photograph of him c.1923, in a suit and mustache. In 1930, he writes to tell his contacts at the Society that his health has worsened (tuberculosis) and he can no longer do physical labor. There's a flurry of letters as the Society tries to find provisions for this "first boy," but J. died in February 1930.

A. was born in 1892, and orphaned before she was 10. She lived with an older sister who wasn't well-equipped to care for another child; and A. contracted tuberculosis that required a right leg amputation. She was admitted to the Lockett Home for Crippled Children, Southport, in the winter of 1901, in good health. Five years later, a report explains that she's using crutches, healthy and strong, but "her intellect is not very bright." The report concludes that she could earn a living doing ironing if she had a "false leg." "She might also do stocking knitting," opined the writer. Unlike J., we don't know the rest of A.'s story--we don't even know if she got that leg.

Students might quickly take from these case files that work and vocational training are a major concern of the Society--much of the paperwork involves finding placements for teenagers who will soon leave care and need to support themselves. Another issue is morality--standard forms will ask such questions as "Are you aware of her being addicted to any unchaste practice?" The legitimacy and baptismal status of a child is frequently recorded, and the alcoholism and sexual behavior of parents is also a constant theme. Tuberculosis and untreated infections and injuries may strike some students as remarkable common in these materials--an opening to discuss the ways medical care changed in the twentieth century, and how medical history intersects with disability history.

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.

Glenn Votes (or, access to the polls, 1940-style)

[Image description--a black-and-white news photo shows a man carrying another man across wooden planks leaving a building, with signs indicating that it's a polling location.]

This image is from Changing Times: Los Angeles in Photographs, 1920-1990, an online exhibit of Los Angeles Times photos, hosted by UCLA Libraries. I've drawn from this archive before, but this photo in contrast (or comparison) to so many photos from the polls this last week caught my attention anew. Glenn Switzer, the man being carried above, was a veteran disabled in World War I. To vote in Duarte, California, in 1940, he had to be carried by another man, Walter Howard. The ground looks muddy; those wooden planks are a makeshift sidewalk for pedestrian voters, but they're insufficient for Switzer's independent access, and they probably kept a lot of other folks from even trying to vote that November.

More disability history on Flickr

cp 1855
Originally uploaded by otisarchives1

[Image description: sepia-toned photo of an African-American man in uniform, seated, facing the camera, with one leg amputated; the leg on the viewer's left is exposed to show the healed surgical site. A set of crutches are leaning against the chair.]

This time, it's content from the Otis Historical Archives in Washington DC, which specializes in images from the history of public health and military medicine, but there are other themes too. Image above is of "Buffalo Soldier" CPL Edward Scott of the 10th US Cavalry, injured 3 May 1886 at the Battle of Pinito Pass, Mexico (sent to chase down Geronimo and his men). These images (about 600 of them) aren't part of the Flickr Commons project yet, but apparently that's in the works; meanwhile, you can still browse and add comments.

BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE: Battlefield Biker has more of Corporal Scott's story, including this quote from a letter written by his rescuer, Lieutenant Powhatan Clarke: "The wounded Corporal [Scott] has had to have his leg cut off, the ball that shattered it lodging in the other instep. This man rode seven miles without a groan, remarking to the Captin that he had seen forty men in one fight in a worse fix than he was. Such have I found the colored soldier."

Bain News Service Images now on Flickr

[Image description: 1910s photo labeled "Blind Athletes at Overbrook PA" showing a group of younger and older boys in gym clothes forming four-level human pyramids on a grassy field.]

I've mentioned the wondrous Bain Collection before here--it's a huge set of news photos from the 1910s, in the Library of Congress. There are a wide array of disability history images there, from General Dan Sickles to deaf schoolchildren dancing.

Well, the Bain Collection just got more interesting, because it's on Flickr as part of an experiment in public history--Flickr users are invited to add tags, comment, and otherwise interact with the over 1500 historical photos--some are already adding links for more information about the photos' various subjects. Go give it a whirl, browse around, leave a comment or add a tag. This is a chance to tell disability stories to a very wide audience indeed. (I've been adding biographical information on some of the images of women, myself.)

UPDATE 1/21: Ah well. I've looked through the whole collection now, and I'm pretty sure they didn't include any of the Dan Sickles images, nor the deaf school children dancing, nor the disabled veterans boxing, in the Flickr set... but there are still some images there that I've tagged "disability" (if someone else didn't get there first).

National Library of Medicine's historical image collection online

A message on H-Sci-Med-Tech pointed me to the National Library of Medicine's History of Medicine image collection online--wow. It's an amazing collection of images from all times and places. Many recent public service posters and program covers, but also much older stuff, like the lithograph I've included at left, titled "Souvenirs of War": it's captioned in French, and from the uniforms I'm assuming early 19c. The caption is in French, and repeats a refrain, "ah, quel plaisir d'etre un soldat!"

[Further image description: All four men visible are using different orthopedic supports--one man in the distance is walking with crutches; another closer to the viewer is also using two crutches, but has his leg hitched up; a third man, in the center of the frame, is using two simple "peg-leg" style lower-limb prosthetics, and a thin cane; the fourth man, on the right, is in a box-like chair with small wooden wheels; he may also have his head/neck wrapped (it's hard to tell).]

The Larrabee Fund?

From the blog of the Connecticut Historical Society Library:

When I was in graduate school the first time, I developed a course to study social movements of the 19th century, including abolitionism, womens’ rights, etc. There were a lot of women’s groups formed to help more unfortunate women. But today, I finished cataloging the treasurer’s records for a charitable fund created by a MAN. Charles Larrabee, in his will, established a fund to care for the “lame, deformed or maimed females” of Hartford. His property reportedly was worth several thousand dollars. His 1847 will bequeathed all of his real and personal estate to the Mayor, Aldermen and Selectmen of the town of Hartford, that the annual income may be appropriated for the relief and benefit for the needy. What his motivation was remains a mystery. I am sure the women whose names are listed in our recently acquired account book (1865-1973) were most appreciative, no matter what his motive.

Well, maybe or maybe not, on that last phrase (not everyone is "most appreciative" of being the target of a charity, eh?). But this might be a terrific source for someone looking for a disability history project to do, especially if you're already in New England and interested in women and 19c. philanthropy. The Larrabee Fund itself may have morphed into the Greater Hartford Larrabee Fund Association, which "serves older women in the Greater Hartford area." (Found a mention of it on this page.) I should add that the blog of the Connecticut Historical Society Library is a gem--what interesting collections come past that librarian's desk!

Long Road Home: Celebrating Olmstead in Georgia

Cindy Sue of Six Almost Seven has details about the celebration for the 8th anniversary of the Olmstead decision in Georgia--they're looking for participants and volunteers. If you can be in Atlanta on Friday June 22, check it out. As one component of the day's events, Endeavor Freedom will be filming stories for preservation in the Georgia Disability Rights Exhibit. That makes so much sense. If you already have activists and survivors gathered to rally and celebrate, it's a perfect opportunity to record the stories that would otherwise be lost.

A Mother's Day image

Changing Times: Los Angeles in Photographs 1920-1990 is a new online archive of digitized newspaper photographs, maintained by UCLA Library Special Collections. It's a rich and searchable collection. The following photo stood out for me, as a fine image to share on Mother's Day in the US:
According to the caption at the website, this is Magdalena Wodke, a member of the Totally Confident Disabled Drill Team, with her son on her lap, on a track at Northridge in 1984. It's an LA Times photo from August 1984. What was that team again? The Totally Confident Drill Team was part of Operation Confidence, an independent-living and vocational training project begun in 1980 at Widney High School in Los Angeles. The TC Drill Team performed at the Summer Olympics in 1984, which is when this photo was taken. I can't find more about Magdalena Wodke, or her son (who would be about 23 now).

Mara and Benoni Buck of Jamestown, Virginia

Who was first to say or do something? It's not as easy a question to answer as you'd think--historians tend to avoid declaring "the first" unless the situation is extremely clearcut. A simple enough question like (for example) "who was Canada's first woman doctor?" can have several possible answers, depending mainly on what you mean by Canadian and doctor. A few months ago, blogger Natalie Bennett pointed to an essay on Comment is Free by David McKie, exploring the hazards journalists face in trumpeting "the first." McKie even used the example of the "first" disabled Member of Parliament, which is a distinction claimed for several men, but without a single best answer. But, Blue has set "Firsts" as the theme for the next edition of the Disability Blog Carnival. So, cautiously, I'll share a first from US disability history. Probably a first. As far as I know....

Mara Buck (1611-c1655?) and Benoni Buck (1616-39) were the first people with presumed developmental/cognitive/learning disabilities to be described in English documents as being born in America. They were two of the children of Richard Buck (1582-1624), a preacher at the Jamestown colony in Virginia (celebrating the 400th anniversary of its founding this month). While still back in England, they say Richard Buck knew William Shakespeare. He was part of an infamous crossing of the Atlantic that was marooned on Bermuda for nine months. He performed the wedding between John Rolfe and Pocahontas. This was no obscure guy. Richard Buck died the same year as his wife, and left a large plantation and minor children, so there were inevitably legal battles within the estate--and it is in those records that we find Benoni described as an "idiot," and Mara as "very dull in taking her lerninge." Benoni Buck lived under the care of guardians, who apparently drew funds from Benoni's inheritance until he died at age 23. Mara Buck eventually married a Mr. Adkins, but her competence to enter into a marriage contract had earlier challenged in court after a suitor attempted to kidnap her from her guardians.

Note that this first record of developmental disability in America isn't a medical record, or an educational record--before cognitive disability was closely explored in those contexts, the legal assessment of incompetence was the most precise and socially consequential. Also note that it often takes a crisis--a crime, a death--to catch any mention of such lives as Benoni Buck's in the net of historical evidence.

Further Reading:
Seth Mallios, "Archaeological Excavations at 44JC568, The Reverend Richard Buck Site" (Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities 1999): online here.

R. Neugebauer, "Exploitation of the Insane in the New World: Benoni Buck, the First Reported Case of Mental Retardation in the American Colonies," Archives of General Psychiatry 44(5)(1987): 481-483. Abstract here.

Irene W. and Frederick Hecht, "Mara and Benomi [sic] Buck: Familial Mental Retardation in Colonial Jamestown," Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 28(2)(April 1973): 171-176.

Good news from Toledo

The Regional Disability Archive collection in the Ward M. Canaday Center is set to receive the Society of Ohio Archivists' Merit Award for 2007, in recognition of its work to collect, preserve, and make available records documenting disability in northwest Ohio. The award will be presented at the Midwest Archives Conference meeting on May 4, in Columbus. The Regional Disability Archive in Toledo includes the papers of Hugh Gallagher, among other very interesting records. (The photo at left shows a girl using crutches and a younger girl flanking Helen Keller, seated, in a black dress; from the Toledo Rotary Club Records, held at the Canaday Center.)

And, coming in the fall of 2008, the Canaday Center will collaborate with the Disability Studies program and the Public History Institute in the University of Toledo history department to mount an exhibit on the history of disability in northwest Ohio, with a nice grant from the university's Program for Academic Excellence. There's word that an online virtual exhibit will complement the in-person version, too, so we may all get a chance to visit this worthy project.

February 9: Laura Redden Searing (1839-1923)

Today is the birthday of American poet and journalist Laura Redden Searing, born on this date in 1839, in Maryland. She became deaf before adolescence, after a bout with meningitis. Laura Redden attended the Missouri School for the Deaf beginning in 1855. After school, she began publishing her poetry under the masculine pen-name "Howard Glyndon." She also worked for the St. Louis Republican, reporting from Washington DC during the Civil War, and from Europe in the later 1860s. She married a lawyer, and had a daughter, Elsa; the marriage didn't work out, and Laura moved to California with Elsa in 1886, when they attended a conference on deaf education and never returned East.

Laura Redden Searing was a proponent of the oral method of deaf education, although she herself never found lipreading a reliable means of following a conversation. Instead, she preferred the pen-and-paper mode, which means that her archived papers (in the Western Historical Manuscript Collection-Columbia) are unusually rich in records of everyday conversations, written on the back of envelopes and other scrap paper.

Want to read more about Searing? Your best bet is Judy Yaeger Jones and Jane E. Vallier, ed., Sweet Bells Jangled: Laura Redden Searing, A Deaf Poet Restored (Gallaudet University Press 2003, part of their Classics in Deaf Studies Series). Or check out the May 2005 essay and interview from Poetry Magazine about deaf poets.

Civil Rights online archive--where's disability rights?

There's a cool new website, The Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project, now fully operational, according to a recent announcement on the H-Net. I recently read Susan Schwartzenberg's Becoming Citizens (UW Press 2005), about the Seattle-area families that pushed for educational rights for disabled children in Washington State--a right they won, with a law that became a model for the IDEA. Great story, important story, it must be mentioned on a Seattle civil rights history project site, right?

Um... no.

Well, maybe there are.... no. Searching the words "disabled," "disability," and "disabilities" gives no hits; neither does "handicap" (always worth checking in historical archives), "blind," or "deaf," or "wheelchair" or "accessible" or "ramp".... do you get the idea? I know there have to be other disability rights stories in Seattle history--where are they? Then again, it's the city where an alternative weekly columnist recently forgot that disability rights are civil rights.

Here's a start: There are photos from a 20o4 ADAPT action in Seattle at Harvey Finkle's site; and also at the site for the Center for Disability Rights in Rochester (I found the above photo of Seattle ADAPT protesters at the latter site).

Veterans' History Project at the Library of Congress

In time for Veterans' Day Weekend, check out the Veterans' History Project at the American Folklife Center, Library of Congress. It's a wide-ranging effort to gather first-hand records--ephemera, interviews, images, etc.--from all US veterans and others (USO workers, flight instructors, medical volunteers), involved in any 20th-century conflict. They're seeking donations and they offer a Field Kit for anyone who wants to conduct an oral-history interview to add to the project's holdings.

What's already online is searchable, and full of disability history stories. For example: There's a transcribed interview with Robert Del Malak (b. 1946), a Vietnam-era veteran; he was in the Navy for a year when he began to experience vision loss from macular degeneration, and was discharged. George Baxter (b. 1930) lost a leg in Korea--his photo (shown at left) and audio of an interview with Baxter are on the site now. There's also a photo album and audio of an interview with Charles Amsler (b. 1913), a WWII medical corpsman who lost a leg to bone cancer in 1948. Wendy Wamsley Taines (b. 1971) describes her PTSD from service as a medic in the Persian Gulf War, in an audio interview at the site.

These are just collections with online content. There's much, much more in the project's archives. Go have a search around--it's incredibly varied content, and the collection is still growing.

Royal Albert Hospital Archive

[Thanks to Iain Hutchison for this tip, via H-Disability.]

The cocoa that they gave us they say is mighty fine
It’s good for cuts and bruises and tastes like iodine
So I don’t want no more of Royal Albert life
Gee ma I want to go home

--A verse from the "Cocoa Song," related by former resident Stanley Byers, right, in an interview in the 1980s

Unlocking the Past is a fine online archive of images, interviews, texts, and video from the Royal Albert Asylum, Lancaster, England, an institution established in 1870, originally as a training school for disabled children, and later becoming a custodial institution for adults with cognitive disabilities. It was closed in 1996. The archives include patient memories like the song above, images of the Royal Albert scouting groups, video, audio, and transcripts of interviews with former patients and staff, architectural descriptions and images, a timeline, an article archive, and so on. It's an ongoing project, inviting contributions from anyone with material to share. Have a look or a listen.

Willa Klug Baum, 1926-2006

The Berkeley Daily Planet website features an obituary today for Willa Klug Baum, who died recently at the age of 79, following back surgery. Baum was an oral historian, author of an important text on methodology, and a founding member of the Oral History Association. In her work as the longtime director of the Regional Oral History Office at the Bancroft Library, UC-Berkeley, she oversaw and supported many projects, including the collection of oral histories related to the disability rights and independent living movement: the Bancroft's invaluable and growing collection on this topic now contains more than a hundred interviews with the leaders and founders of the movement in the 1970s. Said Baum of her own leadership approach, "I give myself credit for knowing a good idea when I heard it and then working to make it happen." The DRILM collection was one incredibly good idea. RIP, Willa Baum.

The Bain Collection

What's the Bain Collection, you may wonder...well, thanks to the Magpie, I now know that it's about 1600 images from a collection of 42,000 glass negatives, mostly American news photos from the early 20th century. Why is this so cool? Well, click on over to the search page. Don't bother typing in "disability" or "disabled"--those words won't bring up anything. But typing in "blind" or "cripple" will bring up loads of photographs, many of them taken at schools and rehabilitation or vocational training programs. Among the more striking images, there are deaf girls dancing, blind veterans learning to play checkers, one-legged races (where at least one competitor chose to run in full business attire), amputees boxing (a very posed shot, since both men are smiling), and General Daniel Sickles in his wicker wheelchair, shown here at right.

Who was he? I was wondering the same thing. Daniel Sickles (1819-1914) was a Union general in the Civil War. Before the war, he was a lawyer in New York City, and a US Congressman; in 1859, while he was a member of Congress, he killed his wife's lover, but was acquitted of the crime, in what is remembered as "the first use of the insanity defense in US history." Though he had no military experience, he was a successful recruiter for the Union Army, and was made a general in 1861. At the Battle of Gettysburg, he lost his leg to a cannonball injury. He had his shattered legbone preserved and donated to the Army Medical Museum, where he is rumored to have visited it annually.

After the war, using a wheelchair (or crutches), Sickles served in various government posts, including another term in Congress (1893-95), and a stint as US Minister to Spain (1869-1873). Sickles lived to the age of 94. The massive funeral procession of Daniel Sickles is also captured in photographs at the Bain Collection.