Radio interview with Burch & Joyner

Disability history on your iPod--it's a click, drag, and drop away. North Carolina Public Radio aired a nice long half-hour interview today with Susan Burch and Hannah Joyner, authors of Unspeakable: A Life Story of Junius Wilson (UNC Press 2007). It's online here.

MacArthur Fellows 2007: Disability researchers in the mix

One of this year's newly announced batch of MacArthur Fellows is Yoky Matsuoka (b. 1971) an engineer at the University of Washington-Seattle. Matsuoka designs very high-tech anatomical models, including an intricate robotic hand, exoskeletal appliances to improve fine-motor use, and another project that uses wearable haptic devices in post-stroke therapies.

Another, Jonathan Shay (b. 1941, portrait at left), is a Boston-based psychiatrist and classicist who takes humanistic approaches to psychological injury in Vietnam (and now Gulf, Afghanistan, and Iraq) War veterans. His book titles may give a good flavor of his work: Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character (1994) and Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming (2002). Shay is himself a stroke survivor who has experienced post-stroke paralysis.

September 21: HG Wells (1866-1946)

Born on this date, English writer H. G. Wells. Wells had chronic lung and kidney troubles following a sports injury in his early twenties; he was also a co-founder of the British Diabetic Association (since renamed Diabetes UK) in 1934. His novels, particularly The Island of Doctor Moreau and The Time Machine and The Invisible Man, have fairly obvious references to eugenics and evolution, normality, science, the senses, the mind, and non-standard bodies. But his short fiction is also full of these themes. So go read his classic short story, "The Country of the Blind" (1904). Or "The Remarkable Case of Davidson's Eyes" (1895) or "Under the Knife" (1896) or .... well, three's plenty for starters.

September 3: Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909)

American writer Sarah Orne Jewett was born on this date in 1849, in South Berwick, Maine. She had rheumatoid arthritis from childhood, which must have been especially difficult living in northern New England long before central heating. Brrrr.

But her family (including her father and grandfather, both doctors) encouraged an active and independent childhood when possible:

...the Jewetts took a philosophical view of Sarah's illness, neither denying nor belittling it nor allowing to tyrannize over her life. They were sympathetic, but there was always the expectation that as soon as the pain subsided there were duties and diversions waiting, most of them outdoors. Her father believed that exercise was as important as rest in keeping the disease at bay, and she became amazingly active and sturdy, considering her handicap. A strong cross-country walker, she liked best to strike out across the fields, taking a book along, hunting out rare flowers and herbs and visiting favorite trees as if they were old friends. She was an expert horsewoman and rower, and she enjoyed skating, swimming, and coasting.

(from Paula Blanchard, Sarah Orne Jewett: Her World and Her Work [DaCapo Press 2002]: p. 31)

August 28: Janet Frame (1924-2004)

'For your own good' is a persuasive argument
that will eventually make a man agree
to his own destruction.

--Janet Frame

New Zealand poet, novelist, and memoirist Janet Frame was born 28 August 1924, in Dunedin. She spent much of her twenties in mental hospitals, beginning with a voluntary commitment in 1947, ending with her final release in 1954. (A diagnosis of schizophrenia was made, but was later rejected by a panel of psychiatrists in London.) She underwent hundreds of electric shock treatments --"each the equivalent, in degree of fear, to an execution," she said -- during her hospitalizations. Her mother had signed the paperwork for a lobotomy, but the surgery was canceled after Frame's 1951 book, The Lagoon and Other Stories, won a national award. She wrote a novel based on her family and her hospitalizations, Owls Do Cry, published in 1957. Another novel by Frame, Faces in the Water (1961), features a heroine who is institutionalized and almost lobotomized. Her novel Scented Gardens for the Blind (1980) has as its main character a girl who never speaks.

Some cites on Frame and disability, to mark her birthday (plenty more cites here):

Simone Oettli-van Delden, Surfaces of Strangeness: Janet Frame and the Rhetoric of Madness (Victoria University Press 2003).

Ana Maria Sanchez Mosquera, "Un/writing the Body: Janet Frame's An Angel at my Table," Commonwealth Novel in English 9-10(Spring-Fall 2000-2001): 218-241.

C. MacLellan, "Conformity and Deviance in the Fiction of Janet Frame," Journal of New Zealand Literature 6(1988): 190-201.

Susan Schwartz, "Dancing in the Asylum: The Uncanny Truth of the Madwoman in Janet Frame's Autobiographical Fiction," Ariel 27(4)(October 1996): 113-127.

Tanya Blowers, "Madness, Philosophy, and Literature: A Reading of Janet Frame's Faces in the Water," Journal of New Zealand Literature 14(1996): 74-89.

Venla Oikkonen, "Mad Embodiments: Female Corporeality and Insanity in Janet Frame's Faces in the Water and Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar," Helsinki English Studies 3(2004): online here.

CFP: Disability History: Theory and Practice

[Straight from H-Disability; links added by me]

Disability History: Theory and Practice

San Francisco State University's Institute on Disability, the Disability History Association, and the Disability History Group of the United Kingdom invite submissions for papers to be given at a conference at San Francisco State University, 31 July-3 August 2008.

During the past two decades, research, teaching, and scholarly publication on the history of disability as a social, cultural, and political phenomenon has drawn increasing attention. The goal of this conference is to assess the state of the field. It will examine the theory and practice of disability history. And it will explore theoretical and substantive, methodological and practical strategies to promote the continued development and intellectual coherence of this field.

We invite proposals for papers on any aspect or stream of disability history. For example:

· Cultural representations.

· The histories of blind people; people with cognitive/developmental disabilities; deaf and hard-of-hearing people; people with physical or emotional disabilities.

· Any historical era.

· Any culture, society, or geographical locale.

· Ideologies and the history of ideas.

· Institutions, professions, and programs that historically have affected people with disabilities.

· Public laws and policies: civil/human rights, eugenic, rehabilitative, international.

· Social and political movements.

While this call is open-ended as to subject matter, we seek in particular historical case studies that can open up discussion of broader issues. We invite papers that use presenters' current research to consider how they approach the history of disability. What theoretical concepts inform their interpretations? What analytical and methodological tools have they found most useful? How does their work benefit from or contribute to other fields of historical inquiry, such as social history, political history, the histories of class, economic systems, gender, race, religion, sexual orientation, and so forth. If the work focuses on a specific stream of disability history, such as the history of blind people or the history of public policies regarding disabled veterans, what are its connections to and implications for other streams of disability history? How does their work draw upon the more general field of disability studies and what are its implications for disability studies?

Commentors will be asked to address these sorts of questions and to facilitate discussion of them in both breakout and plenary sessions.

We welcome proposals from scholars of every rank and status from academically based senior faculty to graduate students, as well as public historians, archivists, and other scholars.

Proposals for papers should include a title and be no longer than 300 words. Depending on the number of papers accepted, presenters will have 15-20 minutes. A curriculum vitae of no more than three US letter-sized pages must accompany the proposal.

Proposals may be submitted electronically via e-mail or fax or sent in hard copy through the postal system. Mailed proposals must include five copies of both the paper proposal and the curriculum vitae. We encourage electronic submissions to expedite decision-making and planning for both the conference organizers and would-be presenters.

The deadline for proposals submitted electronically via e-mail or fax is November 1, 2007. Proposers will be notified by December 1, 2007. Please send proposals electronically to:

Paul K. Longmore
Professor of History and
Director, Institute on Disability
San Francisco State University
longmore@sfsu.edu or
fax: 415-338-7539

San Francisco State offers a range of lodging plans that will accommodate both individuals and families. Some of them are economical and affordable for graduate students.

If you have questions, please e-mail Professor Longmore at longmore@sfsu.edu.

Ten Disabled Characters

For the next edition of the Disability Blog Carnival, host David has requested "top ten lists." I haven't slept for a few days (postoperative ornery kid), so forget careful selecting and ranking, and research is also, sadly, on hold. But I've got my bookshelves... so here are ten disabled characters in recentish novels on my fiction shelves (mostly). In no particular order:

1. Julia McNicholl Hansen in Vikram Seth's An Equal Music (Vintage International 1999) is a chamber musician, a pianist, with adult-onset, progressive hearing loss. By the time we meet her, she's taken lipreading classes and adjusted her performance habits to accommodate the difference; but she hasn't yet told any of her colleagues, afraid for what their reaction will be. So far, she's been able to rely on her experience of the non-audible ways musical quartets interact. The novel's narrator, her old lover and colleague Michael, is thunderstruck when he learns of Julia's impairment. He says "I would have expected more protest, more despair, more rage," and protests "You're taking it too lightly." To which Julia replies, "Well, Michael, it's for me to take. You would have managed somehow if this had happened to you. You might not think so, but you would have." (168-169)

2. Dick Musch in Molly Gloss's Wild Life (First Mariner Books 2001) is a very minor character--he has just one scene--but the history he reflects is important, and under-researched. The narrator, Charlotte, encounters Dick, "a boy with a wooden leg," living in a logging camp in the Pacific Northwest, around 1900:

I leant back and rested my elbows on the bench beside him and commented upon his wooden leg in a mild and roundabout way. 'I believe I've seen half a dozen crippled men in coming four blocks through town,' I said, which didn't seem to offend or surprise him.

'Donkey boilers blow up,' he said easily. 'People fall from flumes, band saws break, a tree walks, a leg gets caught in the bight of the donkey cable. I guess there is about a hundred ways to get killed or hurt in the woods and the mills.' (p. 85)

3. Francis-Xavier Martin in John Bailey's The Lost German Slave Girl (Grove Press 2003) was a real person--because this isn't a novel, but a narrative history of an unusual legal case in antebellum Louisiana. Martin (1762-1846) was an eminent jurist and historian. He presided over the Louisiana Supreme Court for many years, at least a decade of them after becoming blind in his seventies. "Most men would have seen this as a reason for retiring, but not so Martin. When he was no longer capable of writing opinions, he dictated them to an amanuensis; or when none was available, he placed guides at the edge of each page so that he would know when to move his hand down to commence writing a fresh line." (p. 200) If a novelist created a blind judge to hear an appeal about whether or not a slave woman was really white, that would seem too perfect... but sometimes history works like that.

4. Alice Beazley in Jennifer Vanderbes's Easter Island (Bantam Dell 2003) is the sister of Elsa, a main character in this historical novel, but her developmental disability is central to the plot, so she's no side character--we learn much of her interests, and skills, and feelings. Elsa apologizes for Alice a lot, and worries that Alice is a burden on a 1910s research expedition to Easter Island; Elsa's husband insists that Alice is no burden, for reasons of his own. In an early scene, Elsa remembers being scolded by her unusually enlightened father decades earlier, when there was talk of sending the young Alice to an asylum:

'Understand this,' he said. 'Alice does not need to be fixed. She needs to be cared for. And you will not now or ever refer to any of Alice's behavior as a problem or defect. Do I need to repeat myself?' (p. 40)

5. Auro in Nicholas Christopher's A Trip to the Stars (Simon & Schuster 2000) is first introduced as a nervous boy with echolalia--he cannot easily initiate his own words and sentences, but can speak back the words that others say. This echoing makes conversations frustrating, but in music his ability to repeat what he hears is useful, so he sticks to the drums, and becomes a successful jazz drummer by book's end. (By young adulthood, Auro has also begun carrying a notepad for smoother communication.) Auro's cousin describes him, "though his speech disability made it sound as if he had a constricted thought process, that was anything but the case." (p. 143)

6. Zaren Eboli, also in Nicholas Christopher's A Trip to the Stars (Simon & Schuster 2000), is Auro's mentor and bandmate, a jazz pianist with eight fingers (no pinkies), who's also an expert on spiders (eight fingers, eight legs, see?). A particular kind of spider bite that creates longterm neurological effects (hypersensitive hearing and heightened memory, for example) is part of the novel's complicated plot. There's also a Vegas billiards champion in the book, who has a hydraulic billiards table that adjusts to his wheelchair's height. So this book is full of disability themes.

7. Frederick Law Olmsted in Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City (Vintage 2003) is also a real person, and this is another narrative history rather than a novel. Larson tells of renowned landscape architect Olmsted's involvement with the 1893 Chicago Columbian Exposition, but also of his dementia, which became apparent soon after the fair: "It has today, for the first time, become evident to me that my memory for recent occurrences is no longer to be trusted," he wrote to his son in May 1895. He said "anything but that" to the idea of being institutionalized, but in the end he was, anyway--at the McLean Asylum in Massachusetts, the grounds of which Olmsted himself had designed. (p. 379)

8. Crake (Glenn) in Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake (Doubleday 2003) is the villain of the piece--he wipes out the whole human race, more or less, with a virus he's personally engineered and distributed. He's also a character who identifies as having Asperger's--in fact one of the chapters is titled "Asperger's U.," and concerns the main character's visit to Crake at school, which Atwood describes using the usual stereotypes:

Watson-Crick was known to the students there as Asperger's U. because of the high percentage of brilliant weirdos that strolled and hopped and lurched through its corridors. Demi-autistic, genetically speaking; single-track tunnel-vision minds, a marked degree of social ineptitude--these were not your sharp dressers--and luckily for everyone there, a high tolerance for mildly deviant public behaviour. (193-194)

Hmm, David, why top TEN, anyway? Okay, okay, more:

9. Grace Dietrich in "Two Rivers," a novella in Andrea Barrett's Servants of the Map (WW Norton & Co., 2002) first appears in the story as a deaf child living near the Ohio River in the 1820s, who uses her own gestural language or home sign, familiar to her family. "Grace lost her hearing when she was two," her sister Miriam explains to a visitor, "Most of our signs she invented, though we also use some she's picked up from her friends." (p. 148) With her sister and brother-in-law, Grace helps start an Academy for the Deaf in Ohio; the Dietrich sisters are also part of the brother-in-law's expeditions for fossils, with Grace drawing the detailed maps of their excavation sites.

10. Henry Day in Keith Donohue's The Stolen Child (Anchor Books 2006) is a hobgoblin who has taken over the life of a human boy in mid-20th-century America. Okay, being a hobgoblin is not exactly a disability under the ADA, but the "changeling myth" is an enduring story in disability studies (but see Goodey and Stainton 2001* on whether or not this story has firm historical basis). As a hobgoblin, Henry can imitate human form, but it's a constant effort; and likewise, he has to fake the memories and personality of the boy he's replaced. So there are commonalities with the experience of hidden disability and passing in Henry's story.

(*CF Goodey and Tim Stainton, "Intellectual Disability and the Myth of the Changeling Myth," Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 37(3)(July 2001): 233-240.)

Two final notes: (1) Inclusion in this list does not constitute an endorsement of the book or the characterization in question--in fact some of them are pretty problematic--but I figure it's still worth knowing they're out there; and (2) The reason these are mostly from 1999-2003 is that I buy a lot of my books secondhand.

August 15: John Metcalf, aka "Blind Jack" (1717-1810)

Colorful, long-lived Englishman and civil engineer John Metcalf was born on this date in 1717, in Knaresborough, north of Leeds. When he was six, young John survived smallpox, but lost his sight to the disease. His family, thinking he'd have limited career choices, arranged for him to be taught the fiddle, and he learned to play well. He also knew a lot about horses, cards, and hunting, and was a good swimmer and diver. He married and was the father of four. He was briefly in the army in 1745 (not in combat, but moving guns and assisting a recruiting sergeant).

As a young man, he walked to London ahead of his travel companion, and in his twenties he carted fish and other goods from the coast to Leeds and Manchester, or between York and Knaresborough. His business became a stagecoach line, and he drove the coach himself. So he knew the roads very well when, in 1765, he won the contract to build three miles of new road between Minskip and Feamsby. He would, eventually, build about 180 miles of roads, noted for their good drainage and foundations.

Metcalf retired in 1792, but in 1794 he walked from Spofforth to York to dictate his life's story to a publisher. He died in 1810, at the age of 92.

[Image above: a drawing of Metcalf, made late in his life by J. R. Smith, 1801; for use in the published editions of Metcalf's autobiography. He's shown as a robust figure, holding a cane and wearing a hat and coat, with white hair curling down over his ears and collar]

August 11: Andre Dubus (1936-1999)

American writer Andre Dubus was born on this date in 1936, in Lake Charles, Louisiana. He was almost fifty years old, an ex-Marine, father of six, a prolific short-story writer and a respected writing instructor when he stopped to help an injured woman and her brother on the road. The three were hit by an oncoming car, killing the brother. Dubus saved the woman by pushing her to safety, but his own legs were crushed by the car instead. One amputation and years of surgery and therapy followed, and for the rest of his life Dubus used a wheelchair.

In his post-accident life, Dubus published two further books of essays, a collection of short stories, and numerous contributions to literary magazines. One of the essay collections, his last, was Meditations from a Moveable Chair (1998, cover at right shows a bearded Dubus in a wheelchair, near a ramp in a swamplike exterior). A comment here earlier this week pointed out that the title story of Dubus's second-to-last collection, Dancing After Hours (1996), features Drew, a wheelchair user and his assistant, and a waitress who has a strong memory about listening to Rahsaan Roland Kirk. (Ruth at Wheelie Catholic made note of Dubus last year, too.)

[Note: Last August 11, we marked the birthday of poet Louise Bogan.]

Incubation and Spectacle

For anyone who's visited a child in a modern neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), this 1904 illustration by May Wilson Preston (1873-1949) will come as a strange image. It was made for a serial in Good Housekeeping called "The Incubator Baby" by Ellis Parker Butler (1869-1937), which was published in book form in 1906:


What are all those people doing there? Shouldn't they be wearing gloves, or even masks? Where are the infernal beeping monitors?

In the early 20th century, incubators for premature babies were considered a fascinating technological novelty--but hospitals needed funds to purchase them, and that required public support for the idea. To raise interest, incubators were displayed to the public, with the babies still inside, many of them under 3 lbs at birth. "Baby hatcheries" were found at state fairs, and amusement parks like Coney Island. Admission was charged (10 cents), ostensibly to pay for the costs of maintaining the display, and for the lesson imparted by the "experts" on site, who answered questions about the babies and the technology. Some visitors returned again and again to follow the progress of particular babies; twins were especially popular. When babies reached a healthy weight, they were returned to their parents (who were not generally involved in the baby's daily care during incubation).

The Brooklyn Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children objected to the Coney Island exhibit early on, but it remained every summer into the 1940s. The Oral History Archive at the Coney Island History Project has audio interviews with several former "incubator babies" who were displayed in their earliest days. (Quality isn't terrific--one is a recording of a phone conversations.)

For further reading:

Hannah Lieberman, "Incubator Baby Shows: A Medical and Social Frontier," The History Teacher 35(1)(November 2001): 81-88. NOTE: Lieberman was a high school student in Minneapolis when she wrote this essay, which won the National History Day 2001 Competition for Senior Division Historical Paper.

A. J. Liebling, "A Patron of the Preemies," New Yorker (June 3, 1939): 20-24.

August 7: Rahsaan Roland Kirk (1936-1977)

Jazz instrumentalist Rahsaan Roland Kirk (pictured at left, in sepia-toned profile) was born on this date in 1936, in Columbus, Ohio. He played all sorts of woodwind and reed instruments: saxophones, clarinets, flutes, harmonicas, English horn, among others. Oh, and sometimes he played more than one saxophone or flute at a time--and it didn't sound like rush hour traffic (unless he wanted it to, I guess).

Kirk was blind from infancy. He attended the Ohio State School for the Blind, where he played in the school band. He was playing professionally while still in his teens, and recorded his first album before he was old enough to vote, in 1956.

In 1975, Kirk had a stroke with lasting hemiplegia--so he modified some of his instruments to be played with just one hand. In the winter of 1977, Kirk had a second stroke, which was fatal. He was just 41 years old.

Check out Kirk in performance on YouTube, here, here, here, and here, for starters.

New Book: Writing Deafness

How did Mark Twain, Herman Melville, Lydia Sigourney, and James Fenimore Cooper employ deafness themes and deaf characters? Check out Christopher Krentz's new book, Writing Deafness: The Hearing Line in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (UNC Press 2007; cover shown at right). Krentz is an assistant professor of English at the University of Virginia, and also editor of A Mighty Change: An Anthology of Deaf American Writing, 1816-1864 (Gallaudet University Press 2000).

Austin's Lady Bird Lake

Lady Bird Johnson (1912-2007) took on "highway beautification" as a project while she was First Lady in the Sixties. Pretty safe choice for a fifty-something Southern lady, in a socially tumultuous decade. Except... her beautification agenda eventually paid off for a civil rights movement anyway. By working for more park land and recreational spaces close to urban areas, Johnson paved the way (almost literally) for wheelchair-accessible recreation areas, too.

Town Lake in Austin, Texas, was one example of this phenomenon. Formerly a "garbage-strewn eyesore," in the words of one former mayor, the Lake (really a reservoir) has since become a "jewel" in the state capital. Hundreds of trees were planted, trails were laid out, and it's now a favorite spot for many Austin residents. After leaving the White House, the Johnsons were Austin residents themselves; and after her stroke in 2001, Lady Bird used a wheelchair. Her daughter Luci said that they loved to go around the lake trail in her last years. "We discovered it was wheelchair accessible--although not quite enough," said Luci.

Now that the lake has been renamed Lady Bird Lake, Luci hopes that the city will honor the spirit of its namesake, improving and increasing the accessible trail's reach. (As Katja recently observed, some people really do want recreational wheelchair access that goes more than a few hundred feet.) If you're in Austin sometime, go see if they've met that goal.

Prefer to stay on the West Coast? The Lady Bird Johnson Grove in Redwood National Park also boasts a one-mile wheelchair-accessible trail.

Chief Justice Roberts, meet Tony Coelho

If Chief Justice Roberts doesn't already know former Congressman Tony Coelho (portrait at right), now would be a good time to get acquainted. Coelho was one of the primary authors of the Americans With Disabilities Act. He's now the chairman of the board at the Epilepsy Foundation. And he's one of the best-known people with epilepsy in public life today.

Coelho's story was frequently told during his time in Congress: he had studied for the priesthood, but a medical exam found that he had epilepsy (he didn't know that before, apparently) and that fact barred him from taking his vows. When the diagnosis was reported to the state, he also lost his driver's license and health insurance, both denials standard at the time. He went to work for a Congressman, and later ran for the same seat and won. He rose to the position of House Majority Whip during his six terms in office.

But what if you have a seizure at the White House? he was asked during his first campaign. His response: "Well, in the 13 years I have served in Washington I knew a lot of people who went to the White House and had fits. At least I’d have an excuse." (My response: The White House probably has soft chairs and couches and a first aid kit handy, so what's the problem?)

There's an anecdote in Anne Fadiman's The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down about Coelho (the Hmong child with epilepsy at the center of the book's story happens to live in Coelho's California district):

Coelho is a popular figure among the Hmong, and a few years ago, some local Hmong men were sufficiently concerned when they learned he suffered from qaug dab peg [the Hmong term for epilepsy] that they volunteered the services of a shaman, a txiv neeb, to perform a ceremony that would retrieve Coelho's errant soul. The Hmong leader to whom they made this proposition politely discouraged them, suspecting that Coelho, who is a Catholic of Portuguese desccent, might not appreciate having chickens, and maybe a pig as well, sacrificed on his behalf. (20-21)

Fadiman goes on to note that epilepsy is considered an especially spiritual condition in Hmong culture, so "what was considered a disqualifying impairment by Coelho's church might have been seen by the Hmong as a sign that he was particularly fit for divine office. Hmong epileptics often become shamans." (21)

[Pedestrian Hostile has good commentary on the coverage of Roberts' seizure.]

July 29: Eunice Tietjens (1884-1944)

Eunice Tietjens, born on this date in 1884 (and pictured at right, in a head-and-shoulders photo), was a Chicago-based poet and associate editor of the influential magazine Poetry. She also traveled widely, in China, Africa, and the South Pacific. For sixteen months during World War I, she went to be a foreign correspondent in France, for the Chicago Daily News. The experience left her horrified; in her horror, she wrote the following poem:

Song for a Blind Man Who Could Not Go to War

You who have no eyes to see
You were spared what shaketh me.

Houses ribbed against the sky
Where the storm of steel went by;

Barbed wire rusting in the rain,
Still unwashed of human pain;

Children's eyes grown black with fear;
Grief too dead for sound or tear;

Earth with clotted death for yield;
Crows above a battlefield;

Brains like paint spilled on a wall,
And flesh that has no form at all;

And after nights when souls have gone
The lovely, heedless, heartless dawn.

You who have no eyes to see
You were spared what shaketh me.

Paris, 1918

Tietjens was surely underestimating the way such horrors might be perceived without visual inputs--but it's still a poem that conveys something of the post-WWI sense of appalled weariness and rethinking assumptions. She's been shaken into different thinking about impairment... and about sunrises, too. (Another poem of interest is her "From a Hospital Bed," which begins with the evocative lines, "This is a house of many-fingered pain/Swift fingers, pitiless, that probe and press:/A sullen house, where torture is and stress,/ And where drugged nightmare dreams grow real again.")

Both quoted poems are from Tietjens' Body and Raiment (Knopf, 1919). (Thanks again, Google Books.)

The Cairo Toe

I've always liked the sixteenth-century Ambroise Pare illustration of a prosthetic hand--never actually crafted, but the design is lovely in its intricacy. (A few years back, I got a little notebook featuring the image at a conference, from a table sponsored by the National Library of Medicine.) But it's far from the earliest known evidence of prosthetic ingenuity.

Natalie Bennett posted this, from an article in the Telegraph:

Researchers intend to make a replica of the “Cairo toe”, a bending leather and wood attachment that they believe could be the world’s earliest practical prosthetic. They are seeking volunteers, who are missing big toes on their right feet, to test their theory that the fake toe helped its original user to walk.

(So it has to be the right foot? Really? They can't make a mirror-image replica?)

By the way, the toe's original user was a woman in her fifties or sixties--her mummy was dated to between 1069BC and 664BC--so I'm guessing it wasn't a prosthetic to address a battle injury, as many historical prosthetics have been. And maybe the articulated "fake toe" wasn't made primarily to help her walk, but was instead a cosmetic appliance, or helped her do work involving a treadle (if that's not an anachronism) or had some other purpose for her--why assume walking would be the only real use for a prosthesis? The carefully carved toenail wouldn't be there if the device was only for balance and locomotion.

The previous record holder for earliest known prosthesis was the "Capua leg," a copper-and-wood device from about 300 BC. I was in Capua a few weeks ago--but the leg wasn't, it was destroyed in bombing during World War II, while it resided at the Royal College of Surgeons in London. And Herodotus mentions a Persian soldier having a wooden foot after a rather grisly escape in the 5th century BC.

But wait! The "Greville Chester Great Toe" might be even older than the Cairo Toe... oh, the suspense!

[Image above: The Cairo Toe, a dark wooden prosthesis that looks a bit like a big toe and the ball joint behind it, attached to a skeletal foot, with a woven strap nearby. The photo is credited to the University of Manchester, and appeared in the Telegraph article online.]

July 21: Harry Relph (1867-1928)

On a day when much of the blogging world is reading the last installment of the Harry Potter series, a post about another English Harry:

Music-hall entertainer Harry Relph (shown at left, in a publicity pose), known as "Little Tich," was born on this date 140 years ago, in the present-day London borough of Bromley. He was the sixteenth of his father's children, and was born with six digits on each hand and foot; his short stature would become apparent later. Relph's adult height was four feet, six inches.

As a boy, Harry Relph was a barber's assistant, and began performing locally, dancing and playing a tin whistle. He also did blackface acts, early in his career, but eventually found a more unique performance of his own--dancing with large custom "flaps," or elongated shoes (about 28 inches long). His shoes countered his weight, allowing him to bend full over in any direction without falling; he could also balance on the tips of his flaps, lifting himself to a precarious height.

Relph was hugely popular: his frequent appearances in Paris got him elected to the Academie Francaise, and his act was mentioned in anecdotes about World War I English servicemen and skiing. In addition to his "Big Boots" dance, he also performed in drag, and sang. Because of the timing, nature, and popularity of his act, Relph's Big Boots dance is preserved in silent film--and viewable on YouTube, of course (see below for embedded footage). The word "titch" survives in some places as a colloquial term for a little person, after this Tich.

July 16: Dorothy Cottrell (1902-1957)

Certainly I would like to be able to walk, but if the good fairy of old stories offered me the one gift, the ability to walk would not be the thing I would ask for. More years with my husband than I may normally expect, the ability to write better--a dozen things--would come before it.

--Dorothy Cottrell

Ever heard of this Australian writer? I hadn't, but she was born 105 years ago today. She used a wheelchair from age 6, after surviving polio.

Cottrell's life story reads like some of the adventures and children's tales she would later write: as a little girl on her uncle's sheep farm near Toowoomba, she taught the sheep and working dogs to pull her wheelchair like a chariot. She also learned to shoot a hunting rifle, and swim, and drive a car. At 20 she married, secretly, and traveled with her bookkeeper husband around Australia. In 1928 the Cottrells moved to California, and in 1942 to Florida. Dorothy wrote popular fiction, which funded her travels, and some of her books were made into movies. It is said that she would hop a ride on any ship that would accept her with her chair, and thus made her way around the Caribbean she loved.

This month, the rare books collection at the Monash University Library has a display on Australian Women Writers, 1900-1950, and Cottrell is among the featured authors.

Assisted suicide in Wharton's The Fruit of the Tree (1907)

I just finished reading Edith Wharton's The Fruit of the Tree, a 1907 novel about marriage and idealism and stepfamilies and workplace safety and assisted suicide. Yes, one hundred years ago, the central ethical and practical conflicts of a novel swirl around questions of pain management, prognosis, and patient consent.

The theme starts in the first conversation between main characters John Amherst, a mill operative, and Justine Brent, a nurse, about the condition of a mill hand about to lose his forearm after an accident on the job:

"And what will the company do for them when the wife is a hopeless invalid, and the husband a cripple?"

Amherst again uttered the dry laugh with which he had met her suggestion of an emergency hospital. "I know what I should do if I could get anywhere near Dillon--give him an overdose of morphine, and let the widow collect his life-insurance, and make a fresh start.[...] In your work, don't you ever feel tempted to set a poor devil free?"

She mused. "One might...but perhaps the professional instinct to save would always come first."

"To save what? When all the good of life is gone?"

"I daresay," she sighed, "poor Dillon would do it himself if he could--when he realizes that all the good is gone."

"Yes, but he can't do it himself; and it's the irony of such cases that his employers, after ruining his life, will do all they can to patch up the ruins."

Later in the novel, in a typical Wharton twist, Amherst's wife Bessy is paralyzed from the neck down in a riding accident, and Justine is her nurse. She consults a clergyman, a doctor, and a lawyer, all men, who all assure her that hastening Bessy's likely end would be wrong. Bessy's pleas, and the memory of that earlier conversation with Amherst, still convince Justine to administer the overdose of morphine. She never denies the act, but she doesn't tell Amherst or Bessy's family either. When they learn of it, she is effectively banished from the family. Far from approving assisted suicide for his own kind, Amherst is horrified by the fact--it's right for a mill hand who loses his arm, in his calculation, but not for a wealthy woman who becomes paralyzed.

There are a few elements of the story that are of their era: Bessy's pain cannot be managed effectively, and she has one of those plot-friendly injuries that are both immobilizing and intensely painful, and still allow her to speak. There are no surgical or therapeutic options for her, either, although her scientific young doctor is fascinated by the "case," and hopes that he can keep her alive for a long time, at all costs, just to prove his theories and prowess (the doctor is abusing morphine himself). There's no real medical "system" at work: the doctors and nurses who appear are all hired and paid by the patient's family directly, and visit the patient at home--no hospital, no insurance, no ethics committee in sight.

And most critically, Bessy's personal autonomy is disregarded, because she is a woman. She has a living father and husband, and their word carries more authority than her own in serious matters; her wealth also complicates the situation. Justine feels justified in obeying Bessy's desperate pleas, in part, by a New Woman's sense of female solidarity. As Donna Campbell writes in the introductory notes to the 2000 edition from Northeastern University Press,

Defined as a rich woman whom Amherst has never been able to wean from the position of social parasite, Bessy is already, according to the laws of class and consumption, a useless body. Thus Bessy's accident intensifies but does not fundamentally transform her status, a status that according to the laws of class validates the right of the rich to be useless....Justine exposes the unwritten explosive principle that science or its representatives may kill the useless body of the poor but not of the rich. [xxvi-xxvii]

The central section of the book, from the time of Bessy's accident to the moment of her death, is packed with discussions about bodies, and quality of life, and modern medical advances, and the responsibility of nurses and doctors. The plot was apparently inspired by Wharton's upset after a woman friend was paralyzed and died months after an accident, in pain similar to what she assigned to Bessy. This real-life counterpart is discussed at length in the big brand-new (2007) Wharton biography by Hermione Lee.

The last section of the book is aftermath--this isn't an assisted suicide tale where the death is the end of the story, a solution for all concerned. Instead, it's a moment that continues to haunt and twist and nearly destroy the survivors. It's not hard to see where Wharton's sympathies lie (Justine Brent is, after all, an almost too-perfect heroine), but she gives the subject a complex, unsettling treatment anyway. For that, the novel should be read and discussed. Even a hundred years later.

June 30: Derek Bentley (1933-1953)

The short descriptor for Derek Bentley in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography is "victim of a miscarriage of justice." Hard to argue with that. Bentley was born on this date in 1933, in London (his twin didn't survive). He and his sister Iris were children during the Second World War, and had to be dug out of the rubble of their house during a bombing in London. He was considered "borderline feebleminded," and had a history of seizures. He never learned to read or write. Derek Bentley attended a few schools, with little success (one headmaster described him as "the most irregular boy I have had in my career"), and at fifteen was convicted of petty theft, and sent to reform school. He tried to work as a mover and a road sweeper, but couldn't manage long in either job.

In 1952, Bentley was caught trespassing in a warehouse with a sixteen-year-old named Christopher Craig. Fifteen minutes after Bentley was in police custody, Craig fired a gun and killed a police constable. Because Craig was a juvenile, he was sentenced to ten years in prison; Bentley, who never touched the gun, was sentenced to death. Despite protests, Derek Bentley was hanged on 28 January 1953, at the age of 19.

His parents (who died in 1976 and 1993) and his sister Iris Bentley (1931-1997) never gave up trying to clear Derek's name. In 1966, they succeeded in having his remains removed from the prison cemetery. The tombstone was eventually inscribed "a victim of British justice." A 1991 film about Bentley revived interest in the case, and in 1992, Iris convinced the police to re-examine the case. Derek Bentley was pardoned in 1993, and the conviction was overturned in 1998. Too late for Iris Bentley to see; and far too late for Derek Bentley.

[Image: A waist-up image of a blonde teenaged Bentley, wearing a black turtleneck, holding a cigarette in his mouth, a packet in his hands.]