Today on Flickr Commons: Mary Elizabeth Switzer

Mary Elizabeth Switzer (1900-1971)
Originally uploaded by Smithsonian Institution

From the Smithsonian's description:

"Mary Elizabeth Switzer (1900-1971) was Director of the Office of Vocational Rehabilitation in the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare and co-winner of the Lasker Award in 1960 with Paul Wilson Brand (1914-2003), a missionary surgeon in Velore, and Gudmund Harlem, Norwegian Royal Minister of Health and Social Affairs. Switzer was known for her work on the 1954 Vocational Rehabilitation Act, which expanded services for people with disabilities."

November 17: Winifred Holt (1870-1945)

[Image description: black-and-white archival photo of two men seated at a table, in French military uniforms; they have their hands on a small checkerboard; one man appears to have his eyelids closed, and the other has fabric patches over both eyes; behind them, a woman in seated, and has her own hand stretched toward the checkerboard]

Co-founder of Lighthouse International (formerly the New York Association for the Blind) Winifred Holt was born on this date in 1870, in New York City, the daughter of publisher Henry Holt. She was a force in early twentieth-century advocacy --she and her organization worked for inclusion of blind children in New York public schools, for summer camps, vocational training programs and social groups run by and for blind people, for rehabilitation of blinded WWI veterans. She also worked for changes in medical protocols to prevent a common cause of blindness in newborns. She encouraged similar "Lighthouses" to operate in other cities around the world. Many of the projects she started continue in some form today.

In the photo above (found here, in the Library of Congress's Bain Collection), Holt is seen teaching newly blind French soldiers to play checkers in a rehabilitation program in France (Holt received the Legion d'Honneur for her wartime work there). Holt trained as a sculptor when she was a young woman; her best known work is a 1907 bas-relief bronze portrait of Helen Keller, online here. She also wrote a biography of blind English MP and postmaster Henry Fawcett.

New book: Geoffrey Reaume, "Lyndhurst"

News in the inbox today about Canadian disability historian Geoffrey Reaume's new book, Lyndhurst: Canada's First Rehabilitation Centre for People with Spinal Cord Injuries, 1945-1998 (McGill-Queens University Press 2007). Reaume is an assistant professor at York University, where he teaches Mad People's History in the Critical Disability Studies MA program. He's one of the organizers of the Psychiatric Survivor Archives of Toronto. His previous book, Remembrance of Patients Past (Oxford University Press 2000), explores patient life at the Toronto Hospital for the Insane.

About Lyndhurst, from the publisher's website:

Only recently have the voices of the disabled - the personal experiences of people with disabilities - been included in medical history. Lyndhurst marks an important contribution to disability and medical history by providing first-person accounts of patients, staff, and disability activists at Lyndhurst Lodge in Toronto in post-war Canada.

Lyndhurst was the first facility in Canada to focus solely on people with spinal cord injuries, eventually also treating people with related disabilities, such as polio. Geoffrey Reaume details the changes in treatment of paraplegia and quadriplegia that allowed more people to survive and to return to the community, the evolution of social policies that emphasized greater inclusiveness in society for people with physical disabilities, and the role of disability activism in helping to advance these changes.

Lyndhurst is the first Canadian history to trace these developments through the mid to late twentieth century. It is a timely reminder of the past role of government, the health care sector, and disability activists in shaping disability social policies.