Sunday Morning Medicine
A weekly check-up of gender, medicine, and history in the news Meth and Mormon Tea. Mmmm…Panopticon pie. Building dorms for the deaf. A history of “snake-oil salesmen.” The modern history of swearing....
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Thalidomide—The Good and The Bad
I was listening to the BBC world news the other day and a story caught my attention. The story was about an epidemic of birth defects in Brazil, particularly in the slums of Rio de Janeiro.[1] Pregnant...
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The Paralympics, Past and Present
I probably don’t need to tell you that the 2014 Winter Olympics captured the attention of millions of people in the United States and around the world. To miss the inundation of ads, highlights, and...
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Come to the Dark Side: Disability as “Dark” Civil War History
While the rest of the world was happily decking the halls and calling for goodwill toward men, Civil War historians — in the now-famous words of Historista blogger and historian Megan Kate Nelson —...
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Pregnancy, Fear, and Conformity
Last fall, while in the midst of a severe head cold and four months pregnant, I emailed my obstetrician: “can I take Sudafed?” Within the hour he responded with “no sudafed until after 20 weeks if at...
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Police Brutality, Mental Illness, and Race in the Age of Mass Incarceration
On November 9, 2014, two Ann Arbor police officers shot and killed Aura Rosser, a 40-year-old black woman, after responding to a domestic violence call. In the 911 call, Rosser’s partner, 54-year-old...
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Big Promises, Bigger Failures: When Public Education Makes You Sick
Promises, promises… We take it as a given that schooling is good for us, that overall population health increases with increased educational attainment. Indeed, from their founding, public schools have...
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If You’re Not a Jerk, Then I’m Not Disabled
This is my fantasy: I’m standing at the Main Street corner in my little New Jersey suburban downtown, waiting to cross the street. As usual, I’m stressed out by the giant SUVs whipping by, oblivious to...
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Ghosts are Scary, Disabled People are Not: The Troubling Rise of the Haunted...
This past spring, the defunct Willard Psychiatric Center (previously known as the Willard Asylum for the Chronic Insane) in Ovid, New York, opened its doors for tours — one day only, with no advance...
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Denver’s One-Lung Army: Disease, Disability, and Debility in a Frontier City
This post originally appeared on REMEDIA. In 1879 the famous showman, P.T. Barnum joked that, “Coloradoans are the most disappointed people I ever saw. Two-thirds of them come here to die and they...
View ArticleSorry, I’m Disabled. Oh, Wait, I’m Not Sorry, Just Disabled.
“Sorry,” I say, “Sorry, but would you mind giving me the directions again a little slower? I have a visual impairment and I didn’t see which way you were pointing.” “So sorry, excuse me for bumping...
View ArticleI Could Wrestle with my Disability, but I Think I’ll Dance Instead
This post is the inaugural essay in an occasional series we’re calling Clio Gets Personal, a special and infrequent departure from our typical historical and cultural criticism featuring more intimate...
View Article“Me Before You”: Hollywood’s Disability Problem & the Perils of Assisted Suicide
The recent movie Me Before You, based on the best-selling book by Jojo Moyes, has been marketed as the tearjerker romance flick of the summer. The film stars Emilia Clarke (of Game of Thrones fame) and...
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Playwright Alice Eve Cohen Asks Us to Reconsider What We Think We Know about...
“What makes a mother real?” asks writer and performer Alice Eve Cohen in her newly-published play, What I Thought I Knew. In 1999, Cohen experienced the most improbably and bizarrely complicated...
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Bradley Snyder and the Legacy of First World War Blind Veteran Rehabilitation
On April 30 People Magazine featured a story on Brad Snyder, a young swimmer seeking a gold medal at the summer Olympics in Rio this year. Snyder’s journey is extraordinary in and of itself, having...
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“Save Changes”: Telling Stories of Disability Protest
At first, it was a simple case of “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em,” as I worked with WikiEducation Foundation to teach a methods course in which students created disability history content. But the...
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No Excuses: The 21st-Century Supercrip in Three Snapshots
In the past decade, the landscape of commercial fitness has changed drastically. It has become less dependent on stationary exercise machinery, and instead emphasizes free weights. CrossFit gyms and...
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Finding My Amputee Brethren
I remember vividly the first amputee I met after my amputation. Driving down with my spouse to Wake Forest from our small college town so that I could get more chemo, we were at a rest stop. I had only...
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Care Gone Wrong: Bad Moms, Fake Disabilities, and Imagined Illnesses
At first, it seemed impossible that Gypsy Rose Blancharde had murdered her mother. Dee Dee appeared to be her daughter’s most outspoken advocate. She was the strong and devoted caregiver that Gypsy...
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Face to Face with Sharrona Pearl
I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Sharrona Pearl about her new book, Face/On: Transplants and the Ethics of the Other. Below are excerpts from our conversation, which ranged from disability,...
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