Rehabilitation and Disability

by

Stephen E. Mawdsley

• LAST MODIFIED: 17 April 2025
• DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780197768723-0002

Introduction

The history of rehabilitation sits at the intersection of disability and treatment because it speaks to a physical or mental condition brought to clinical attention for the purpose of recovery. Although rehabilitative practices have a long history in human societies, the explicit idea of applying a medical intervention to a disability can be traced to the nineteenth century with the rise of industrial capitalism and nation-states. The concept of rehabilitation was as much a political response to the perceived need for productive labor as it was about fears over dependency. Rehabilitation practices were not only shaped by technological and medical innovations, but also by social, cultural, and political forces that defined who was treated, how they were perceived, the character of the applied interventions, and what constituted success. Issues of race, ethnicity, class, gender, region, and sexuality have offered historians further nuance in showing variations in access to care, the burden of stigma, and the imposition of blame. Although sometimes efficacious, rehabilitation did not always result in the outcome imagined by health professionals. Since not all conditions were well matched to treatment or were beyond available technological means, rehabilitation could result in adverse results or lasting disability. Due to the varied and complex nature of disability, rehabilitation often proved to be a negotiated process whereby individual agency existed in tension with clinical judgment. The growing application of the history of emotions to rehabilitation histories has offered scholars deeper understandings of the complex personal journeys of those receiving treatment as well as those who provided the care. For these reasons, the history of disability and rehabilitation provides a rich lens to examine a past society’s understandings and expectations of disabled individuals and how they imagined using medicine to aid recovery.

The Meanings of Disability

Since rehabilitation is a distinct intervention in the experience of disability, it is useful to understand its social and cultural constructions as well as its physical and psychological manifestations. Ideas of normalcy combined with the historical practice of othering informed the stigmatization of those with disabling conditions and adjustments to how rehabilitation was imagined and conducted. Across time and place, different societies imagined unique responses to disability. How past societies chose to identify and understand difference and the needs of disabled persons provides context into how rehabilitation was approached. The works in this section show how past societies imagined and responded to disability and the consequences of such reactions to disabled persons. Linton 1998, Kudlick 2003, and Davis 2006 offer approaches to studying disability; a non-Western perspective is provided in Burch and Rembis 2014. Burch and Patterson 2013 focuses on how gender can shape treatment, while Jaffee and John 2018 uses race as the primary lens. Longmore and Umansky 2001, Mitchell and Snyder 2015, and Rose 2017 examine definitions and societal responses to disability, while Nielsen 2013 considers the impact of disability rights activism.

• Burch, Susan, and Lindsey Patterson. “Not Just Any Body: Disability, Gender, and History.” Journal of Women’s History 25.4 (2013): 122–137.

  DOI: 10.1353/jowh.2013.0060

  Uses the intersection of gender and disability to assess how disabled people were imagined and treated.

• Burch, Susan, and Michael Rembis, eds. Disability Histories. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014.

  Brings together a collection of articles that engage with place, gender, and race to offer a more nuanced understanding of the intersection of disability and medicine. Also extends the focus of disability beyond Western societies to examine those in Asia and Africa.

• Davis, Lennard J., ed. The Disability Studies Reader. 2d ed. New York: Routledge, 2006.

  A collection of articles concerning mental and physical disability, as well as issues related to pain. The articles also explore the construction of gender, sexuality, and ideas of the body in relation to disability and the consequences of stigma.

• Jaffee, Laura and Kelsey John. “Disabling Bodies of/and Land: Reframing Disability Justice in Conversation with Indigenous Theory and Activism.” Disability and the Global South 5.2 (2018): 1407–1429.

  Applies Indigenous theory to reassess the non-Western experience of disability. Claims that Indigenous peoples’ experiences with settler colonialism provides a useful framework for understanding national and bodily self-determination.

• Kudlick, Catherine. “Disability History: Why We Need Another ‘Other.’” American Historical Review 108.3 (June 2003): 763–793.

  DOI: 10.1086/ahr/108.3.763

  Convincingly argues for historians to incorporate disability as an approach to studies of the past. Reveals how doing so will reveal new ways about how societies functioned.

• Linton, Simi. Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity. New York: New York University Press, 1998.

  Identifies and examines key themes in understanding disability, including power, education, and meanings. Argues for a more complex understandings of disability to achieve more inclusive experiences.

• Longmore, Paul K., and Lauri Umansky, eds. The New Disability History: American Perspectives. New York: New York University Press, 2001.

  A collection of articles that speak to the various meanings of disability in American history and reveal how disability became an identity and a cultural signifier.

• Mitchell, David T., and Sharon L. Snyder. The Biopolitics of Disability: Neoliberalism, Ablenationalism, and Peripheral Embodiment. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015.

  DOI: 10.3998/mpub.7331366

  Advances the concept of “ablenationalism” to describe how disabled persons are measured within global consumer culture. Shows how disability creates new forms of knowledge and awareness.

• Nielsen, Kim E. A Disability History of the United States. Boston: Beacon Press, 2013.

  Inverts the traditional medical narrative by revealing the perceptive of people with disabilities. Shows the importance of activism and mass movements to shaping and reshaping the lives of disabled Americans.

• Rose, Sarah F. No Right to Be Idle: The Invention of Disability, 1840s–1930s. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017.

  DOI: 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469624891.001.0001

  Examines how disabled American workers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were recast as morally deficient dependents and barred from workplaces. Shows how the category of disability was reinvented at a time of changing policies and family structures.