Rehabilitation services and disability Disability in History Disability
Rehabilitation services and disability Disability in History
Disability in ancient time • As impairing conditions such as the pervasiveness of war, poverty, plague, pestilence, viral and bacterial diseases, malnutrition, injury during performing hard work, and body mutilations exercised against war captives and criminals were noticeably more prominent than they are today, it is logically possible to conclude that disabilities were common occurrences in the ancient time.
Disability in Ancient Greece and Rome • “Let there be a law that no deformed child shall live“ (Aristotle, 384 -322 BC). • In the Ancient Greece, infants with impairments were perceived as representing the anger of the gods and thus infanticide was practiced in order to mollify the gods. • The Ancient Romans also used to believe that infants with disabilities were not fully human and as a result abandoned them to die.
Disability in Ancient Greece and Rome (cont) • Infanticide had been predominantly practiced against children born with severe physical impairments. • However, parental solicitude, undetected congenital conditions, the activities of certain religious and political officials prevented infanticide to be universally applicable in Ancient Greece and Rome.
Humoral Theory • Physicians, beginning with Hippocrates (460 -377 BC) firstly questioned the notion that mental and other forms of disabilities were caused by evil spirits and demons. • Fundamental to Hippocratic medicine were the four humors (blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile) which all were endowed with basic qualities of heat, cold, dryness, and moistness. For him, it is an excess of one or more of the humors or the imbalance of such basic qualities that cause disease or disabling condition. • By further extending Hippocrates’ theory, Galen (AD 130200) rejected supernatural explanations of mental disorder and viewed the disabling conditions in essentially physiological terms.
The Medieval Period – Establishments of monastically inspired hospices for the blind in today’s Turkey, Syria and France in the fourth to sixth centuries – Initiatives in Belgium to support persons with mental disabilities in family care settings in the thirteenth century – Charities organized in the form of almshouses, hospitals, clothes, food, money, and goods dispensed at church doors) – Emergence of residential institutions for the mentally disabled, visually impaired, persons with hearing impairment, lepers in Spain, England, France, Germany and other Arab countries.
Early Modern Period • Due to developments in science, philosophy, and medicine, and the rise and the increasing legitimacy of scientific method during the Renaissance and the Enlightenment periods, the early modern period in the west (1500 through the eighteenth century) marked significant and far-reaching change in the life of PWDs.
Education and the Nineteenth Century • Education of the deaf was first started in Spain, followed by The education of the blind and, much more tardily, education of children with intellectual disability and physical disabilities. • Residential schools for deaf and blind students and institutionalized segregation of people with mental illness and intellectual disability grew rapidly during the nineteenth century.
Eugenics • “Society brings on its own ruin by allowing the less intelligent to out-reproduce the more intelligent” (Francis Galton, 1822 -1911). • By the end of the 19 th century and in the early twentieth century, the philosophy of social Darwinism and eugenics came to prominence. • Francis Galton, a cousin of Darwin, in the late nineteenth century, coined eugenics referring to the “science of the improvement of the human race by better breeding”.
Positive and Negative Eugenics • Positive eugenics encouraged people with “good genes” to be reproduced for the proliferation of healthy elements in the society by providing them with incentives. • Negative eugenics was based on systematic constraints and coercion to discourage reproduction of people with “inferior hereditary qualities”. • Sterilization was the most favorite solution proposed to prevent social problems by the eugenicists.
Involuntary Sterilization • By the end of the First World War eugenics was influential in many countries, including France, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Russia, and thousands of people with disabilities in North America, Germany, Scandinavia and Switzerland were involuntarily sterilized. • However, Nazi sterilizations were the most comprehensive where a great number of PWDs counted in hundred thousands were sterilized involuntarily.
The Two World Wars • The First World War brought about the need to cater for large number of disabled ex-servicemen that led to the development of different sheltered-workshop schemes in the belligerent countries. • The Second World War also – provided temporary employment opportunities for the disabled in replacement of persons taken in to the armedforces in the occupations that had never been previously considered suitable for PWDs and imagined they could perform – realized that full physical fitness is not required for the majority of occupations.
Independent Living Movement • Cognizant of the deprivations PWDs experience and following in the wake of the black, feminist, and other social movements of the 1960 s, increasing number of disabled people embraced activism and carried out political movements and collective actions during the 1960 -70 s. • Many of the ideas, issues, and themes that characterized all of the late-twentieth-century disability-based political movements caused a new comprehensive disability and disability rights ideology-Independent Living Movement.
Independent Living Movement (cont) • The independent living movement – redefined the nature of disability and the problems PWDs confront to be primarily a social, rather than a medical, issue – attributed the causes of the limitations PWDs confront to inaccessibility in the built environment, inappropriate public policies, domination of disabled people by bureaucrats and professionals, prejudice in the culture, and institutionalized discrimination and segregation rather than to individual physiological conditions – looked for social and political solutions and called for the shift in priorities from correcting individuals to reforming society.
International Efforts • At international level – The 1971 Declaration of the Rights of Mentally Retarded Persons – the 1975 Declaration of the Rights of Disabled Persons – the 1981 UN's International Year of Disabled People – the 1982 World Program of Action Concerning Disabled Persons and the subsequent ten years of The UN Decade of Disabled Persons – the 1994 UN Standard Rules on the Equalization of Opportunities for Persons with Disabilities and – the 2006 UN Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities
Gaps • However, the following points are the challenges in studying the history of disability: – Lack of primary sources – lack of precision on who constituted the disabled population – Conflicting records – Applying contemporary contempt for studying disabilities to the assessment of the ancient world
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