Public Disability History

by Emmeline Burdett 1 In a PDH blog post earlier this year , the Dutch historian Paul van Trigt asked whether the investigation of historical violence against people with disabilities can ever serve the emancipation of people with disabilities? I believe that it can, and to illustrate this, I am going to look at the various ways in which the disability rights movement in the United Kingdom has dealt with Nazi attitudes towards, and treatment of, disabled people, and the questions which this continues to pose for contemporary Western societies. As this is a rather large topic, I am going to address it in two blog posts. In this first post, I am going to discuss the various instances of images connected with this being used to cement a sense of group identity amongst disabled people. In my subsequent post, I will be looking more closely at the programme’s wider implications, and discuss how members of the British disability rights movement have engaged with these. I hope that my two

By Chunchun Wang Mr. Lin 1 , a retired teacher in his seventies, has been a left above-knee prosthesis user since 2016. He underwent amputation surgery after accidentally cutting the artery in his left thigh when carpentering in 2015. Living with his prosthesis changed the everyday life of Mr. Lin and his family, daily interactions with others included. It was an upsetting experience for Mrs. Lin to speak about her husband’s encounter with some neighbors after him being disabled: “After his surgery, we did not go out regularly. We only told a few trustworthy people about his situation. Others guessed that something terrible must have happened to him, but they were not sure what it was. Gradually the story spread, so more and more people knew he was disabled and using a prosthesis. One day, after enjoying the winter sunshine in our neighborhood, we passed a few acquaintances on our way home. To my shock, those people with whom we had interacted for years, they turned their faces to