Disability Studies and Mad Studies

Beth Linker, University of Pennsylvania
 
Title: Disability and the Making of the Posture Sciences
 
Abstract: On the eve of World War I, a new health threat gripped the United States. The first report of it ran in the New York Times, just weeks before the U.S. officially declared war on Germany in the spring of 1917. A Boston physician conducting physical exams on freshman entering Harvard University found a distressing number of students with poor body alignment. The study, known as the “Harvard Slouch” report, would become the baseline for subsequent population studies on posture health for much of the century to come. In those years, Americans from all walks of life—immigrants, military draftees, school children, educators, and industrial workers—would undergo posture examinations, with public health officials reporting that approximately 80 percent of U.S. citizens suffered from postural defects. These studies would continue for nearly the entire twentieth century, forming the basis for a  national health epidemic geared toward bodily surveillance and disability prevention. 
 
My forthcoming book Slouch focuses on this consequential but often overlooked episode in U.S. history with an eye toward revealing how notions of ableness along with a pervasive fear of disability fueled the creation of and preoccupation with the poor posture epidemic. The first chapter of the book “Disability and the Making of the Posture Sciences” explores how poor posture came to be construed as a disability in the first place, largely through the work of paleoanthropolgists and physicians. 
 
Bio: Beth Linker is the Samuel H. Preston Endowed Term Associate Professor at the University of Pennsylvania in the Department of the History and Sociology of Science. She is the author of War’s Waste: Rehabilitation in World War I America (Chicago, 2011) and co-editor of Civil Disabilities: Citizenship, Membership, and Belonging (Penn Press, 2014). Her book, Slouch: Posture Panic and the Making of an Epidemic is forthcoming from Princeton University Press.