A social history of people with physical disabilities, including spina bifida

The social history of people with physical disabilities shows that their status has been heavily influenced by emotions such as fascination and fear on the part of nondisabled people, and these emotions foster prejudices that act as powerful forces of discrimination and tell us a great deal about the sensibilities of the time. Currently, developments in health care financing in North America, coupled with the social implications of molecular genetics, threaten to erode many of the gains that disabled people have realized in this century. A socially active and politically empowered disability rights group is the vital protection that disabled people must have from medical cost cutting and a resurgence of eugenics based on molecular medicine. Historically, people with disabilities have held an inferior social and economic status, presumably owing to the physical impairments imposed by the disability. However, nondisabled people frequently have uncomfortable feelings and even negative views of disabled persons, in part from fears and anxieties about their own vulnerability. Such anxieties come from the thought that all of us are vulnerable, generating a need to avoid identification with the disabled to assuage those anxieties. Negative feelings and beliefs on the part of nondisabled people act as powerful, prejudicial forces that foster discrimination and cause isolation, frustration, and even harm to the disabled. In recent years, changes in public attitudes, coupled with the passage of federal legislation, has improved the prospects for people with disabilities, but modern society continues to be preoccupied with inabilities rather than with capabilities. The purpose of this paper is to present a social history of persons with physical disabilities, including spina bifida. This social history will show that the status of disabled people in society has been influenced by emotions such as fascination and fear, and that these emotions foster prejudice and discrimination against people with disabilities.