Citation

Baynton DC. Health History 2011; 13(2): 43-64.

Affiliation

University of Iowa, USA.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2011, Australian and New Zealand Society for the History of Medicine)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

22329259

Abstract

At the turn of the twentieth century, social attitudes toward disability turned sharply negative. An international eugenics movement brought about restrictive immigration laws in the United States and other immigrant nations. One cause was the changing understanding of time, both historical and quotidian, that accompanied the advent of evolutionary theory and a competitive industrial economy. As analogies of competition became culturally ubiquitous, new words to talk about disability such as 'handicapped', 'retarded', 'abnormal', 'degenerate', and 'defective', came into everyday use, all of them explicitly or implicitly rooted in new ways of thinking about time. The intense fear of disability that characterised the eugenics movement grew, in good part, from this new and unsettling vision of time.

Language: en