Calendar of Events

Lecture: "War’s Waste: The Rehabilitation of Disabled Soldiers in American History"

August 26, 7:00 PM

SPEAKER: Beth Linker, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Department of the History and Sociology of Science, University of Pennsylvania

DESCRIPTION: With the number of casualties from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan mounting every day, Americans will be forced to come to terms with the tens of thousands of men and women permanently disabled from the conflicts for many years ahead. At the moment, it is almost universally accepted that the proper social and cultural response to the wounded is to encourage them to undertake extended hospital stays, undergo extensive physical rehabilitation, and (when needed) make use of state-of-the-art prostheses-all with an eye to facilitating the injured soldier's swift return to a “normal” civilian life. While supervised long-term medical care is part-and-parcel of today’s U.S. veteran welfare system, this was not always the case. Rather, the idea of rehabilitating maimed soldiers arose at a particular time in our nation's history, during the First World War. University of Pennsylvania historian Beth Linker tells us how and why this earlier model (based on generous life-long veterans' pensions) was thoroughly supplanted by the rehabilitative model that persists largely unchallenged to this day.

The lecture is free and open to the public. It will be interpreted for the deaf and hearing impaired.

Clarkson University, Cheel Campus Center

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This event was supported by a grant from the New York Council for the Humanities.