Heather R. Perry. Recycling the Disabled

In the last two decades, historians have produced a number of studies on war-related disabilities during World War I. For example, Paul Lerner’s Hysterical Men: War, Psychiatry, and the Politics of Trauma in Germany, 1890–1930 (2003) addresses issues of war hysteria, and Sabine Kienitz’s Beschädigte Helden: Kriegsinvalidität und Körperbilder 1914–1923 (2008) looks at physically disabled soldiers in Germany. Heather R. Perry extends the discussion by these and other historians in her detailed examination of the rehabilitation of wounded soldiers in Recycling the Disabled: Army, Medicine, and Modernity in WWI Germany. Perry begins with an analysis of the role of orthopedics in the rehabilitation process and argues that the war provided practitioners with the opportunity to establish much-sought-after expertise. While orthopedics had carved out a space for itself as a specialty distinct from trauma medicine before 1914, orthopedists during the war claimed that their knowledge was important for the initial treatment of war casualties as well as for postoperative care and rehabilitation. Leading professors and practitioners such as Fritz Lange and Konrad Biesalski were successful in establishing “the centrality of orthopaedic expertise to the long-term care and welfare of the nation’s disabled soldiers” (33). Perry discusses the role that physicians played in the design, construction, and testing of artificial limbs, but she neglects the important contributions made by engineers like Georg Schlesinger, a topic that has found more extensive treatment in Matthew Price’s dissertation “Bodies and Souls: The Rehabilitation of Maimed Soldiers in France and Germany during the First World War” (Stanford University, 1998).

Ancient history · First world war · Modernity · Physical therapy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · World War II · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Medicine · Rehabilitation · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies