Abstract
Disability studies can be of great value to medical education first, by placing the medical paradigm in the broad context of a sequence of ways of understanding and responding to disability that have emerged in the last two thousand years or so; second, by reminding medical professionals that people with disabilities have suffered as well as profited from medical treatment in the last two hundred years; finally, by providing access to a distinctive point of view from which the experience of disability looks very different than it may from the outside.
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Notes
I refer to disabled people (or people with disabilities) collectively, when they are hardly a monolithic group. Similarly, I will use the term, medicine, as a kind of shorthand for the medical-industrial complex, which is also not monolithic. Finally, I will be describing disability studies as though it were more cohesive than it is.
The discussion of these paradigms draws on chapter two, “Paradigms Cost,”of my Signifying Bodies: Disability in Contemporary Life Writing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009), 16–30.
Sir F. Bacon, “Of Deformity,” in The Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall, ed. Michael Kiernan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985) , 133–34.
O. Sacks, Migraine: Understanding a Common Disorder, rpt. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985, 140.
M. Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 189; I have reordered her sentences.
L J. Davis, Introduction, Disability Studies Reader, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2006), xv.
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Couser, G.T. What Disability Studies Has to Offer Medical Education. J Med Humanit 32, 21–30 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-010-9125-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-010-9125-1