Disciplining disabled bodies

Although the treatment of fractures and dislocations featured in surgical texts from the Hippocratic era, ¹ the term ‘orthopaedics’ was first coined by the eighteenth-century French physician, Nicholas Andry, from the combination of two Greek roots, ‘orthos’ meaning straight and ‘pais’ meaning child. ² His concept acquired new cultural and historical significance in 1975, when Michel Foucault used an image from Orthopaedia: or, the Art of Correcting and Preventing Deformities in Children (1743) as an illustration for Discipline and Punish, his ground-breaking study of the birth of the prison. Andry's bent tree – bound to a straight stake – exemplified the pursuit of normality through an ongoing and routinized regime of disciplinary power that for Foucault was the hallmark of modern societies. ³ This chapter explores how orthopaedic medicine was applied to the disciplining of disabled children in Britain between 1800 and the outbreak of the Second World War. It is argued that from the early twentieth century, a social brand of orthopaedics – quite distinct from its medical or surgical counterparts – came to monopolize the surveillance of impairment and the repair of disabled bodies incapable of participating in the labour market. Three main themes are examined to support this thesis: the transition in orthopaedic knowledge from ‘deformity’ to science; the capture of voluntary organizations for disabled people by social orthopaedists; and the principles of medical holism through which this programme of treatment and reform was implemented.