ABSTRACT
The relationship between disability and illness is a problematic one. Many people are disabled by chronic and/or life-threatening illnesses, and many people with disabilities not caused by illness have chronic health problems as consequences of their disabilities; but modern movements for the rights of people with disabilities have fought the identification of disability with illness, and for good reasons. This identification contributes to the medicalization of disability, in which disability is regarded as an individual misfortune, and people with disabilities are assumed to suffer primarily from physical and/or mental abnormalities that medicine can and should treat, cure, or at least prevent (Oliver 1990; Morris 1991). Moreover, Ron Amundson argues that, since illness is perceived as “globally incapacitating,” identifying disability with illness fosters the myth that people with disabilities are globally incapacitated, which in turn contributes to the social devaluation of disabled people (Amundson 1992, 113-14). Perhaps most importantly, in the recent past, many healthy people with disabilities were forced to live in long-term care institutions under medical supervision simply because they needed services to perform tasks of daily living. In those institutions, medical personnel controlled every aspect of their lives, and little or
