Beth Linker > Quotes

“Despite the fact that Lt. C. spent months in the Balkan bed, with one end of a pulley attached to his stump and the other end attached to bricks hanging over the end of the bed in order to keep the skin around his stump on a constant stretch, bone still protruded, making future artificial limb wear nearly impossible. In”
― Beth Linker, War's Waste: Rehabilitation in World War I America

“Among Walter Reed amputees, physiotherapists had a reputation for being “all chesty,” often challenging (and beating) the nurses at a game of basketball.70”
― Beth Linker, War's Waste: Rehabilitation in World War I America

“Each individual 150-by-30-foot ward had hardwood floors and walls with rounded corners, “making them easier to clean” and to keep germ free. Ventilation—another crucial element of hospital design and disease control at the time—was “obtained through openings over each window, controlled by moveable glass frames . . . hinged at the bottom.”
― Beth Linker, War's Waste: Rehabilitation in World War I America

“Given the fact that the goal of rehabilitation was to find disabled men gainful employment, it is noteworthy that the United States did not take the path of the St. Dunstan’s Hostel in London, where blinded soldiers were retrained to work as masseurs and employed by the Crown.16 Despite such examples, the US Medical Department, and orthopedic surgeons more specifically, opposed the idea of training men as physiotherapists.17 Orthopedists never made their rationale for hiring female physiotherapists explicit. They knew, of course, that the military needed men on the front lines and could not spare too many of them for hospital work. They also knew that women were cheap.”
― Beth Linker, War's Waste: Rehabilitation in World War I America

“One such case was a local thirty-year-old seamstress, who because of childhood rickets suffered from chronic slipping of both knee caps and thus found it difficult to keep pace with her co-workers. After a tendon release and rehabilitation, the patient was able to “work in a factory, able in every way to meet the demands made upon her.”87”
― Beth Linker, War's Waste: Rehabilitation in World War I America

“After witnessing conditions of overcrowding and poor ventilation in the Georgetown Union Hotel Hospital in 1861, the US Civil War Sanitary Commission recommended that sick and wounded soldiers be cared for in tents and wooden shanties, structures that offered ample natural ventilation and could be easily abandoned and destroyed if infectious disease became rampant.15 When Borden assumed his post at the Washington Barracks over thirty-five years later, little had changed.”
― Beth Linker, War's Waste: Rehabilitation in World War I America

“Another way in which physiotherapists made rubbing respectable was to mandate that the therapeutic encounter involve an element of pain.”
― Beth Linker, War's Waste: Rehabilitation in World War I America

“Perhaps most important, orthopedic surgeons knew that female assistants would pose less of a threat to their male-dominated professional authority than male physiotherapist would. In short, as one orthopedist put it: “The work could be best performed by women.”18”
― Beth Linker, War's Waste: Rehabilitation in World War I America

“Rehabilitation legislation also led to the formation of entirely new, female-dominated medical subspecialties, such as occupational and physical therapy. The driving assumption behind rehabilitation was that disabled men needed to be toughened up, lest they become dependent of the state, their communities, and their families.”
― Beth Linker, War's Waste: Rehabilitation in World War I America

“Putting Rubbers to the Test No one knew what to expect from the women who graduated from the physiotherapy war emergency courses once they entered the field.”
― Beth Linker, War's Waste: Rehabilitation in World War I America

“Relying on the breadwinner ideal of manhood, those in favor of pension reform began to define disability not by a man’s missing limbs or by any other physical incapacity (as the Civil War pension system had done), but rather by his will (or lack thereof) to work. Seen this way, economic dependency—often linked overtly and metaphorically to womanliness—came to be understood as the real handicap that thwarted the full physical recovery of the veteran and the fiscal strength of the nation.”
― Beth Linker, War's Waste: Rehabilitation in World War I America

“The disabled man heralded in rehabilitation propaganda literature was the “supercrip,” a man who, against all odds, surmounted his physical deficits and achieved spectacular career success.33”
― Beth Linker, War's Waste: Rehabilitation in World War I America

“Rhetoric coming from outside medicine among lay rehabilitation advocates suggested that nursing could do more harm than good in the rehabilitation of disabled soldiers. Rehabilitators worried that a soldier, when showered by acts of womanly kindness and care, would lose the will to get well, failing to overcome his disabled state.”
― Beth Linker, War's Waste: Rehabilitation in World War I America

“the CTCA held frequent lectures that aimed to dispel the traditional assumption that men had natural, unbridled sexual passions that needed to be met in order to maintain their health and masculinity. The CTCA, historian Allan M. Brandt writes, “sought to invent for the troops a concept of virginity and chastity equivalent to that demanded of women.”40 In”
― Beth Linker, War's Waste: Rehabilitation in World War I America

“After spending a couple months at Walter Reed, Kristi told a Washington Post reporter that, if someone had to get injured, she was glad it was her husband; she was convinced that together they were strong enough to face whatever challenges Fernandez’s disability posed.”
― Beth Linker, War's Waste: Rehabilitation in World War I America

“arrangement. First the soldier was to engage in “bedside occupation”—a phase necessary to “buck up” the soldiers—which would be followed by training in the curative workshops housed at military hospitals.”
― Beth Linker, War's Waste: Rehabilitation in World War I America

“These women adhered strictly to the “no pain, no gain” philosophy of physical training. To administer a light touch, “feel good” massage would have endangered their professional reputation (they might have been mistaken for prostitutes) while also undermining the process of remasculinization.”
― Beth Linker, War's Waste: Rehabilitation in World War I America

“One might think that as a country almost always involved in a military operation of one kind or another, the United States would be accustomed to and prepared for injured soldiers coming home. Yet this is not the case. Conflicts during the twenty years prior to Iraq (Grenada, the Gulf War, Somalia, and the Balkans) produced relatively few US causalities and thus never stressed the home front medical system as the current war has. Not since the Vietnam War has Walter Reed seen thousands of returning wounded soldiers, some needing months, if not years, of medical care.8”
― Beth Linker, War's Waste: Rehabilitation in World War I America

“Why? Because the ethic of rehabilitation, established almost a century ago, lives on.”
― Beth Linker, War's Waste: Rehabilitation in World War I America