Library Collections: Document: Full Text


The Disabled Soldier

Creator: Douglas C. McMurtrie (author)
Date: 1919
Publisher: The Macmillan Company, New York
Source: Available at selected libraries
Figures From This Artifact: Figure 2  Figure 3  Figure 4  Figure 5  Figure 6  Figure 7  Figure 8  Figure 9  Figure 10  Figure 11  Figure 12  Figure 13  Figure 14  Figure 15  Figure 16  Figure 17  Figure 18  Figure 19  Figure 20  Figure 21  Figure 22  Figure 23  Figure 24  Figure 25  Figure 26

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The literary and scientific obligations of the author are extensive and almost too numerous to detail. It has not seemed feasible in a work of this kind to burden the text with footnotes and references, so an endeavor will be made to acknowledge the main sources of personal assistance and data. Most vital help has been freely given by members of the staff of the Red Cross Institute for Crippled and Disabled Men, among them Dr. J. C. Faries, Mr. Howard R. Heydon, Mr. Harry Birnbaum, Mrs. Donald Whiteside, Miss Florence Sullivan, Miss Gertrude Stein, Miss Ruth Underhill, Mr. Alexander Gourvich, Mr. Gustav Schulz, and Miss Letty L. Davis. Mr. Jeremiah Milbank, also of the Institute, and a distinguished benefactor in the cause of the cripple, has been so kind as to write the introduction. These staff colleagues have not only helped generously in many ways during the preparation of the manuscript, but have also read the proofs to check them for accuracy and to offer suggestions. Their part in the production is most cordially appreciated.

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The individual chapters have been read by various authorities, to whom I am indebted for criticisms and suggestions and checking as to accuracy of statement -- the chapter on "First Steps to Self-Support" by Lt.-Col. Casey A. Wood, M. C., U. S. A. and by Dr. Herbert J. Hall, of Marblehead, Mass.; "The New Schoolhouse" by Mr. W. E. Segsworth, Director of Vocational Training of the Invalided Soldiers' Commission of Canada, and by Dr. James C. Miller, now on the staff of the Federal Board for Vocational Education; the chapter entitled "Hors de Combat" by Lt.-Col. David Silver, M. C., U.S.A.; "Out of the Darkness" by Lt.-Col. James Bordley, M. C., U. S. A., and director of the Red Cross Institute for the Blind, and by Mr. C. F. F. Campbell, of the same Institute; "In Wake of Battle's Din" by Lt.-Col. Charles W. Richardson, M. C., U. S. A.; "The Step in Time" by Dr. Henry Barton Jacobs and by Mr. William H. Baldwin, treasurer of the National Association for the Study and Prevention of Tuberculosis; "Brink of the Chasm" by Major George H. Kirby, M.C., U.S.A.; "For the U. S. Forces" by Mr. Curtis E. Lakeman, of the Department of Civilian Relief of the American Red Cross. I have further received much of value from the comments and correspondence of Miss Grace Harper and Captain H. W. Miller, both with the American Red Cross in France.

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For the use of photographs illustrating the reconstruction of disabled American soldiers, I am indebted to the Instruction Laboratory of the Surgeon General, U. S. Army.

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From the literature much data has been gleaned. Some of the principal authors to whom acknowledgment should be made are Eugene Brieux, Dr. Maurice Bourrillon, Leon de Paeuw, Gustave Hirschfeld, Prof. Ettore Levi, Sir John Collie, Major Robert Mitchell, John Galsworthy, Sir Arthur Pearson, A. G. Baker, Dr. Konrad Biesalski, Dr. J. R. Byers, Dr. J. Dundas Grant, Lt.-Col. E. N. Thornton.

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The book has been set up in the printing department of the Red Cross Institute. The care taken by Miss Inez Rodimon, Mr. William J. Howe, and Mr. Aage Petersen, of the staff of that department, in putting the manuscript into type has materially lessened the work of the author.

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It may be noted in passing that the royalties on this volume have been assigned to the Red Cross Institute for Crippled and Disabled Men, as the director of which the writer has been privileged to serve in a volunteer capacity.

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Douglas C. McMurtrie
311 Fourth Avenue
New York

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CHAPTER I
A RECORD OF INJUSTICE

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Beyond reaches of history, the disabled man has been a castaway of society. In the far east, the tribes of ancient India turned out their deformed members to wander in the wilderness and perish of exposure; here in America, among the Aztecs, deformed persons were sacrificed in time of famine and need, or on the death of kings and great men.

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The disabled wolf is torn to pieces by the pack; primitive society abandoned, expelled, put to death its disabled and deformed members. Superstition was no doubt partly responsible for this savage practice, but it is conceivable that it was in great measure due to purely material considerations. In an age when life was a bare-handed struggle against starvation and death from man and beast, the tribe must have felt that its crippled members were useless if not dangerous burdens. They had to perish in the ruthless struggle for existence.

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In the course of time, primitive man came to anticipate the operation of the natural law of selection by putting the deformed to death as soon as they were born.

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Yet, with the dawn of civilization and the development of pastoral and agricultural life, the condition of the cripple did not improve to the extent that might have been expected. Oriental peoples turned forth their cripples to wander in the wilderness, the inhabitants of India cast them into the Ganges, the Spartans hurled them from a precipice, the Hebrews banished them so that their cripples had perforce to beg by the roadsides. The exposure of deformed and "superfluous" infants remained a widespread and long-lived practice. Among some peoples the motives underlying these customs were intentionally eugenic, in a primitive way; in general, however, they seem to have been partly economic and partly superstitious. With regard to the latter, the superstitious motives, it is a curious fact that whereas primitive peoples have frequently found something sacred -- a touch of the divine -- in persons afflicted with disorders of the mind, bodily deformity seems to have been quite generally regarded as a blight sent by the gods, a punishment for sin, evidence of traffic with devils.

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