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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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46  

Shakespeare's learned and philosophic contemporary, Lord Bacon, in his "Essay on Deformity" strikes a similar note, holding that "deformed persons are commonly even with Nature; for as Nature hath done ill by them, so do they by Nature, being for the most part . . . void of natural affection."

47  

Writing almost two centuries after Shakespeare, Schiller, in his earliest play, "The Robbers," presents an interesting parallel to Shakespeare's Richard III in the figure of Franz Moor, who says:

48  

I have potent reasons to be out with Nature, and my honor I shall press them all . . . Why did she burden me with this load of ugliness? Why me, of all people? . . . Verily, I believe she threw into a single heap all the despicable elements of mankind, and baked me therefrom. Death and devils! Who gave her the authority to dower others with this and that, and to withhold these things from me?

49  

Later he cries out, pathetically enough, as if with a laugh of grim irony:

50  

But is it just to damn a man because of his deformity? In the most wretched of cripples there may shine a great and lovable soul, like a ruby buried in mud.

51  

In conformity with medieval tradition, Goethe in "Faust" provides Mephisto with a limp. Stevenson's genial cutthroats in "Treasure Island" are variously mutilated; and even one of our own present-day novelists has a penchant for legless and one-eyed villains!

52  

But, from the end of the eighteenth century down, literature has grown increasingly rich in imaginative works that are not obsessed with this idea of a relation between physical and moral deformity. From Quasimodo to Little Eyolf, from Tiny Tim to Richard Calmady, the cripple has been presented with a freshness of vision and a realistic insight that mark the dawn of a new era for this social castaway. Perhaps the change cannot be more strikingly indicated than in the following translation from "an old manuscript" first published in 1806; in its lonesomeness, its resignation, its poignant imagery, the little poem is a most revealing bit of the true psychology of the cripple under adverse social conditions:

53  

Dear hand of God!
Lighten my heart,
Help me to find
Fun in my smart.
Methinks the dear Lord
At toss-ball doth play,
The harder he strikes me.
The higher my way.

54  

Or I am a sapling
A garden within,
God is the gard'ner
And bends me to Him,
He cuts me and prunes me
And bends every limb,
So I may grow upward
And nearer to Him.

55  

Oh, let me proclaim it,
God cuts to the bone,
He chips me and hews me,
But I make no moan,
You marvel and wonder?
I think it His wish
To sculpture an angel
Out of my flesh.

56  

The dawn of a new era! It is probably fair to say that the old era was summed up and the new era prepared for by a Spaniard named Vives who published a book early in the sixteenth century on the subject of the management of the poor -- a book which was translated into several languages and widely read. Vives divided the poor into three classes: those in hospitals and poor-houses, public homeless beggars, the poor at home. He proposed a census of the poor in each town and the collecting of data as to the causes of distress. Then he planned the establishment of a central organization of relief under the magistrates. Beggary was to be strictly prohibited; work was to be provided for all. The non-settled poor who were able-bodied were to be returned to their native homes; the able-bodied settled poor who knew no craft were to be put on some public work -- the undeserving being set to hand labor; for the others, work was to be found, or they were to be assisted to become self-supporting. Hospitals were to be classified to meet the needs of the sick, the blind, the insane. Funds were to be obtained chiefly from private sources and from the church.

57  

The Sorbonne approved this scheme; the city of Ypres put it into effect in 1524; similar plans were adopted in Paris and elsewhere. Queen Elizabeth's Poor Relief Act of 1601 was largely based on it. It was an ambitious scheme for the administrative technique of the age; but, whatever its success, it had in it the seed of a rational approach to the problem of the poor in general and of the disabled and the deformed in particular.

58  

Influenced, it may well be, by this Spanish book, President de Pomponne de Believre founded in France in 1657 an asylum in which the infirm could find suitable work. Despite several sporadic imitations of this project, which later became the Salpetriere, the early measures did not in a strict sense mark the beginnings of care for cripples, but they operated to the ultimate advantage of those who, by reason of their infirmity, were cast upon the pity of their fellow men. The actuating motive of provision in many cases, however, was utilitarian in character. One object -- an object avowed by Vives, for instance -- was that all cripples might be so confined that they should not annoy the community by their deformed appearance, and the streets and highways be rid of beggars.

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