Douglas C. McMurtrie Cripples Collection

Format:

Book

Series:

History of Disabilities: Disabilities in Society, Seventeenth to Twentieth Century.

History of Disabilities: Disabilities in Society, Seventeenth to Twentieth Century

Language:

English

French

German

Italian

Multiple languages

Subjects (All):

People with disabilities.

People with disabilities--Rehabilitation.

Children with disabilities.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (272 volumes) : illustrations.

Place of Publication:

1864

Language Note:

In English, French, German, Italian, and others.

Summary:

The History of Disabilities program provides access to primary sources written using terminology that was in common use by the medical establishment and general society at the time, and describes diagnoses, methodologies, procedures, and treatments that may no longer be used or were debunked by later research. Users may come across words and expressions describing individuals and groups that they find condescending, upsetting, disconcerting, offensive, and not acceptable today. MiFhGG

The use of the term "Cripples" in the collection title is intentional; this is a historical term used by McMurtrie to name the collection he created. It is used here in its historical connotation as commonly employed by society during the 19th and early 20th centuries. Douglas McMurtrie was the director of the Red Cross Institute for Crippled and Disabled Men around the time of the First World War. The Douglas McMurtrie Cripples Collection consists of 300 bound volumes. The volumes contain approximately 3,500 separate books, pamphlets, reports, and articles from the European continent, North America, and the United Kingdom and its Dominions. McMurtrie assembled a huge library of materials about the disabled, and about rehabilitation. The Cripples Collection examines disability and the disabled (especially children). Most of this material dates to the 1910s and the early 1920s. The McMurtrie collection provides a window into the development of rehabilitative care in the early twentieth century, demonstrating that transnational medical networks operated and expanded throughout the First World War and that the transmission of information and ideology often went hand in hand. McMurtrie espoused the "gospel of rehabilitation"--an insistence on returning the disabled man to independence and self-sufficiency that he might eschew charity and compete fairly in the labor marketplace. McMurtrie was deeply interested in the cause of rehabilitation of the disabled, not just for soldiers returning from the battlefields of the First World War, but for all who lived with disabilities, especially children. Aside from leading the Red Cross Institute for Crippled and Disabled Men as Director, McMurtrie was a talented printer, typographer, bibliographer, and book binder, which is one reason his collection is wonderfully bound and cataloged. While the majority of Disabilities in Society, Seventeenth to Twentieth Century is made up of materials written in English, the McMurtrie collection is the exception as we wanted to keep the collection cohesive as McMurtrie meant it to be. His collection contains content mainly in English, but also some German and French and a few other Western languages. The McMurtrie collection at the New York Academy of Medicine consists of two sections: the War Cripples Collection and the Cripples Collection. Portions of the War Cripples collection were used in another digitization project and thus could not be used for this project. Nevertheless, the other project never looked at the other half of the collection--the "Cripples" volumes--which contain a substantial, curated collection of material about disabilities globally, with a particular focus on children. McMurtrie's collection is an astonishing record of a particular moment in disability history. It demonstrates how social attitudes toward people with disabilities began to change, and how the medical profession, scientists, and inventors began shift their focus toward rehabilitation, independence, and self-sufficiency.

Notes:

Date range: 1864-1919.

Reproduction of the original from the New York Academy of Medicine.

OCLC:

1477836903