Disability advocates across the country are mobilizing to help create understanding and celebrate the history of individuals with disabilities! Since West Virginia passed the first…
The Museum of disABILITY History
1921
Franklin Roosevelt contracts polio. Elected President of the United States in 1932, Roosevelt tries to hide his disability.
American Foundation for the Blind formed. Helen Keller raises funds for the foundation.
1927
Buck v. Bell is heard in the Supreme Court of the United States. The court rules in favor of forced sterilization of the feeble-minded.
1927
Franklin Roosevelt helps to establish the Warm Springs Foundation for the rehabilitation of polio patients in Warm Springs, Georgia. One year later he ran successfully for New York Governor. Roosevelt had visited the naturally warm springs to relieve his paralysis from polio in 1924 and built his home there as well.
1927
The first Iron Lung was invented by Harvard medical researchers Philip Drinker and Louis Agassiz Shaw. Polio patients that had difficulty or were unable to breathe would be placed in the iron machines to aid inflating and deflating the lungs.
1935
The League of the Physically Handicapped is founded in New York City. The League protests discrimination against disabled people regarding placement in federal works programs such as the WPA. They use sit-ins, picket lines and demonstrations to draw attention to their cause.
1940
National Foundation for the Blind is formed in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania by Jacobus ten Broek. They advocate for "white cane laws" for pedestrians to ensure safety and input from the blind for a variety of programs.
American Federation of the Physically Handicapped is formed by Paul Strachan. The group advocates for the end of job discrimination and the establishment of a National Employ the Handicapped Week. In 1958 the federation is dissolved and becomes the National Association of Physically Handicapped.
1941
Rosemary Kennedy is lobotomized and sent to the St. Coletta School in Jefferson, Wisconsin two years later in 1943. She spent 57 years at the school until she passed away at the age of 86.
1943
The classification of autism was introduced by Dr. Leo Kanner of John Hopkins University. Kanner used the term early infantile autism and the characteristics he described in a paper published in The Nervous Child are still included in the autism spectrum of disorder.
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