A Disability History of the United States

In Chapter 5, Nielsen focuses on the years following the Civil War and examines the ways in which the definition, perception, and consequences of disability changed during this time. Because of the devastation of the war, in which more than 620,000 people were killed and hundreds of thousands more became physically and psychologically disabled, disability became more visible across the nation, and medical advances began taking place. The primary consequence of the war—namely, emancipation—meant new experiences of disability for African Americans and renewed national debates about race, but another consequence was the sheer number of veterans with disabilities who were without employment. One solution to the latter was the creation of the Invalid Corps in 1863, which put nearly 20,000 disabled veterans to work. Another solution was the continuation of veterans’ pensions begun after the Revolutionary War. Because disability pensions were reliant on medical determinations, “the pension system once again defined disability as incapacity to perform manual labor” (86). Nielsen argues that “wartime made disability heroic—but only for male veterans, and only for men with physical, and visibly exhibited, disabilities” (87).

Nielsen argues that as a consequence of “ugly laws,” in which cities banned “diseased” and “maimed” individuals from public spaces and prohibited street beggars, people with disabilities were made invisible.