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One of the wheelchair brigade (1970)
Oct. 3rd, 2021 08:22 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hedgebirdWe owe this one totanaqui, digging in the depths of the digital archives: thank you again, Tanaqui, for taking the trouble to find it.
"One of the wheelchair brigade" is a 1000-word article by Rosemary Sutcliff published in The Times (her usual newspaper, according to her godson Anthony Lawton) a few days before the UK passed the Chronically Sick and Disabled Persons Act, a bill that expanded basic services for people with disabilities. In it she describes her own condition and some of the problems it caused beyond just the physical.
You can read a quick explanation of the Act on health.org.uk. Details of the encounter with the patronizing lady can be found in Sutcliff's later "Emotions in Focus" piece. Her memoir, Blue Remembered Hills, is also a good place to learn more about how her disability affected her life (though if that sounds depressing, rest assured the book is anything but.) And I assume it's just a coincidence, but 1970 was also the year Sutcliff published The Witch's Brat, starring one of her most visibly disabled heroes: Lovel, an infirmarian monk with a congenital hunched back and club foot, who invents a medieval version of physical therapy for an injured patient.
( Read more... )
tanaqui, digging in the depths of the digital archives: thank you again, Tanaqui, for taking the trouble to find it."One of the wheelchair brigade" is a 1000-word article by Rosemary Sutcliff published in The Times (her usual newspaper, according to her godson Anthony Lawton) a few days before the UK passed the Chronically Sick and Disabled Persons Act, a bill that expanded basic services for people with disabilities. In it she describes her own condition and some of the problems it caused beyond just the physical.
You can read a quick explanation of the Act on health.org.uk. Details of the encounter with the patronizing lady can be found in Sutcliff's later "Emotions in Focus" piece. Her memoir, Blue Remembered Hills, is also a good place to learn more about how her disability affected her life (though if that sounds depressing, rest assured the book is anything but.) And I assume it's just a coincidence, but 1970 was also the year Sutcliff published The Witch's Brat, starring one of her most visibly disabled heroes: Lovel, an infirmarian monk with a congenital hunched back and club foot, who invents a medieval version of physical therapy for an injured patient.
( Read more... )
