In the past, language was often a barrier to medical research, to the advancement of the care of humans with a disability, an illness. Today, taking charge of one’s health has expanded, the internet providing the ability to harvest information, be prepared to ask questions. But in the past, when there was no easy access to information, this was not the case.
Consider changes in a person’s mental health or the adult with a language difficulty or barrier. For many years and in many countries, if you didn’t meet certain standards in your actions, your verbal ability, you were often labeled insane and housed in an institution. Though within you were the basic needs to be loved, cared for, you were mistreated, abused, even raped. Many stories surrounding mental hospitals have been unearthed, books written, films made. They often reveal true horror stories.
THE CLASSIFICATION THAT LABELED CHILDREN and ADULTS
Below is a copy of the classification system that was used to label a person’s mental ability. These cruel terms were actually used by doctors, nurses and other health officials.
Idiots. —Those so defective that the mental development never exceeds that of a normal child at two years.
Imbeciles. —Those whose development is higher than that of an idiot, but whose intelligence does not exceed that of a normal child at about seven years.
Morons. —Those whose mental development is above that of an imbecile, but does not exceed that of a normal child at about twelve years.
— Edmund Burke Huey, Backward and Feeble-Minded Children, 1912
ADVANCES IN MENTAL HEALTH
But through research, eventual open-mindedness and always the passage of time, medical professionals and society at large came to understand that poor nutrition, cheap housing, exposure to sick environments, and the lack of love and good parenting contributed to mental ability.
Research and a steady, thorough evaluation of clients led to the defining of conditions like bi-polar disorder, schizophrenia or borderline personality disorder. We now know that people with these conditions often function differently than the norm, but they can still love, live good lives, while benefiting from the medications that are created to help them. Our humanity demands this. All people deserve love, respect, kindness and encouraging human contact.
ADVANCES IN PHYSICAL CARE
But for centuries, physical disabilities usually meant you did not receive everything you needed. Your full personhood was disregarded. You were often labeled: gimp, cripple, and yes, moron. But damn, you were not less of a person.
Yet it took years, even in the supposedly forward thinking USA, for people with disabilities to be understood, to be heard. Now finally, we have become enlightened. We understand that a person who is physically challenged is, of course, a full person–that he or she can work and travel, take care of a family–if they have the help of specific changes that accommodate them, encouraging them to prosper, and always providing their special needs.
MORE LABELS
But in the older, uneducated days, labels were heartless, and they were everywhere. Consider how medical people and medical institutions in England labeled their centers of care: Crippled Children’s Hospital; Chronically Ill Hospital; Insane Asylum. Your diagnosis as you were wheeled in was printed in stone on the front of the building. You were sentenced, these words shouted out that the hospital lacked knowledge, lacked understanding. The hospital actually failed to understand their patients were human, and that being human demands our physical bodies, minds and even our goals and loves to be treated with respect–within that very setting.
And though some persons complain about medicine today, about how hospitals function…there are some sensible reasons for change. Today, hospital stays are shortened, thus allowing the patient to go back to family and society, to live as normal a life as possible, despite the condition he or she has.
(The eye surgery that I have written about, was done when I was five. It required that I stay in the hospital for a week! Yes, a week away from my mother. The surgery also required that BOTH of my eyes were covered with gauze during that time. Someone fed me, put me on the bedpan. I slept on my back with sandbag pillows on either side of my head so I would not move. They also covered my elbows with cardboard discs that prevented me from raising my arms during sleep. My mother could visit for one hour per day, and there was a day when she was unable to come. Bad memories for me.)
Today, that procedure and most others are done in an outpatient setting, requiring maybe four to five hours of recovery, and possibly periodic visits to a medical office post surgery. Because yes, we have come a long way, working to get patients discharged to home, back into society, and thus helping them live as normal a life as possible, with whatever illness or condition they have.
A PERSON IS NOT A DISEASE !
And this is so important: a person is absolutely not the gallbladder in 305 or the rheumatoid arthritis in 312. We are all people who sometimes become ill, and ask our medical community to help us, encourage us, so that we can work our way back to full health–or to the best we can be.
But do we realize that our human body is a gift, and we only get one? When do we really start living in the body that we have been given?
During Covid 19, many of us were more aware than others, following protocols to stay healthy. But there will always be folks who don’t stop smoking until they have Congestive Heart Failure. Teens with genital warts (HPV) who are told they now have Pelvic Inflammatory disease (PID), but are certain the nurse is lying, it being easier to deny the condition, infect others–the point being, that until this person accepts her diagnosis, seeks treatment, she will not be truly LIVING in her body.
HOW HUMANS, ESPECIALLY WOMEN, SUFFERED, DIED
Today, we benefit from modern science as to our mental and physical health. But the connection of mind and body was not always recognized. In the Judeo-Christian history, there was a strong pull to the heavens, away from the earth where living was hard. Cathedrals were built, but the human body was basically ignored.
Medicine was savagely ignorant, the care of one’s body truly suffering. Consider the Black Death, or a farming accident where the cure was to cut off a limb. Many lived their later years with no teeth, or easily became blinded because of injuries. And when sores became septic you died. Women in difficult childbirth often bled to death or became septic, the presence of bacteria not known, doctors with dirty hands probing intimate parts of the female body when assisting in childbirth–until Ignaz Semmelweis taught society about germs!
Often described as the “savior of mothers”, Semmelweis discovered that the incidence of puerperal fever (also known as “childbed fever”) could be drastically cut by the use of hand disinfection in obstetrical clinics. Puerperal fever was common in mid-19th-century hospitals, and was often fatal. Semmelweis introduced the concept of washing of one’s hands in chlorinated lime water before operating. HARD TO BELIEVE, RIGHT? But bacteria was invisible…the world working by only what was evident.
FINAL THOUGHTS
In addition, the body was thought to be secondary. Many suffered, hoping that their pain would be a path to heaven and the afterlife. But today we truly work to LIVE in the body, not to die.
Today, people in medicine are constantly researching, their goal to improve life, cure disease, enable people who are handicapped from birth or from accidents to function as normally as possible. It has always been about living in the body, caring for that body. But today–in so many ways–that task is enlightened, aided by research and knowledge. Now we strive to care for our bodies, to maintain them and our minds…so that we can appreciate the life we have been given.
Suggested Reading:
Unclean Hands; Andrew Schafer MD;
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks; Rebecca Skloot;
Being Mortal; Atul Gawande