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10 Issues L. & Med. 401 (1994-1995)
Slapping up Spastics: The Persistence of Social Attitudes Toward People with Diabilities

handle is hein.journals/ilmed10 and id is 431 raw text is: Slapping Up Spastics: The Persistence of Social Attitudes Toward People with Disabilities Hugh Gregory Gallagher, M.A.* If the physician presumes to take into consideration in his work whether a life has value or not, the consequences are boundless and the physician becomes the most dangerous man in the state.' A Personal Statement I am the author of By Trust Betrayed: Patients, Physicians, and the License to Kill in the Third Reich.2 I am a historian; I am also a severely disabled person, a polio quadriplegic. As such, I am interested in the evolution of social attitudes and assumptions towards disabled people. It is my conviction that the underlying assumptions that made possible the killing by physicians of upwards of two hundred thousand disabled German citizens in the 1930s and 1940s are still widely held, not just in Germany but throughout the Western industrialized world. The purpose of this article, as of my book, is to make the reader aware of these assumptions and of the evil that can arise from their careless application. *Author, historian and public affairs advisor; European business consultant and publisher of a policy analysis newsletter; author of the Architectural Barriers Act of 1968, the first national disability rights legislation. B.A., magna cum laude, Claremont College, 1956; B.A., M.A., Oxford University, 1959; Visiting Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars at the Smithsonian Institution, 1981-82; and Visiting Scholar at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, Georgetown University, 1987-89. He is at present a consultant at the Library of Congress and the United States Holocaust Museum. This article was presented at the Inaugural Conference, Dec. 5-8, 1993, at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C. 'FREDRIC WERTHAM, A SIGN FOR CAIN: AN EXPLORATION OF HUMAN VIOLENCE 153 (1968) (quoting Christoph Hufeland, an Eighteenth Century German Physician). 2HUGH G. GALLAGHER, BY TRUST BETRAYED: PATIENTS, PHYSICIANS, AND THE LICENSE TO KILL IN THE THIRD REICH (1990).

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