This year, the official theme for Disability History Month is “Disability, Life and Death.” This theme addresses concerns about the legislation being considered in parliament regarding assisted suicide and how it could be used against disabled people. Instead, as explained by the DHM website, it should be the responsibility of our society to properly accommodate disabled people to be able to live their lives to the fullest. They also address the history of ideas that have attacked disabled people’s right to life, including the history of eugenics and the sterilisation or mass murder campaigns that it led to.
From the 20th of November through December, a collection of History Faculty Library material will be displayed on this topic in the Upper Gladstone Link of the Radcliffe Camera. In addition, a selection of relevant e-resources have been listed below. Please click on the book cover pictures to be taken to the SOLO catalogue record for each resource. For further reading on the subject of disability history, please check out our LibGuide by clicking here.
Books featured on the display from the top left:
“War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race” by Edwin Black | “Disability in Eighteenth Century England: Imagining Physical Impairment” by David Turner | “The Routledge History of Disability” edited by Roy Hanes | “Ramping Up Rights: An Unfinished History of British Disability Activism” by Rachel Charlton-Dailey | “The Problem of Mental Deficiency: Eugenics, Democracy and Social Policy in Britain c.1870-1959” by Mathew Thomson | “Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court and Buck v. Bell” by Paul Lombardo | “Death and Deliverance: ‘Euthanasia’ in Germany c.1900-1954” by Michael Burleigh | “Medical Films, Ethics and Euthanasia in Nazi Germany: The History of Medical Research and Teaching Films of the Reich Office for Educational Films– Reich Institute for Films in Science and Education, 1933-1945” by Ulf Schmidt | “Treatment Without Consent: Law, Psychiatry and the Treatment of Mentally Disordered People Since 1845” by Phil Fennell | “A Historical Sociology of Disability: Human Validity and Invalidity from Antiquity to Early Modernity” by Bill Hughes | “Colonising Disability: Impairment and Otherness Across Britain and its Empire c. 1800-1914” by Esme Cleall | “A History of Disability in England: From the Medieval Period to the Present Day” by Simon Jarrett.
Accessing these e-resource materials will require a Single-Sign-On Login for Oxford University members. External readers will need to log in with their Bodleian accounts while using the Bodleian libraries network (either the Bodleian Libraries Wi-fi network or using the reader PCs within the library.)
