Day 1: Holocaust Museum

I had known going into the museum that disabled individuals were among the first genocide victims in Nazi Germany.  I assumed that disabled bodies posed some sort of affront to the aesthetics of physical perfection the Nazis valued so much, but I never considered the erasure of disability on a social level.  Throughout the museum, quotations from German soldiers compared their state to a single living organism, and one officer referred to Hitler as “The great physician of our body politic.”   Non-Aryan members of society were imperfections that could only weaken an otherwise healthy body.  One display case actually ranked various races of the world in terms of their value to an ideal society.  Jews were considered the worst.  They were compared to parasites because they not only failed to contribute to the health of the social body, they also weakened other races (the quotation that explains this claim does not provide evidence to support it).  The entire Holocaust was an attempt to erase disability from German society, even after the focus of concentration camps shifted away from literally disabled persons.

Erasing disability was more than just an aesthetic choice.  It was also economic.  In addition to funding concentration camps, the German government was fighting a costly war.  Some of the first victims of disability genocide were elderly people in state-run facilities, and the decision to euthanize most of those patients came from a cost-benefit analysis of what they could provide economically vs the cost of care.  All the food an elderly person consumed was less food for the troops.

Day 1, part 2: American History Museum

Thanks to the wonderful Katherine Ott, one of the museum’s curators, our class got a behind the scenes look at many disability artifacts.  Katherine had them all laid out on a table for us to study, and then she presented each one.  Before explaining each artifact, she would ask the class to guess its function.  We finished with an abysmal record.  Some of the artifacts were exotic or absurd and looked nothing like modern versions.  Some of the most interesting artifacts were the ones designed to help disabled people pass for non-disabled.  For example, Katherine showed as a hearing aid consisting of an earpiece connected to a long tube.  Rather than include a bulky amplifier as part of the aid, people used to hook up their aids to amplifiers hidden in potted plants.  Katherine showed us a collection of glass eyes and explained how they were custom-fitted and colored.  She even showed us a “night eye” that was dilated for evening wear.  Katherine also had a few prosthetic legs.  One was colored to look like a caucasian leg and was fitted with a business shoe.  Another leg was clearly artificial and made of metal, but Katherine explained that it was much more comfortable and functional than the one made to pass.  The effort that people would put forth in order to pass, both in terms of money and hassle, illuminates the power of disability stigma in the time when these artifacts were used.

Day 2: Air and Space Museum

I searched for lapses in accessibility inside the museum, but couldn’t find anything significant.  Text in the display cases is low enough to be visible by someone in a wheelchair and every part of the museum is accessible by ramp or elevator.  There aren’t really any disability artifacts here.  Anyone who has seen GATTACA knows that disability has no place in space travel, at least not yet.  Astronauts have to be in perfect physical condition.  The one problem I had with accessibility is that the ramp on the Constitution Avenue side was far to the side of the building and required a significant detour for someone in a wheelchair to enter the museum.  This architectural choice made the museum seem somewhat unwelcoming, but at least they were not totally unwilling to accommodate their mobility-impaired guests.