Gian Antonio Stella traces the stories of many people, some well-known and some less so, in this accessible essay—their struggles and their remarkable gifts, all shaped by congenital or acquired physical disabilities, mental illness, debilitating disease, and more. Stella is not the first to examine the history of disability, but through rich and compelling citations, he weaves together narratives separated by vast distances of time and place. From Romito 8, a prehistoric skeleton found in the Pollino Park (whose fossil remains reveal a man disabled by a severe fall yet supported and valued by his community) to Jeffrey Hudson—"Lord Minimus"—a marvel of the 17th century for his tiny stature; or the Viking warrior Ivarr Boneless, probably born without legs, whose story has even made its way into a recent television series. Stella recounts the lives of artists and poets—Frida Kahlo, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Giacomo Leopardi—and, more recently, the contrasting fates of Rosemary Kennedy and Anne De Gaulle, among many others. The book casts a wide net, sometimes perhaps too wide, encompassing disability in all its forms. The title itself speaks to how each person relates to the "different"—to what lies outside the norm. Stella sets the stage by declaring that "words matter and they don't. Facts matter. And to truly understand them, we must move back and forth through history." He presents stories capable of making us reconsider how society views, explains, and "treats" disability—difference—through the eyes of the non-disabled. The book pairs personal narratives with the arc of philosophical and scientific thought across centuries, tracing humanity's illusory pursuit of perfection and its urge to eliminate what does not fit the ideal.
Yet nothing seems comparable, in scope or speed, to what happened less than eighty years ago: the systematic murder of thousands of innocent people in Nazi Germany. The program was called Action T4. It began with forced sterilization, then escalated to the complete elimination of those deemed a useless burden on society—people left to starve to death simply because they were deemed "unfit." The book devotes two central chapters to the events and the people who justified, imagined, and carried out this horror—but also to the rare courageous few who found the strength to resist and speak out openly. What strikes us are the letters of the diligent bureaucrat, the behavior of the mediocre ambitious doctor, the soulless intellectual, the blind devotion of the nurse—individual cogs that, together with countless others, supported, shared, and enacted Hitler's murderous racial purification. Set against these are the brave homilies of Bishop Clemens von Galen, the defiant words of Dr. Friedrich Holzel as he resigned from his "repugnant" post, and the resignation of magistrate Lothar Kreyssig, who found his work incompatible with the greater good he felt called to serve.
What also strikes us is recognizing that eugenic thinking did not begin with the Nazis—and cannot be confined to their catastrophic choices. Stella traces the history of eugenic thought and shows that, setting aside Plato and Aristotle (whose ideas must be understood in context), the eugenic ideology behind Action T4 had illustrious precursors and admirers far beyond Nazi Germany. In ancient times, myths and divine punishment justified the elimination of the imperfect; in modern times, cold rationalism and pseudo-scientific claims have served the same purpose, emerging in different places and eras—from Cesare Lombroso to Peter Singer, from England to the United States to Japan to Scandinavia. The troubling impression is that certain psychological drives have not changed at all with modernity and scientific progress. Neither Christian teaching, despite Christ's clear words and eloquent deeds, has managed to stem the tide. Throughout history, this pursuit of the flawless human—what Stella describes as a "subterranean river"—has continued carving its channels through the depths of thought, conscience, and social life, surfacing again and again, masked as progress, utility, and so much else.
Read this book so that you might feel yourself a vital participant in the battle evoked in its subtitle. The faces we encounter are those who somehow managed to remain part of the historical record. They are our way of remembering all those who were literally "removed" from it.
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