Recycling The Disabled

Examines the "medical organisation" of Imperial Germany for total war

This book examines the 'medical organisation' of Imperial Germany for total war. Faced with mounting casualties and a growing labour shortage, German military, industrial and governmental officials turned to medical experts for assistance in the total mobilisation of society. Through an investigation of developments in orthopaedic medicine, prosthetic technology, military medical organisation and the cultural history of disability, Heather Perry reveals how the pressures of modern industrial warfare not only transformed medical ideas and treatments for injured soldiers, but also transformed social and cultural expectations of the disabled body - expectations that long outlasted the war. This book is ideal for scholars and students interested in war, medicine, disability, science and technology, and modern Germany.

This valuable resource is written for therapists and teachers, vocational instructors, parents, and all environmentalists who wish to use their ingenuity to create useful therapy products from common objects. Author Barbara Smith, M.S., OTR, reasons that when she finds alternative uses for plastics and recycles them, not only does she avoid having to purchase the material, but she also reduces the amount of waste deposited in the environment. Many a pattern can be carved from a plastic bottle. Cut a large detergent bottle to provide a surface for weaving. Snip off narrow bottle necks and use them as rings on a dowel. Cut off a hollow bottle handle, and you have something to fit a peg inside, or cut up that same bottle to make disks for stringing on a colorful length of discarded jump rope. For imaginary play, cut out space boats and weird helmets. The possibilities are endless! The therapy products described in this book are made mostly-if not entirely-from recycled throwaways. These materials are easily collected, free, and versatile. The products can be used over and over again, and creating them can be fun and rewarding. The products and activities are presented in three categories-fine-motor activities, gross-motor activities, and sensory activities. The activities are presented in a cookbook fashion, with a brief description of the material or activity, a list of needed materials, construction directions, and suggested uses and adaptations. The Appendixes provide six lists for guidance in planning of activities for clients. Terms used throughout the book are defined in the Glossary. Although the activities in this 155-page manual are designed for adults with developmental disabilities, many are appropriate for clients of all ages, with or without developmental delays.

Representing the best of cutting-edge scholarship in First World War studies, this anthology demonstrates how conversations among historians across international and cross-disciplinary boundaries enhances our understanding of this global conflict.

This study traces how the environmental effects of industrialization reverberated through the cinema of Germany’s Weimar Republic. In the early twentieth century, hygiene encompassed the myriad attempts to create healthy spaces for life and work amid the pollution, disease, accidents, and noise of industrial modernity. Examining classic films—including The Last Laugh, Faust, and Kuhle Wampe—as well as documentaries, cinema architecture, and studio practices, Paul Dobryden demonstrates how cinema envisioned and interrogated hygienic concerns about environmental disorder. Framing hygiene within the project of national reconstruction after World War I, The Hygienic Apparatus explores cinema’s material contexts alongside its representations of housework, urban space, traffic, pollution, disability, aging, and labor. Reformers worried about the health risks associated with moviegoing but later used film to popularize hygienic ideas, encouraging viewers to see the world and themselves in relation to public health objectives. Modernist architecture and design fashioned theaters into regenerative environments for fatigued spectators. Filmmakers like F. W. Murnau and Slatan Dudow, meanwhile, explored the aesthetic and political possibilities of dirt, contagion, intoxication, and disorder. Dobryden recovers a set of ecological and biopolitical concerns to show how the problem of environmental disorder fundamentally shaped cinema’s relationship to modernity. As accessible as it is persuasive, the book adds to a growing body of scholarship on biopolitics within German studies and reveals fresh ways of understanding the apparatus of Weimar cinema.