An IASH Work-in-Progress seminar, delivered online-only by Dr Hilary Buxton (American Philosophical Society Fellow, June-July 2024)
Decolonizing Care: Race, Disability, and Military Medicine across the First World War Empire
The First World War generated radically new ways of treating and politicizing the bodily and psychological effects of war. This voluminous history has focused primarily on white soldiers. Yet 1914 to 1918 also saw the largest single labor migration within the British Empire to date, as nearly three million non-white troops volunteered to fight far from home. My project tells the stories of these soldiers’ journeys through medical and military bureaucracies, exploring how the intimate interactions between patient and carer mapped onto the greater constellation of war and colonialism. The history of medical treatment for colonial forces reveals the extraordinary role of wounded, debilitated, and disabled colonial subjects in determining their own care, making the knowledge that sought to treat them. The result was a mixed legacy of therapies that lasted well into the post-colonial period, carrying with them both groundbreaking empathy and lasting inequality.
In this paper, I examine military prosthetics for colonial servicemen, comparing the ways in which a variety of veterans sought to re-fashion, re-invent, or otherwise alter the form and use of their government-provided limbs. The differentiated distribution of prostheses, and reactions to how veterans used them, became an exercise in determining who deserved limbs – one in which amputees recurrently exercised power in shaping their prosthetics and defining their social value.
Please click the link below to join the webinar:
https://ed-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/81857401179
Passcode: 6aSe7GF7