Functional health: The utilitarian discourse of disability

The normalization of those who had disabilities played a special role in the discourse of the Czechoslovak ideologues about the new health care during the 1920s. Having disabled people participate in building the nation highlighted a heroic past and a promising future – because the main target groups of normalization were war veterans and children with physical as well as mental disabilities. The Czechoslovak official ideology proclaimed the systematic reform of care for the disabled, providing options for its normalization: “The world war brought the care of the handicapped back to the state of the Middle Ages.” Remarkably, people with disabilities gained a twofold status, as those whose lives were aggravated by the war, and as those who were unable to make a positive contribution due to the postwar hardship of the Czechoslovak people: “The permanently impaired are those who remain the most abandoned Cinderellas of our social health care. Sustainable care of these unhappiest people is not only profound for the national economy but also reconciles the life of ordinary people.”

By summarizing the problem of disability, the ideologues of public health reform attacked the dependence of those with disabilities on others’ care as blocking the dignity of not only the individuals but of society in general: “The main risk for those who were handicapped was to remain beggarly creatures who are sentenced to the care and charity of their surroundings.” Thus, the ability to work was seen as “the only one way to provide, essential for the existence of individuals and society, the true gold treasure of the state, labor has become a precious outstanding and wanted value.”