The secret malady: venereal disease in eighteenth-century Britain and France

the National Foundation and that only in the 1960s, when it began to accept federal funding, was it forced to admit African-American patients and care-givers. In his analysis of the British Polio Fellowship, founded in 1939, which he defines as "an organization of the disabled run by the disabled themselves" (p. 165), Gould points out the frequent tensions between the disabled and the able-bodied caregivers and teachers who believed they could better speak for their charges. Gould also underscores the crucial role of professional salespeople and advertising executives in organizing and directing the National Foundation, a role that did not vanish after the fiasco of the 1935 vaccine trials. Disappointingly, he does not discuss the work of the Foundation's propaganda department and its wide-ranging production of posters, pamphlets, magazines and movie previews, which played a powerful role in shaping the image of disease and disability in American popular culture. What is new and important about this book is largely presented in the provocative final chapters. Here Gould offers moving tales by women and men, informed by the self-conscious awareness among many polio "survivors" (to use Gould's term) that their experiences-both medical and social-were at once unique and part of a larger shared ordeal. These stories from adults remembering a disabled childhood and youth in the 1930s to the 1960s are gripping and disturbing. Gould's informants-over a dozen tell a full story-talk about sex, personal identity, family relations, and medical care and abuse, often in a calm matter-of-fact tone that Gould intends to be shocking. There are some well-known people-like pop singer Ian Dury and polio rehabilitation specialist Lauro Halstead-but most are unknown outside polio circles. Many of the speakers are angry about medical and therapeutic policies that their families and care-takers tried to teach them, which emphasized mainstreaming and denied difference. These sections offer a powerful contribution to the social history of disability.