Master of His Fate James Tobin (free e books to read online .txt) 📖

make sense for FDR to continue this sort of treatment over the winter in New York, perhaps with Miss Plastridge herself? He must not lose the progress he was making through another long spell of inactivity. In fact, Pope offered to pay Plastridge’s fee as a token of gratitude for what FDR had already done for Margaret by establishing the center at Warm Springs.

So it was that Alice Lou Plastridge, suitcase in hand, found herself face-to-face with Sara Delano Roosevelt, who opened the big front door in Hyde Park on the day after Thanksgiving.

Miss Plastridge had grown up in a small town in the Green Mountains of Vermont, about two hundred miles north of the Roosevelt estate. At Mount Holyoke College she was trained as a teacher in physical education and gymnastics, but in 1914 she took a summer course at Harvard in the treatment of scoliosis, an inherited condition that causes painful curvature of the spine. The man in charge was none other than Dr. Robert Lovett, who soon hired Plastridge to work in his clinic, where she learned physical therapy. In 1917, with many young polio patients in need of treatment, Lovett urged her to open her own practice in Chicago. Though she was only in her twenties, she became one of the first physical therapists in the city. She held to the no-nonsense tenets that she and Helena Mahoney had learned at the Lovett clinic. “It is rarely if ever too late to do constructive work, for improvement will continue for a period of years if proper treatment is given—and continued,” she wrote. But “it is extremely discouraging because improvement is so slow.”

When Henry Pope proposed that she spend a month with the Roosevelts in New York, she said later, “I knew at the end of five years [since the onset of FDR’s paralysis] one month was a drop in the bucket.” But Pope was so keen on the idea that she agreed to spend Thanksgiving through Christmas with the Roosevelts.

Lovett, Wright, Mahoney, and Plastridge believed polio survivors enjoyed the right to live full, rich, independent lives to the greatest extent possible. As they plotted therapeutic strategies and tactics, the first physical therapists operated with a deeply practical understanding of everything patients were up against. It wasn’t just the paralysis or weakness of a damaged muscle. It was the way people looked at them when they moved their arms or legs awkwardly, and the false conclusions people drew about those awkward movements—that polio survivors were best shut away in back rooms and sanitariums, where “normal” people wouldn’t have to see them. These notions about people with disabilities were summed up by the word stigma, which in medieval times referred to a burn made on the skin with a hot iron, something like a tattoo, signifying disgrace. Stigma was worse than muscular weakness. It was not too far from a criminal’s sentence to banishment from society.

The physical therapists knew the stigma of disability was deeply unjust, but they also knew it was powerful. They could not dispel it by themselves, and certainly not overnight, perhaps not ever. So to fight the stigma, they taught their patients how to make their movements as normal as possible.

Many years later, disabled people would start to ask: If the stigma lies in the minds of the able-bodied, why are we the ones who have to change? Why don’t they change the way they think? But not in the 1920s. For the early physical therapists, learning to walk “like normal” was partly for safety and partly for speed, but it was also, as Plastridge put it, so that “limps and distorted positions shall not become conspicuous.” A key aim of “corrective walking,” she advised, must be “moving quietly and steadily without needless body, leg or arm motions which would attract attention to the disability.”

This was Plastridge’s mindset as she prepared to work with Franklin Roosevelt. It was perfectly suited to the new goal FDR had described to Helena Mahoney in Warm Springs—to “walk into a room without scaring everybody half to death.”

Many years later, Plastridge remembered being received at Hyde Park as graciously as if she had been the queen of Spain. First Sara greeted her warmly, then Eleanor, then Anna. As the women moved into the spacious library, chatting as they walked, Plastridge heard a man’s rich tenor voice calling from the far end of the room: “Well, aren’t you ever going to come and speak to me?”

At Plastridge’s orders, the Roosevelts once again had a long wooden slab laid across sawhorses in FDR’s bedroom, and again he was helped to stretch out on the slab for daily exercises, just as he had done with Kathleen Lake five years earlier. When Plastridge got him up on his crutches, she immediately saw just how little he had learned about how to use them. In his long sessions with Dr. McDonald in Massachusetts, when the focus had been strengthening the muscles, he had all but abandoned his efforts at smoother, steadier walking with crutches and canes. He would swing the crutches far out ahead of his body and bring them crashing down with such force that she thought the floor would give way, then drag his limp legs forward by the strength of his arms and upper body alone.

After two weeks of workouts she could see no gain in strength and no improvement in his crutch-walking. “I knew we weren’t getting anywhere because there wasn’t any motion in his legs,” she said later. “I didn’t know what I was going to do.”

Then one day he sat down too hard in a chair and hurt his back, leaving him in considerable pain.

When Plastridge appeared at his door the next morning, he grumbled: “What are you here for? Didn’t you know I hurt my back?”

She had heard many such excuses from other patients.

“I thought maybe I could do a little work with you,” she replied. “Will it hurt your back to move your