Rosemary Kennedy

, may she rest in peace. There's a whole awful history of disability in the last century in her biography: the botched delivery that probably led to her mild retardation, the secrecy about her disability, the hideous medical procedure (because who knew about behavioral intervention, ach). I did a little webcrawling and came across some fantastically hateful stuff--unsurprising, I guess.

Though last night I was reading about Helen Keller to the kids, and I was thinking about how astoundingly progressive, really, her family and education had been: the hero in Helen's story is Teacher, but what about the parents who took her to doctor after doctor, specialist after specialist, to get help for their little girl?