Walking devices for elderly Central American
Between 1900 and 2000, life expectancy increased by three decades—from 47 to 77—a higher rise in one century than through the entire previous history of humankind. With dramatic changes in life expectancy came switching expectations for individual control of health insurance and purpose in subsequent life.
This poster analyzes changes in a product object—the cane—to explore broader transformations in attitudes and beliefs about aging in twentieth-century America. Into the late nineteenth century, a tremendous selection of canes accompanied the powerful, the stylish, the affluent, the old, the young, the lame, and the dignified. There were “at minimum 2000 different styles and handles, ” in accordance with the Boston day-to-day Globe (November 16, 1885), while style houses of Tiffany, Gorham, and Fabergé marketed gold and diamond-encrusted “limited edition” canes to their well-heeled clients.
However, by the end for the twentieth-century, canes had transformed into health products resisted by the senior and stigmatized because of the wider general public. Canes had been now offered by medical offer stores and doctors grouped canes into the category of “mobility aids, ” joined up with by crutches, walkers, and wheelchairs. From common, customized, and sometimes expensive items of style, canes re-emerged as devices mostly for the senior handicapped: progressively standardized, clinically oriented, and closely associated with persistent conditions in subsequent life.
Exactly how, during the period of the twentieth century, did canes transform from an object with a multitude of meanings—wealth, power, and magnificence, among others—into a stigmatized unit used exclusively by the disabled, and mostly the disabled elderly? So what does the change into the definitions of this cane unveil about wider changes in the health and cultural values for aging and old age?
This poster provides an aesthetic representation of my paper’s two central arguments: first, I argue that the cane surfaced as mostly a health instrument while the process of getting older it self emerged under systematic scrutiny and health administration during mid-twentieth century. Second, I contend that whilst canes allowed greater flexibility and freedom, they also marked users as disabled, an ongoing process that became progressively stigmatized as failing to achieve an emerging perfect of independent, functional “healthy aging.”
While attitudes toward older people have been discussed, attitudes toward the items they normally use provides understanding of switching values in regards to the process of getting older, the health management of old age, additionally the eventual introduction of health as a brand new image of condition when it comes to elderly. Although older grownups compensate the primary population of disabled Americans, scholars of impairment studies have mainly centered on handicaps in kids and youngsters. Historians of senior years, on the other hand, never have examined the significant transformations in the objectives for the aging process despite crucial shifts in twentieth-century medication, culture, and demographics. By tracing the contacts between the aging process and impairment through product object of the cane, this poster illuminates a vital and under-examined facet of health and social history: the handicaps of ageing have mainly been formed by historical attitudes toward and objectives associated with life period.
