The Mirror Versus The Smoke

A few years ago a statue of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in his wheelchair was erected. During his lifetime FDR did everything he could to disguise the fact he was wheelchair-bound. Now we are more comfortable with disability we are happy to embrace the idea that a disabled man can be a major world statesman.

This however makes another case all the more unusual. Those who know something about neurosciences hold the name of Andrea Verga in great esteem. This nineteenth century figure revived interest in his discipline and made a number of contributions to his field that are incomprehensible to the rest of us. Yet few are aware of the disability he had to overcome to achieve the things he did.

Andrea Verga was born in Trevilglio near Bergamo in 1811. His original desire to become a butcher was frustrated by his snobbish parents and instead he became an anatomist. In time he rose through the ranks and by 1851 he had become Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the Ospedale Maggiore in Milan. This demonstrates that he had understood that the diseases of both brain and body should be taken together which is a perception seemingly foreign to his modern counterparts.

Verga lives in history for his discovery of the Cavum Vergae. This is described in a wonderful piece of abstract prose as "An inconstant horizontal slitlike space between the posterior one-third of the corpus callosum and the underlying commissura fornicis (commissura hippocampi; psalterium) resulting from failure of these two commissural plates to fuse completely during foetal development; like the cavity of the septum pellucidum, the space is not a true ventricle in the sense that it did not develop from the central canal of the neural tube." Amazingly some people actually know what all that means. He also reported the first "macroscopic and microscopic descriptions of pituitary adenomas in acromegalic patients." Again your guess is as good as mine but apparently this was something big which paved the way for more accurate work later and more discoveries. Verga lived until 1895 and was buried with adulation by the scientific community. They had to show somebody that their work actually meant anything. He is remembered in a street name in Milan and also by a statue outside what is now Milan University.

Verga is not mentioned anywhere as a disabled man. His statue however tells a different story. Unusually for an anatomist Andrea Verga had no arms. It was bold of the Italians to portray him in that way but on this realistic stone sculpture where every whisker of his beard is articulated there are no arms to be seen. Maybe being an anatomist with this handicap was considered so incredible that no one would dare remark on his disability in their accounts of the man and his work. But there is no reason to leave the arms off a realistic sculpture if he had them. Verga was clearly more of an achiever than even his admirers would concede and the non-scientific world would relate to his achievements all the more if they were made aware of this astonishing fact.

It is well known that King David had no arms. He slew Goliath and wrote the Psalms in spite of this handicap so graphically recorded by Michelangelo. Similarly Rameses the Great and several other Egyptian rulers had no noses as their monuments make clear. We should therefore be prepared to accept disability as a necessary accompaniment to high status and achievement. Maybe that is the reason for disability discrimination. Most of us will never be kings or world famous scientists or religious leaders. If someone with the disability to become one of these things appears before us we are bound to expect that they will be the things we are not. If they show themselves to be no different apart from their disability it is reasonable to think that they are not deserving of the respect which goes with their status and a whole industry of abuse has therefore unwittingly developed as a result.

In America there was once a glut of films portraying disabled detectives. Longstreet was blind and Ironside paraplegic. Cannon was fat and Columbo mentally retarded. Only by portraying the detective who always won as disabled could they give him credibility. So why did it take America so long to portray Roosevelt as he was? Because he was the only American President in a wheelchair. Other Presidents had their own disabilities and their own similarly disabled funders to keep onside. If they drew attention to Roosevelt's particular disability it would mean promoting that one group of disabled ahead of their own supporters. People would vote for wheelchair candidates rather than people who cannot construct a sentence like George W. Bush and the backers of those who created that situation would soon leave their previously favoured candidates in the lurch. No one wants to be the one who bequeaths such a legacy to his successors.

There should be no problem with acknowledging the disabilities which all achievers seem to have. Andrea Verga having no arms should be public knowledge. But it would be an even greater advancement in public morals if those who achieved great things but had no disability at all were recognised as such. Ignoring disabilities simply obscures the real achievements of the genuinely able-bodied. Disability discrimination is ultimately discrimination against the non-disabled. Maybe it is disabled people themselves who are therefore actually behind it. Enough people have gained enough cheap publicity from their handicaps. Now we know why the media magnates who rose from humble origins are so keen to let them.