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THE RISE OF PROFESSIONALS AND INSTITUTIONS FROM AN INTERVIEW WITH Peter Hall, 1997 Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the concepts of normality and abnormality become medicalized and legalized -- a framework which determined the destiny of individuals according to the extent to which they measure up to the standards that public and private institutions, controlled by benevolent Protestants, were creating. By the beginning of the 20th century benevolent societies are making decisions about who can live in the community and who cannot. They had created "philanthropic monasteries" whose purpose was to remove these abnormal people from the general population, to put them among their own kind, and if possible, to discourage them from reproducing themselves and being a burden to the public because being disabled was often conceived as being dependent or potentially dependent. Once you move into this institutionalizing mode, the determination of who is in need and how they should be helped is made by the caregivers and not by the receivers of care, by the charitable, and not the recipients of charity. To give care, it's not enough to be a good-hearted person. You have to have credentials. Who issues those credentials? Who are the gate-keepers? What we begin to see is a professionalization of caregiving. You might say, "Well, they just want to do the best for the disabled." You can only do that if you have standards of excellence that enable you to ensure that the people giving the care know what they're doing. Beneath the surface of this rhetoric, if you look at the career trajectories of the caregivers, and the institutional relationships of the caregivers, it becomes quite clear that the primary purpose and interest of this institution-building activity is enhancement of their power and prestige in the public sphere. |
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