The medical perspective of disability -- that disability is primarily a medical condition -- contributed to the isolation of people with disabilities. What, after all, do persons with different diagnoses have to do with one another? The right approach is to “overcome” your disability, as Helen Keller and FDR were said to have done. Meanwhile, a movement of parents began in the 1950s to change the way society regarded mental retardation. Consumer organizations -- United Cerebral Palsy, the Multiple Sclerosis Society, the Muscular Dystrophy Association, the American Cancer Society -- organized their members into sometimes competing lobbies, dividing up the charity and welfare dollars. A few leaders were beginning to see disability as a social, even a political, problem as much as an individual one.
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