The ambitions of the disabled

This prompted by an email arriving in my in-box a few weeks ago about a young lady who has hearing problems and who is nearly blind – but who want to be a doctor. For the purposes of what follows, let us suppose that she has normal hearing but no sight, and that she has been this way since birth. In other respects she is both healthy and very talented.

It is no doubt true that many disabled people are not given the opportunity to make good use of the abilities that they do have. So, for example, in the olden days, many blind people were confined to residential institutions where they passed their time making baskets and such like out of bamboo, baskets which went on to be sold more or less for charity. We can do better than this.

It is also true that humans are vertebrates, a group of animals which have evolved good quality eyes, and humans have good quality eyes backed up by good quality brains. Vision is both powerful and an important part of what we are. So not having vision is very challenging.

One of the challenges is that fact the learning has become very vision-centric. It may have been the case a hundred years ago that a blind person could participate in a lot of academic life with the aid of Braille and of a personal assistant with a good reading voice. I very much doubt if that is the case now, clever electrical and computing toys notwithstanding. I believe it would be very much harder to thrive in academia now than it would have been then, and that this will be particularly true of the sciences, medical or otherwise. A difficulty probably compounded just presently by the squeeze on teaching resources, certainly in austerity England.

And then so much of the work of a doctor, particularly a physical rather than a mental one, revolves around vision: looking at the patient, looking at images of the insides of the patient and looking at images on computers and in books. While, at least to a greater extent, the work of a mental doctor – a psychiatrist or a psychologist – is more sound and language orientated. A great deal can be done with what a patient says and the way that they say it. A great deal can be done by talking to a patient. And it is probably true that while a blind person misses out on all the visual cues that come with spoken language, such a person is probably more sensitive to that spoken language itself. There are ups as well as downs.

Which perhaps leads me to an answer of sorts. One applauds the drive and ability which gets our hypothetical young blind person into medical school and onto the lecture circuit. But maybe it would be better for all of us if she settled for an occupation which was less vision centric. Perhaps helping people with mental disorders or mental issues, in some capacity or other.

Reference 1: https://setting-sights.blog/. The lady in question’s blog. The source of the image included above.

Reference 2: https://setting-sights.blog/about/. Something about her.

Reference 3: https://www.medscape.com/today. The source of the email that reached me.

Reference 4: https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2019/07/01/alexandra-adams-we-need-to-do-more-to-raise-awareness-of-workplace-discrimination-in-the-nhs/. Another piece about her.