Frustrated in their attempts to access information, seek compensation, and prevent future deaths, the families convinced the flamboyant lawyer, Jan Schlichtmann, to take on what was thought to be a hopeless cause. Suddenly, the case seemed to promise a multi-million-dollar settlement. Large industrial concerns, as well as government officials, began to pay close attention. Obsessed with the enormity of the apparent crime, the creative Schlichtmann amassed a huge amount of damning evidence through careful and expensive scientific research. But the accused companies also invested large sums in experienced lawyers and scientists who used other data and legal technicalities to refute the charges. The families lost their case in 1986, and Schlichtmann was financially and emotionally ruined. By that time, 21 cases of leukemia had been identified – 4 times the anticipated rate for the population. A public health report found “no significant differences” in exposure between the leukemia cases and controls, yet concluded that “it is not possible to rule out exposure to this water as a factor” (Cutler et al 1986). 

Author Jonathan Harr began work on A Civil Action in 1986 before the opening of the trial, and he accompanied Schlichtmann to almost all meetings, relied on court transcripts, and conducted many painstaking interviews with the families and opposing lawyers. The result is an omniscient yet intimate perspective on these true events that reads like an action-packed thriller, complete with dialogue. It won many awards and was on the New York Times bestseller list for 65 weeks. It stands as an interesting commentary on the nature of environmental health and on the American justice system. 

Three years later, Steve Zaillian wrote and directed the award-winning film, A Civil Action (1998), based on Harr’s book and starring John Travolta and Robert Duvall. Shlichtmann received $250,000 for the portrayal rights, but is quoted as saying, “John Travolta made more money playing me than I ever did playing me” (Kix 2009). Forty years later, now at age 75, he continues to champion environmental causes, aiming for settlements rather than court cases and recounting his “lessons learned” on the speakers’ circuit. 

Woburn and A Civil Action had coincided with other prominent environmental disasters, caused by industrial failures: Three Mile Island (1979), Love Canal (1977-1979), Times Beach, Missouri (1983), Bhopal (1984), to name only a few. The book and the film contributed to rising awareness about the health risks of environmental damage, and they added to increasing skepticism over the intentions of private entrepreneurs and the courts. They also heralded a period that saw a growing body of legislation aimed to define responsibilities and regulate industrial pollution – measures coming, alas all too frequently, after new problems arose and covering jurisdictions defined only by political boundaries, which have nothing to do with the flow of water and air. In 2022, the United Nations declared that a healthy environment is a human right. Dozens of countries, including Canada (2023) and several American states, have enshrined that ideal in law, even if practicalities and protections lag far behind. 

Less known is that fact that Woburn triggered a public-health preoccupation with “clusters” and the nature of proof (Alexander et al., 1999; Kingsley et al., 2007) Do clusters indicate important dangers or are they unfortunate but random occurrences? A decade later, the Center for Environmental Health Sciences at Massachusetts Institute of Technology reported on its vain “search for causes” in the industrial toxins of the Woburn leukemia cluster (Durant et al., 1995). In 2002, a controlled study, based on Woburn, failed to establish a causal correlation between disease and contamination; it pointed out that incidence had returned to anticipated levels, while 8 consecutive years had seen no leukemia cases at all (Costas et al., 2002). Woburn has also been cited in efforts to provide better statistical evaluation of “clusters” (Waller, 2000). Woburn prompted recommendations to incorporate qualitative methods into public heath reporting (Brown, 2003) and to recognize the value of citizen science and epistemic differences in lay and professional “ways of knowing” (Brown, 1992; Petteway et al, 2019). Woburn is still being cited in public health assessments of environmental causes of malignancy, often with ambiguous outcomes (Binczewski et al., 2026). 

A Civil Action helped prepare the terrain for these many studies with their controls, statistics, and tracking of chemicals–mind you, only those chemicals that are already recognized and detectable. We no longer question the harm in smog and smoking, while improvements in respiratory diseases proclaim the benefits of keeping air clean. It is dismaying that the idea of water pollution as a harm to human health continues to be such a hard sell, while disasters like Flint, Michigan, or Grassy Narrows, Ontario, roil on. 

Water degradation is bad for flora, for fauna, and for the planet. Therefore, it is bad for us too. But for industry, the courts, and even some epidemiologists in their many ways of knowing, it remains an unproven hunch. 

References 

• Alexander, Freda E. 1999. Clusters and clustering of childhood cancer: A review 
• European Journal of Epidemiology 15: 847-852.
• Binczewski, N.R., Morimoto, L.M., Wiemels, J.L., Richardson, D.B., Bartell. S.M., Metayer, C., Vieira, V.M. 2026. Spatial analysis of residential location at birth, PFAS in public water, and childhood cancers in Southern California (2000-2019). Journal of Exposure Science & Environmental Epidemiology 2026 Mar 5:10.1038/s41370-026-00850-1. doi: 10.1038/s41370-026-00850-1. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 41781477; PMCID: PMC13032745. 
• Brown, Phil. 1992. Popular epidemiology and toxic waste contamination: lay and professional ways of knowing. Journal of Health & Social Behavior 33(3):267-81. 
• Brown, Phil. 2003. Qualitative methods in environmental health research. Environmental Health Perspectives 111(14):1789-98.  
• Costas, K., Knorr, R.S., Condon, S.K. 2002. A case-control study of childhood leukemia in Woburn, Massachusetts: the relationship between leukemia incidence and exposure to public drinking water. Science of the Total Environment 300(1-3):23-35. 
• Cutler, J.J., Parker, G.S., Rosen, S., Prenney, B., Healey, R., Caldwell, G.G. 1986. Childhood leukemia in Woburn, Massachusetts. Public Health Reports 101(2):201-5. 
• Durant, J.L., Chen, J., Hemond, H.F., Thilly, W.G. 1995. Elevated incidence of childhood leukemia in Woburn, Massachusetts: NIEHS Superfund Basic Research Program searches for causes. Environmental Health Perspectives 103 Suppl 6:93-8. 
• Kingsley, B.S., Schmeichel, K.L., Rubin, C.H. 2007. An update on cancer cluster activities at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Environmental Health Perspectives 115(1):165-71.  
• Kix, Paul. 2009. In the shadow of Woburn, Boston Magazine, City Life, 22 September:  https://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/2009/09/22/in-the-shadow-of-woburn
• Lagakos, S. W., Wessen, B. J., Zelen, M. 1986. An analysis of contaminated well water and health effects in Woburn, Massachusetts. Journal of the American Statistical Association 81(395):583–596.  
• Petteway, R, Mujahid, M., Allen, A., Morello-Frosch, R. 2019. Towards a people’s social epidemiology: Envisioning a more inclusive and equitable future for social epi research and practice in the 21st century. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 16(20):3983. 
• Waller, L.A. 2000. A civil action and statistical assessments of the spatial pattern of disease: do we have a cluster? Regulatory Toxicology & Pharmacology 32(2):174-83. 
• Jonathan Harr discusses A Civil Action on C-Span 

Web image by Medhum.org

In her 2011 book Blood Feud (also published as Blood Medicine), award-winning journalist Kathleen Sharp describes a wrenching example of whistleblowing in the pharmaceutical industry about a drug designed to promote the growth of blood cells.  

Beginning in 1992, Mark Duxbury and Dean McClellan became high flying salesmen for Johnson and Johnson, Ortho branch – happily promoting the anemia drug Procrit (or Epogen — erythropoietin). (Yes! that’s the same hormone sometimes abused by high-performance athletes.) Developed by fledgling Amgen, Procrit was licensed to Ortho for specific uses. The two salesmen rejoiced as their careers took off; during 1993, they earned bonuses and their stature rose. Soon however, Duxbury was being encouraged to promote the drug for off-label uses and in high doses—all to enhance sales. He began to realize that the drug was not safe when used in these situations: people were dying because their unnaturally thickened blood resulted in strokes and heart attacks. He was appalled by the fact that the company was giving kickbacks to prescribers who were making false claims to Medicare. 

Duxbury raised objections with his employer. For voicing concerns, he was ostracized and then fired in 1998. Along with the stresses of his work, the financial difficulties, and emotional turmoil, Duxbury’s home life collapsed, his marriage fell apart, and he worried about his daughter, Sojourner. He developed multiple health problems, including sleep apnea and dependency on drugs and alcohol. 

Duxbury enlisted the help of the famous lawyer Jan Schlichtman featured in the 1995 book, A Civil Action, by Jonathan Harr (also the famous 1998 film starring John Travolta). In 2003, they launched a qui tam lawsuit under the False Claims Act against his former employer. A qui tam case allows an individual to sue on behalf of the government (i.e. the people); if successful, the individual will be entitled to a portion of the proceeds. The process stalled but was revived in 2009. However, Duxbury died suddenly of a heart attack in October 2009 at age 49 with the case still unresolved. The potential value of his qui tam was unknown but was estimated to be 150 million dollars four years later.  

Contacted by Duxbury in 2004, author Kathleen Sharp, initially hesitated to take up the project. After the FDA issued increasingly alarming warnings about the dangers of Procrit in 2006-7, she began to take his concerns more seriously.  Relying on interviews and many documents from courts and private papers, Sharp reconstructed the events in a narrative that resembles a novel, with direct quotes and even the inner thoughts of the players. Duxbury’s death intestate comes as a shock to the reader, as it may well have been to the author. Reference notes support the unverifiable claims made in her narrative—placing it somewhere in-between “recreative” journalism and fiction. 

Since the publication of Blood Feud, the case was referenced in an unsuccessful suit by Duxbury’s daughter Sojourner against her stepmother in 2013 and an appeal of the same year, which gave judgement to the defendant (i.e. not Duxbury). Duxbury v. Ortho Biotech has become an important precedent cited in other qui tam cases into the present. 

Blood Feud raises concerns about the behavior of pharmaceutical companies in duping their own salesmen to generate income even at the cost of human life. But it also invites consideration of the too-often-neglected responsibilities of the health care profession and the government. The thorny legal aspects of the pharma industry and its regulation result in multiple lawsuits that contribute to the ever-higher costs of drugs. 

Blood Feud: The Man Who Blew the Whistle on One of the Deadliest Prescription Drugs Ever 
Kathleen Sharp 
Dutton, New York, 2011: 432 pages 

Web image by Medhum.org

What could possibly go wrong, right? 

This is the set-up of Dorothy Bridges’ The Expendable Man, and the answer is, of course, “plenty.” It is not a big reveal to say that the girl’s motives seem dubious, and she proves hard to be rid of, being dropped off and then repeatedly showing up again, including at Hugh’s Phoenix motel room, where he refuses to speak to her. It is not even a big reveal to say that the morning after she shows up at his motel room her body is found in a canal on the outskirts of Phoenix, and the autopsy reveals her to have been pregnant—and to have had an abortion. Unsurprisingly, the suspicion of the local police falls on Hugh, the last person—and conveniently, a physician—known to have seen her alive. It will be up to Hugh to prove his innocence despite the damning circumstances.  

Dorothy Hughes was known as a writer of noir fiction, and The Expendable Man is no exception. From the first page she creates a sense of uneasiness which pervades the entire novel. The dry airless heat of the southwestern desert, the rowdy and vaguely threatening teenagers in their jalopies who buzz about the town of Indio like so many flies, the trackless expanse of territory with the lone hitchhiker in the middle of nowhere, the local police, who seem to have had their humanity burned out by the heat—all of this contributes to the subtle but steadily mounting dread which characterizes so much of the novel.  

The book was written in 1963, when Los Angeles was very much the land of dreams, and Phoenix was still a relatively young and underdeveloped city just beginning to stretch out in the Maricopa Valley; it’s a short distance from the downtown neighborhoods to farms and empty lands where bad things can happen. And when this particular bad thing happens, people want to find the perpetrator. If it could possibly be an outsider, someone educated and from the big city, who drives a big Cadillac—someone “not one of us”—so much the better. Of course it looks too easy, but the community needs someone to blame. They need a sacrifice, and Hugh is just that: convicting him of the crime will spare the police having to look too hard in their own backyard for the culprit. Hugh is literally an expendable man. 

Fortunately, Hugh has his family and his new love interest to support him, and he enlists them in his attempt to solve the crime, because solving the crime is the only way to get him off the hot seat. How this happens is well-plotted and holds the reader’s attention.  

The fact that this is written in 1963 influences the lens through which the novel should be read; that is, with mid-twentieth-century mores and cultural referents in mind. Reaction to the news that the dead girl has had an abortion galvanizes the community—abortion is illegal, and the Arizona of the novel considers it immoral as well. The combination of people’s revulsion at the very fact of the abortion, and the thirst for punishment that accompanies it, magnifies the crime of murder; everyone talks about the heinous nature of what has happened. Also, the Cadillac was at the time a symbol of having “arrived,” and a medical school education was expensive; not all families could afford to pay for one. And golf was, and still is, an expensive indulgence. With touches like these Hughes paints a very specific picture of her protagonist.  

The Expendable Man is, however, so much more than simply a mystery. Hughes’ ability to create the setting and build the uneasiness is superb literary craft. Interestingly, it’s possible that the way she does this has partly to do with her excellent writing and partly to do with popular culture that postdated the novel’s publication—i.e., it may have as much to do with what the reader brings to the novel as (or rather, in addition to) what the author puts in it. Every film that included a hitchhiker story gone bad—and there are any number of them—contributes to the aura of dread in the early pages. And it is hard to read the descriptions of the action in Phoenix without channeling the early parts of Hitchcock’s Psycho. And we all know how that turned out.  

But The Expendable Man is also the novel as social commentary, never directly stated, but always there. The conflict between the middle- or upper-middle-class, cultured, educated, “city slicker” and the locals who think and live very differently—and are looking to hang someone—is riveting.  

There is one big reveal which comes out of left field. It happens relatively early on and changes everything in the way the reader views the story. It’s actually too good, too cleverly imagined, to give away, but watch for it (it’ll be hard to miss) and prepare to have everything you’ve thought about the story suddenly change with the breathless rapidity of a pulled-out rug. It will ratchet up the discomfort and make you re-evaluate the entire story and your reactions to it. 

Don’t say you haven’t been warned.  

The Expendable Man 
Dorothy B. Hughes 
New York, NYRB Classics, 2012 (orig published 1963), 264 pp. 

Web image by Medhum.org

The latter decision unarguably constitutes a significant setback in the struggle for reproductive rights for American women, but the history of access to abortion—and a sense of what the future might hold—may best be understood by taking the long view, across cultures. In Pushback: The 2,500-Year Fight to Thwart Women by Restricting Abortion, historian Mary Fissell does just that. Starting with the story of an enslaved woman in ancient Greece who becomes pregnant after being hired out as a prostitute by her enslaver, Fissell presents a series of case studies. Each one illustrates how women continued to have abortions through the centuries despite changing mores, laws, the influence of the church, and the irregular availability of experienced or qualified providers. The stories also demonstrate a pattern: as women gained more social and economic freedoms, the laws governing abortion became more restrictive, with the pendulum eventually swinging back in the opposite direction to a more liberal stance on abortion.

The enslaved woman in ancient Greece would likely have faced no moral sanction for seeking an abortion—her value lies in her continued availability as a sex worker, and, in her case, a singer. Documents suggest that women in her position would have had the knowledge to end her pregnancy, most likely with an herbal abortifacient, though squatting, jumping and sneezing were also recommended methods of preventing pregnancy immediately after sex. In ancient Rome, the focus on controlling fertility was somewhat different; Roman women had greater freedoms than their Greek sisters, raising concerns about adultery, which Augustus declared as a criminal offense. With  a focus on increasing the number of upper-class Romans who would rule the growing empire, controlling the fertility of elite married women was one way to achieve this end.

Leaving antiquity behind, Fissell nimbly guides us through the Middle Ages. In an era where Christianity is on the rise, and the issue of ensoulment is linked to the experience of quickening (when the pregnant woman first feels the fetus moving), the story of Brigid of Kildare was recorded. Brigid, a holy woman whose historical existence cannot be confirmed, was said to have helped a young woman miraculously end her unwanted pregnancy (a subsequent miracle attributed to Brigid helped a woman preserve her chastity).  The Church’s codified position on abortion was still more than 500 years away and for many of these early Christians, discussions of ensoulment notwithstanding, concerns around abortion as a means of covering up illicit sex appear to have weighed more heavily than any harm to the fetus.

In early modern Europe, in some parts of the continent, abortion had become a capital crime punishable by execution, a development that reflected “a larger cultural shift that sought to control female sexuality in the interests of Church and state.”  The story of Anna Harding who went on trial in 1618 was a case in point. Against the background of a witchcraft panic, Harding  admitted to providing both married and unmarried women with herbal and floral preparations to end their pregnancies. A “confession” under torture to having consorted with a demon led to Harding’s conviction and being burned at the stake. 

Indeed, herbal preparations to end unwanted pregnancies were common to societies as disparate as enslaved women in the Caribbean, who used abortions as an act of resistance, to Victorian women of all classes who sought abortions for many of the same reasons as women do today. Use of one of the herbs best known to induce abortion, pennyroyal, persisted up through the early 20^th century, although not without risk to the pregnant woman.

By this time, the idea that life begins at conception had gained a greater hold in the United States. Hugh Hodge, a professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, argued this “scientifically-based” premise as early as 1839, while the Pope’s 1869 declaration that life begins at conception would have been presented as divine revelation, though Fissell posits that concern on the part of European monarchs in Catholic countries worrying about depopulation and “degeneration” may well have influenced the pronouncement.

The story of Beatrice J, a Baltimore woman, who safely achieved two self-managed abortions in the 1940s through the aid of a catheter and ergot pills to induce uterine contractions, serves as a more modern example of women who had ended a pregnancy going on to administer abortions to others. In Beatrice’s case, after her trusted pharmacist helped set her up as an abortion provider, an undercover police operation exposed her practice. A trial followed, but charges were ultimately dismissed by a progressive judge on the basis that the “client”  who visited Beatrice was not actually pregnant.

In addition, Fissell points out this was not an isolated example by any means. Even in the most restrictive settings and time periods, there appears to have been a fair amount of  tacit acceptance.  In the U.S., for example, “Physicians performed legal abortions for a variety of indications, and the rest, so-called criminal abortions, went largely unremarked. In the 1920s and ‘30s, abortion providers were rarely prosecuted, whether physicians or not, and the former were at risk only if a woman died.” Moreover, once antibiotics and blood transfusions became available in the 1930s and 1940s, the morbidity and mortality associated with these procedures would have been reduced.

The presence of abortion providers who practiced under the radar persisted throughout the ‘30s and early ‘40s, albeit with some providers using their own judgement as to who was morally deserving of their covert services.  But the 1940s and 1950s also brought a more punitive attitude toward abortion in the United States. With an increasing number of arrests of providers administering safe abortions, dangerous practices became more widespread, as did abuses by practitioners, including sexual assault on clients. In turn, these tragic stories led to the underground movement of women and their allies who supported those in need, including the Jane Collective in Chicago, a group of women who risked criminal prosecution to help others obtain safe abortions. 

While the individual stories of women seeking abortions constitute the throughline of Pushback, Fissell consistently addresses the broader factors that affected access in each of the societies she describes, including eugenics, racism, nativism, and concerns about fidelity and heredity. Enslavement and labor demands, the appropriation by physicians in the 19^th century of care that was formerly the domain of midwives, and superstitions linking women’s fertility to fertility of livestock and crops, also come under scrutiny, as does the relatively recent shift of emphasis from the importance of the life of the mother to that of the fetus.

Readers might also consider the role of medical advances as factors that have altered our understanding of pregnancy, development of the fetus, and access to abortion. Among them was the development of simple urine tests that eliminate the uncertainty surrounding pregnancy, a means of confirmation light-years away from those early societies where pregnancy was confirmed by quickening. Sophisticated imaging of the fetus via ultrasound not only confirms pregnancy at an early stage, but packs an emotional punch. Moreover, the availability of medication through pharmacies and online sources for self-managed abortions, while under threat, has created a new landscape for pregnant women. This last means of obtaining an abortion, though formulated in a laboratory, suggests a new iteration of the herbal abortifacients used by so many generations past.

Pushback succeeds at being both highly readable and meticulously researched—the volume includes an extensive list of notes and references for each chapter. Fissell, who is the Inaugural J. Mario Molina Professor in the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University, also writes the Substack A is for Abortion: Snapshots from the Past. As a pre-modern historian of the 17^th century, she particularly enjoys the kind of “detective work” that accompanies that study. But she was also pleasantly surprised by how much she enjoyed researching and writing on the modern period, where sources are more readily available, including data she found through Ancestry.com.

Fissell completed her manuscript before the start of the second Trump administration and aside from allusions to Roe v. Wade and Dobbs v. Jackson, Pushback does not explore the ways in which abortion became a flashpoint in our most recent national elections. (A description of politically motivated anti-vice campaigns that targeted abortion practitioners and pregnant women in the late 1940s and 1950s is included in the chapter dealing with that time period.)

But in a discussion with this writer, Fissell weighed in on current data that shows more American women than ever are having abortions despite the 2022 Dobbs ruling. “Restriction has an impact and makes abortion much more difficult and dangerous to access,” she said. “But it never stamps it out.” She also cited data that suggests roughly 66% of Americans think abortion is a decision that should be made between a woman and her doctor.  

Interestingly, Fissell did wonder at the onset of her research for Pushback whether she might change her mind on the issue. In the end, she describes holding the same views as when she started.  “Given that abortion was often shameful and secret if not [completely] illegal, I was amazed by how much I was able find out.” Her appreciation for insights from the reproductive justice movement deepened considerably as well, as it informed her understanding of women in earlier societies and the use of the term “choice,” then and now, for women in untenable circumstances.

“[Choice is] something a white woman with money can afford to have,” Fissell said. “Choice [does not apply to] a struggling waitress in a small Southern town who was raped and has two kids at home, and her wages won’t even cover their care…Casting the decision as choice means we don’t understand many women’s experiences.”     

Pushback by Mary Fissell was published by Seal Press (2025).
Web image by Medhum.org.

A country doctor, Gregory Ovchinnikov, begins his daily rounds in the hospital. He soon notices that his assistant, Smirnovsky, is drunk. When the assistant refuses to obey an order and verbally snaps back at him, Ovchinnikov hits the man in his face. The angry physician then rushes out of the ward and goes back to his lodgings, abandoning his patients.  

At first, Ovchinnikov considers demanding that the town council fire Smirnovsky. Later, after he calms down and goes back to work, he begins to appreciate the enormity of his unprofessional act — perhaps the town council will fire him for assaulting his assistant. Strangely, when the assistant comes to apologize, the doctor indicates that it is he, the doctor, who has behaved inexcusably. The assistant is stunned but decides to report Ovchinnikov to the council. Of course, the council demands that the lower-class Smirnovsky apologize to the upper-class Ovchinnikov. 

This story illustrates both a conflict of conscience and a conflict between social classes. With regard to the latter, it is quite clear that the town council would never rule against the gentleman-physician in favor of the drunken, lower class medical orderly. The physician, however, struggles with his own conscience: was he justified in hitting the man? If not, what should he do to make amends?  

Originally Published 1888 
Jack Coulehan (Ed.) Chekhov’s Doctors, Kent State University Press, 2003. Translated by Ronald Hingley.  

A previous version of this review was published in the NYU Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database (Litmed).

Reviews of Chekhov’s Stories

Cold Eye, Warm Heart: Medicine and Anton Chekhov  

Jack CoulehanAug 6, 2025

An Awkward Business by Anton Chekhov 

Jack CoulehanJun 11, 2025

The Grasshopper by Anton Chekhov

Jack CoulehanMay 11, 2025

Ionych by Anton Chekhov 

Jack CoulehanMar 11, 2025

A Doctor’s Visit  by Anton Chekhov 

Jack CoulehanMar 11, 2025

Ward No. 6 by Anton Chekhov

Jack CoulehanMar 11, 2025

A Nervous Breakdown by Anton Chekhov 

Jack CoulehanFeb 11, 2025

Enemies by Anton Chekhov

Jack CoulehanJan 11, 2025

The story, “A Jury of Her Peers” by Susan Glaspell (1876-1948) tops the list of all the classic fiction pieces I used in more than three decades of teaching in a medical school. It is vivid, accessible, and moving – and it conveys important historical messages while also holding up a mirror to current affairs and professional identity. 

The Pulitzer-Prize winning-author, was inspired to write this powerful tale, following her coverage as a journalist of the 1901 trial of woman who had murdered her husband. First she wrote it as a play, “Trifles,” in which she played a role when it opened in Providence RI in 1916. The following year she adapted the play as a story. A moody thirty-minute film was produced and directed by Sally Heckel in 1980, making use of Christina Rossetti’s poem “In the Bleak Midwinter,” set to the music of the Gustav Holst. A rather blurry version can be found on youtube. 

On a cold winter day, Mr. Hale has found his neighbor, Mr. Wright, strangled to death in his own home. Mrs. Minnie Wright claimed not to know who killed her husband, but she had already been arrested and was awaiting charges in jail. County Sheriff Peters brings Hale, his wife Martha Hale and his own wife Mrs. Peters to the isolated. Wright home. The two wives are to gather Minnie’s clothing and see to her preserves. The men mock women’s “trifles” and jokingly tell them not to miss any clues, before they turn to the “more serious,” manly work of finding a motive. In a basket of patches destined for a quilt, the women find a strangled canary. In quilt-like fragments, they piece together the difficult life of the absent third woman. The kitchen contains many signs of Minnie Wright’s life of abuse and violence, signs that are clearly visible to the women and ignored by the men. With silent understanding, they destroy the evidence that could incriminate her.  

Considered to be one of the earliest examples of feminist literature, this story is a wonderful teaching tool. Written before women could sit on juries, it raises important issues about the discriminatory aspects of justice, the contingency of laws, and the construction of psychiatric diagnoses, especially insanity in criminal defense. Minnie’s “peers” are her female neighbours who scarcely knew her, but who easily imagine the hardship of her life and the abuse that she (and perhaps they too) suffered.  

Over many years, I had the unforgettable experience of reading this story with a combined class of law students and medical students co-taught with my law-school colleague Mark Weisberg.ⁱ All the students believed that Minnie deserved to be acquitted. But their reasons differed along professional lines, and this same difference appeared every year we taught with the story.  

The future lawyers wanted her to find pardon in a medicalized solution: they longed for an insanity defense in the battered wife syndrome, a diagnosis which did not become available until the 1970s.  

The future doctors believed that Minnie was far from insane; her actions, they thought, were taken in reasonable self-defense; they wanted a legal fix that would change the laws to allow women to sit on juries and to recognize the harm of domestic abuse. In fact, women as jurors evolved slowly over many more years at different times and places and involved several legal cases on appeal.  

The class discussion centered on why members of each group sought to preserve the rightness of their own professional canon even when they understood that the rules expressed in the story were decades out of date.  

1, Mark Weisberg and Jacalyn Duffin, 1995. “Evoking the Moral Imagination: Using Stories to Teach Ethics and Professionalism to Nursing, Medical, and Law Students”; Journal of the Medical Humanities 16. 4: 247-263 Reprinted in Change, The Magazine of Higher Learning, 27. 1: 20-27.

An earlier version of this review was published in the NYU Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database (Litmed).
Web image by Brajendra Singh

A Jury of Her Peers from Internet Archive (Open in New Window)

A Jury of Her Peers Directed by Sally Heckel in 1980

Change Not Charity traces the grassroots movement leading to the passage in 1990 of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), the law that mandates accessibility for the disabled.  

People with disabilities have a long history of being isolated, excluded socially as well as physically from facilities that were not accessible. Beginning in the late 1960’s, Jerry Lewis’ Labor Day Telethons were watched by nearly half of the country and raised millions of dollars towards finding a cure for muscular dystrophy. But despite its good intentions, by arousing the audience’s pity of the disabled to attract donations, the telethons also heightened the distance between “normal” people and people with disabilities. 

Children were among those whose disabilities affected them in harmful ways. In one of the many interviews, Cynthia Jones describes how, at the age of five and a half, she was selected as a poster child for the March of Dimes because she was “blonde, blue-eyed, and braced.” When her teacher passed around a flyer to promote polio vaccines in class, she was horrified to see a picture of two children, one labeled “This”, the other “Not This.” Cynthia was the “Not This.” At that moment, she realized that no one wanted to be like her. In fact, many young children with disabilities were institutionalized and kept out of the public eye. 

In February 1972, reporter Geraldo Rivera’s broadcast from inside Willowbrook State School, an institution for disabled children on Staten Island, shocked the nation and helped spark the disability rights movement. At the same time, a group of disabled college students in Berkeley, with a donation from the Rotary Club, formed the Center for Independent Living (CIL), offering services which included applying for government assistance, counseling and transportation. CIL drew disabled people from throughout the country who wanted to live in a place where they could find support and practical help. Judy Heumann, a disability rights advocate who had successfully sued the NYC Board of Education when she was denied a teaching position, became the Center’s Deputy Director.  

 In 1973, an update to the Federal Rehabilitation Act was enacted to help veterans. At the end of the document there was a 46-word clause, Section 504, barring discrimination against the disabled in federally funded institutions. People with disabilities took note, but the new regulations languished unsigned until demonstrators occupied the Federal Building in San Francisco and protested in Washington DC. The demonstrations drew national attention and led to Health, Education and Welfare Secretary Joseph Califano signing the regulation into law. Years later, the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act expanded the earlier regulation to include private institutions and businesses.  

The story of the disability rights movement has elements that resonate today. Letter-writing campaigns and connections forged with members of Congress and the Executive Branch helped garner support for pending legislation and advance the movement’s agenda. Justin Dart, Vice Chair of the National Council of the Handicapped, crisscrossed the country holding town meetings to find out about discrimination in local communities. He issued his findings in a report titled “Toward Independence,” which served as a roadmap for disability legislation. 

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was initially introduced in 1988, at which time opponents called it the bankruptcy bill because the cost of creating accessible spaces was considered too exorbitant. In Washington DC, people parked their wheelchairs and maneuvered up the steps to the US Capitol into the Rotunda where over 100 protesters were arrested. ADA was finally passed two years later in 1990 with the support of President George H.W. Bush.   

The disability rights movement led to significant change in large part because people showed up repeatedly over the years in multiple venues across the country to ensure their voices were heard. And while much has been achieved, the documentary ends with a reminder that there is still more work needed, citing that two out of three adults with disabilities are not in the work force.  

Change Not Charity, part of the PBS’s American Experience series, is a comprehensive overview of the pivotal events leading up to the passage of ADA, using archival footage of demonstrations and interviews with participants, Congressmen, and legal advocates. The documentary is directed by Jim LeBrecht, who won the Academy Award for his previous documentary Crip Camp, a more personal documentary, with its focus on some of the key people in the movement beginning with their experiences at the sleepaway camp. Both documentaries provide insight into the struggles faced by the disabled and the efforts to advance disability rights.  

Change Not Charity Film Trailer

CHANGE NOT CHARITY  

Director: Jim LeBrecht 
Narrator: Peter Dinklage
A STEWARD/GAZIT PRODUCTIONS FILM FOR AMERICAN EXPERIENCE 2025 
RT 53 minutes 

Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution 

Carol Schilling Jan 3, 2025

A powerful film celebrating disability rights, resilience, and community, revealing untold struggles and triumphs that demand greater recognition and action

Located near Woodstock, geographically and culturally, Jened offered a space free from the discrimination the summer residents encountered elsewhere. Campers engaged in uninhibited physical activities, uncensored storytelling, self-governance, mutual caretaking, real friendships, irreverent insider humor, romance, and fun. One powerful, sobering scene allows viewers to overhear campers with diverse disabilities share common experiences: being disrespected or ignored at school, overly protected at home, isolated everywhere. Another tracks the campers’ hilarity and pride over an outbreak of “crabs.” One camper declares his counselor’s demonstration of how to kiss, “Best physical therapy ever!”  

The second and longer part of the film follows several former campers into their adult lives. They become parents, spouses, professionals, and disability rights activists at a crucial historic moment for disability legislation. Both parts of the film propose that the liberty and solidarity experienced at Jened emboldened several of the campers to seek opportunity and equality in the world beyond their camp. 

While former camper Jim Lebrecht narrates the film, Judy Huemann—who died in 2023—is its political and moral center. A wheelchair user, Heumann rose from Jened camper to counselor. Campers revered her for successfully suing the New York City Department of Education for the right to teach. When she and several former campers unexpectedly reunited in Berkeley, California, they participated in the Independent Living Movement that famously started there. An astute leader, Heumann inspired an astonishing 25-day sit-in at the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW) offices in San Francisco’s Federal Office Building in 1977.  She and her disabled colleagues risked their health and their lives—they slept on the floor and improvised medical necessities—to convince HEW to enforce the anti-discrimination section of the 1973 Rehabilitation Act: Section 504. Heumann’s uncompromising standoff with the HEW representative is unforgettable. As is her daily urging for the occupiers to hold fast. Regular deliveries of food, supplies, and solidarity from the Black Panthers and other marginalized groups fueled the protesters’ determinism and ultimate success. 

In other archival footage, Heumann, demanding accessible taxies, leads demonstrators to gridlock traffic in New York City intersections. Still other protestors abandon their wheelchairs and pull themselves up the steps of the U.S. Capitol to insist on disability civil rights. Recently filmed interviews with several former campers affirm that, despite the work toward disability justice that remains, they live fuller, more vibrant lives as a result of their camp experiences and the legislation they demanded.  

Crip Camp is an indispensable film because it’s told from the rarely seen perspective of disabled teenagers . The Jened campers’ irrepressible personalities, candor, and accomplishments demolish stereotypes about disability. It’s simultaneously painful to confront the inhospitable world they had to navigate and still do. The film’s co-directors, Jim LeBrecht and Nicole Newnhan, prompt us to ask why histories of the civil rights projects of the’ 60s to ‘70s have largely ignored the struggles and successes of disability activists. Yet as Crip Camp raises awareness of the “nothing about us without us” campaigns for disability rights, it also makes me restless for more documentaries. Without doubt, we have more to learn about the history and politics of the passage—and enforcement—of laws through the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act and its 2008 Amendment.

Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution 
Directed by Jim LeBrecht and Nicole Newnhan 
Higher Ground Productions: 2020, RT: 104 minutes 

For more information about Crip Camp and its Impact Campaign, please visit https://cripcamp.com/