Julie M. Powell

This dissertation explores the growth of wartime rehabilitation initiatives during World War I and the rhetoric that accompanied and facilitated their expansion. During this period, the Allied nations—and later, ex-enemies—collaborated in the development of rehabilitative language and practices that were deeply influenced by political ideologies and modern conceptions of ideal manliness. The project demonstrates the extent to which the new focus on rehabilitation and the reconstruction of the disabled male body both encouraged and frustrated international community building in the early twentieth century, and how wartime rhetoric about duty, debt, and masculinity and new understandings of rehabilitative rights for the war-wounded opened a space to consider how such rights might be extended to others.