![]() My hearing is impaired by tinnitus, taking the form of a high-pitched ringing or screeching that means that I can’t hear sibilants and hard consonants even with my hearing aids. At the DNDN, we adopt the discipline of checking at the start of any meeting if anyone requires any adjustment.įor me, it is relatively easy. For others, it involves thinking carefully about lighting, legibility and document suitability for text to speech solutions. For some of my colleagues in the Disabled NHS Directors’ Network (DNDN), it is a matter of ensuring that there is decent physical access in the shape of ramps and lifts. However, we do hope people make “reasonable adjustment” (to use the words enshrined in the 2010 Equality Act) to help us mitigate our disability so we can achieve and contribute to the best of our ability. But his disability meant that he couldn’t turn a kick wheel and follow the family trade as a potter himself, so directed his attention and his prodigious talent to reshaping the industry he worked in.ĭisabled people don’t want to be defined by their disability. The fact that contemporary portraits do not show his prosthesis may reflect a desire on his part conceal his disability. Wedgwood had his lower leg amputated because of smallpox contracted as a child. In Stoke on Trent, outside the Wedgwood Museum, stands a statue of Josiah Wedgwood, possibly one of the greatest figures of the Industrial Revolution: entrepreneur, inventor, innovator, radical and anti-slave trade campaigner. Head 150 miles north-west and you find a statue that, remarkably, conveys no hint of another hero’s disability. ![]() Unlike Nelson, Churchill’s disability was invisible and often glossed over, so you can’t blame the sculptor for not capturing it. Our history is full of disabled heroes, known for their achievements and not defined by their disability.ĭown at the other end of Whitehall is the statue to Winston Churchill, rarely recognised as disabled, but who suffered from a recurrent depressive condition that he described as his “black dog”.
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