The 2024 Kass Lecture in the History of Medicine features Beth Linker in a talk titled ‘The Other Disabled President,’ which describes the crippling back pain John F. Kennedy suffered from in his first year as president, a fact largely hidden at the time from public view. After several failed medical interventions, the president finally experienced some relief under the care of Dr. Hans Kraus, an orthopedist and posture-fitness guru. My talk will explore how this chance relationship would go on to inform Cold War notions of physical fitness, and how disabling back pain—and its prevention—rose to national prominence and stoked geopolitical concerns regarding the communist threat to the so-called free world.

Beth Linker is the Samuel H. Preston Endowed Term Professor at the University of Pennsylvania in the Department of the History and Sociology of Science. Her research and teaching interests include the history of science and medicine, disability, health care policy, and gender. She is the author of War’s Waste: Rehabilitation in World War I America (Chicago, 2011) and co-editor of Civil Disabilities: Citizenship, Membership, and Belonging (Penn Press, 2014). Her most recent book, Slouch: Posture Panic in Modern America (Princeton University Press, 2024), is a historical consideration of how poor posture became a feared pathology in the United States throughout much of the twentieth century. For this project, Linker received grants from The American Council of Learned Societies, The National Endowment for the Humanities, The National Institutes of Health, and The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.