Inventing Polio Care at the Colonie de Saint-Fargeau: Disability, Rehabilitation, and the Welfare State in Interwar France

Abstract

In 1919, the polio survivor and Red Cross nurse Ellen Poidatz created the Colonie de Saint-Fargeau, France’s first residential rehabilitation facility for children and adolescents paralyzed by polio. This article examines the Colonie’s external politics and internal dynamics, showing how Poidatz framed her work within conventions of maternalist politics to secure private donations and public subventions to anchor the facility within France’s mixed economy of social welfare. Analyzing Poidatz’s contributions to rehabilitation medicine as it developed in the interwar decades and the varied experiences of children at the Colonie, this article illustrates how the provision of polio care remained fraught with tensions. Although Poidatz’s vision of providing physiotherapy, education, and vocational retraining in a single center was not fully realized, she played a critical, if unacknowledged role in the creation of the welfare state by turning the Colonie into a national model for polio care that endured into the post–World War II era.