In the winter of 1938, a group of Jewish doctors and therapists fled Vienna, reassembled in northern Scotland, and founded an intentional community for the care of children with disabilities called Camphill Special School. In an era when shame, blame, and institutionalization were the response to disability, they founded Camphill on the principle that disabled children could enrich communities and that doctors should abandon the search for cures. Their radical position was rooted in their unusual approach to medicine. They were followers of the Austrian occult philosopher, Rudolf Steiner, whose philosophy, called Anthroposophy, spawned alternative medical, educational, and agricultural movements. In spite of these unorthodox credentials, Camphill soon grew into an international movement; there are over 100 communities around the world today. Though the Camphill movement is now headquartered in the US, I argue that its roots as a Central European medical subculture remain definitive today. The movement originated in the era of eugenics and as Douglas Baynton has noted, eugenicist concerns about disability were inseparable from concerns about race. In fact, German racial thinking structured the founders’ thinking about ability and disability. I use writings by the founders and oral history interviews with older community members to reconstruct and analyze Camphill’s unusual approach to disability. In the process, I shed light on current historiographic discussions about the roots of the disability rights movement and the ways in which countercultural thinkers, movements, and communities have forged diverse and sometimes uncomfortable alliances among people with common concerns about health.
