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Abstract
This article explores discourses surrounding ‘walking’ in a Turkish rehabilitation hospital and their impact on in-hospital relationships, patients’ attitudes towards disability, and constructions of ‘bodily normality’. Interviews were conducted with 29 patients, 11 medical personnel, and two non-medical personnel. Three categories of discourses emerged. First, hope for walking is kept alive in doctor–patient relationships, either through a state of silence on the matter or an emphasis on time, determination, and faith in God. Second, patients are virtually assured of the retrieval of walking, mostly through interactions with fellow patients and their accompanying family members (refakatçis). Third, a possible non-walking future is highlighted, either within a framework closer to a disability rights perspective or through an emphasis on gratitude. Diverse discourses on walking emerge due to the informality of in-hospital practices. Still, the ‘normal body’ is predominantly reproduced as the ‘walking body’. Thus, patients refuse discharge before regaining the ability to walk.
Acknowledgements
The author is grateful to all the interviewees for their time and support. The author would also like to thank Tom Shakespeare, Sibel Yardımcı, Bülent Küçükaslan, Başak Can, and Nina Ergin for their comments and contributions.
Notes
1. Refakatçi literally means a person who accompanies someone else. In the medical context, it refers to persons who accompany patients during their hospital stay, often family members. The Turkish health care system is based on the assumption of their presence (Bezmez and Yardımcı Citation2010).
2. This diversity does not derive from differences in the patients’ types of impairments, because medical personnel were not interviewed at a patient-specific level, but asked about their approaches to disability generally.
3. The fieldwork for this larger project was conducted with Sibel Yardımcı. I am grateful to Sibel Yardımcı for encouraging me to prepare this article on ‘walking’.
4. Some literature also exists on vocational rehabilitation (for example, Gruber, Titze, and Zapfel Citation2014; Hillborg, Svensson, and Danermark Citation2010) and community-based rehabilitation (for example, Edmonds Citation2005; Eide Citation2006).
5. Several months after the fieldwork, the hospital was relocated to a building in a different neighbourhood. The setting described here relates to the pre-relocation period.
6. The importance of communication in rehabilitation has also been highlighted by Wong-Hernandez (Citation2002) in relation to ‘bilingual and bicultural’ patients in the United States.
7. These hints at walking were independent of the patients’ level of impairment, since the interviewees in this section were mostly wheelchair users of several years.
8. This courtyard structure refers to the hospital before it was relocated.
9. The role of the family in rehabilitation is very important and too complicated to be discussed in terms of a ‘good/bad’ dichotomy. While the Turkish example demonstrates that families can reproduce disabling ideologies, as Arntzen, Hamran, and Borg (Citation2015) have argued, their exclusion from in-patient rehabilitation might make it harder for them to assist their disabled relatives when the latter return home.
10. NMP1 informed us that there were approximately 13 disabled personnel.
Similarly, Pawlowski (Citation2001, 68) has focused on the role of staff with disabilities working in a rehabilitation hospital. She argues that patients’ encounters with disabled staff ‘links patients and staff in a commonality of impaired bodies rather than separating them in the expected whole versus flawed, healthy versus sick relationship of care provider to patient …’.