Norman T. Kirk: reassessing standards of success in the rehabilitation of amputee veterans

• Main Author: Poon, Wai Yee
• Other Authors: Park Hyung Wook
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2024
• Subjects: Arts and Humanities
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/174314
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Amputation is an extremely traumatizing process and a defining marker of disability. In the context of military medicine, amputee veterans are situated somewhere in-between military and civilian medicine. Surgeon General of the United States Army, Norman Thomas Kirk was one of the most prominent figures in orthopedic surgery in the military. Research on his career often frames his career as a success, transforming the effectiveness of military medicine. However, they often fail to evaluate his career in the overall context of military medicine. This paper hence aims to explicate what military medicine is and define it from civilian medicine. It will look at how the visible disability of amputation was often scrutinized across different wars. Societal scrutiny should hence play a part in the scrutiny of success in military medicine as well. Kirk’s ability to enact durable change should hence be evaluated in the context of how military medicine was viewed by the public, and how his career should be seen as a sum of his experiences, beyond his active career. As a result, the paper aims to recontextualize Kirk’s success in the context of military medicine and how it has been scrutinized over time.