Bodies and Souls: The Rehabilitation of Maimed Soldiers in France and Germany during the First World War

This dissertation explores the discourse and practice of the science of rehabilitation as it developed in France and Germany during the First World War and its aftermath; it is particularly concerned with the ways that rehabilitation wove together bodies, minds and machines, both conceptually and practically. The author identifies and examines at length three characteristics of rehabilitation: its widespread use as a means of technocratic nation-building; its tendency to incorporate human bodies into small and large-scale mechanical systems; and its function as a discipline of both body and soul. As a whole, the dissertation shows how the discourses and practices of rehabilitation helped to create and stabilize a notion of the human subject based on the principle of the machine.