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Abstract
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. I identify and examine 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.
The concerns of rehabilitation reflected, on a relatively small scale, some of the most important preoccupations of interwar European culture: the difficulties of moving from war to peace; the powerful, exciting, and troubling importance of machines to daily life; the struggle to define principles on which a society ought to be built. Through rehabilitation, we have a chance to see these questions work themselves out on a limited scale.
