Robert Murphy's career, culminating in the study of disability, gives evidence of deep commitment to understanding the human condition in adversity. His life-long interest in the psychological, sociological and cultural significance of behavior; his work on alienation, developed through...

Sociological research on the disabled has for the past 25 years made extensive use of a social deviance model to characterize the status of the physically impaired. The present article, which is based on a three-year anthropological investigation of the social relations of paraplegics and...