“An Emporium of Beggars,” Medical Rhetoric, Disability, and Philadelphia’s Early Nationalist Welfare Crises

Abstract: In the early 1800s, cities across the Atlantic world launched welfare reforms designed to curtail excessive spending. Cities like Philadelphia opened numerous investigations into the rise of poverty and local governments ushered in new practices that depended heavily on institutions like hospitals, prisons, and boarding schools. This article considers the rhetoric used by early Philadelphia reformers to defend reform practices. Relying on hundreds of pension applications, I compare descriptions of the poor offered by government officials with actual pension records. I argue that these reforms evidence a shifting of historic protections for disabled persons, and a refusal on behalf of government officials to acknowledge the rise of a disabled minority in the United States. Changes to the poor laws barred disabled populations from securing home-based care resources, and posed institutionalization as the sole solution to rising poverty rates.