Beth Linker
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Slouch

Posture Panic in Modern America – Beth Linker tells the incredible story of twentieth-century America’s largely forgotten posture panic—a decades-long episode in which it was widely accepted as scientific fact that Americans were suffering from an epidemic of bad posture, with potentially catastrophic health consequences. Tracing the rise and fall of this socially manufactured epidemic, Slouch also tells how this period continues to feed today’s widespread anxieties about posture.

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Slouch is a unique and provocative account of the unexpected origins of America’s largely unquestioned ideas about bad posture. 

About Beth Linker

Department Chair, Professor & Author

Beth Linker is Chair of the Department of the History and Sociology of Science and the Samuel H. Preston Endowed Term Professor in the Social Sciences. She is also a former physical therapist and holds an M.A. in bioethics. Her research focuses on how disability becomes defined, medicalized, and marginalized in modern U.S. history. She is the author or editor of three books.

Her most recent book, Slouch: Posture Panic in Modern America (Princeton University Press, 2024), is a historical consideration of how failing posture became a scientific and cultural inflection point in the late nineteenth century. For the next century to come, slouching became a feared pathology driven by a society-wide intolerance of non-normative, disabled bodies.

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Beth Linker
Beth Linker - Slouch: Posture Panic in Modern America

Historian of Medicine and Disability

Beth Linker’s interest in healthcare and disability can be traced to her childhood. She grew up in a family of nurses. A widowed mother of three, her grandmother opened her own nursing home in 1952 in a small, rural Ohio town where Beth grew up. The home was passed down to Beth’s mother who was also a nurse. As a young child and teen, Beth would visit residents, taking knitting lessons from one, participating in crafting and holiday caroling with others.

She continued the family healthcare tradition by becoming a physical therapist. In the clinic, she gravitated toward children and adults who, affected by various neurological and orthopedic conditions, benefited most from hands-on manual care.

Beth’s decision to pursue a Ph.D. in history at Yale University grew out of her frustrations with the American healthcare system, particularly its tendency to place a premium on quick fixes rather than long-term care and maintenance. Her career as a historian has been devoted to critically analyzing health and widespread cultural inequities, particularly as they affect those with disabilities.

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