Gini Laurie

She edited and published a newsletter that soon grew into an influential magazine called the Rehabilitation Gazette: International Journal of Independent Living by and for Persons with a Disability.

In 1977, the same year that the ACCD successfully pressured the government to release final regulations implementing Section 504 of the 1973 Rehabilitation Act, Laurie wrote Housing and Home Services for the Disabled: Guidelines and Experiences in Independent Living.

[2] For three decades, she campaigned against the institutionalization of people with disabilities, and for the rehabilitation and personal assistance services that would make an empowered life possible for them in their communities.

She had gone to college with the intention of becoming a physician, but eventually abandoned that plan due to the obstacles women then faced in entering the profession.

During the polio epidemic of 1949, Gini Laurie began to work around the edges of polio rehabilitation as an American Red Cross volunteer at the Toomey Pavilion at Cleveland's City Hospital,[6] later the twelfth of 15 Respiratory Care and Rehabilitation Centers funded by the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (March of Dimes).

What followed is described by Joan L. Headley, executive director of Post-Polio Health International: The [respiratory rehabilitation] centers, where individuals with severe polio in need of rocking beds and iron lungs were sent, provided superb medical and psychological rehabilitation but, until 1953, most of the permanent respirator users seemed doomed to remain in the hospital for the rest of their lives.

Gini and her husband, Joe, started to meet those needs by building a heated pool with a lift at their home, where they held annual reunions of the alumni of the respiratory center.

… Gini led a letter-writing campaign in 1959, alerting survivors in every state to write to their congressmen urging national attendant care legislation.

In 1959, she formed a nonprofit organization called Iron Lung Polio Assistance, Inc. and began to publish the immediate precursor to the Rehabilitation Gazette in the form of "a leisurely quarterly" called the Toomey j. Gazette – a rather opaque name for general purposes, but one that was instantly recognizable to respiratory polios throughout the United States.

"Our aim," wrote Laurie in 1960, is "to reach and advance respiratory polios all over the world and to share the problems, experiences, thoughts and adventures that would be of value."

At first the Gazette seemed concerned primarily with sustaining the bonds polio survivors had already formed with each other, and in helping them to record and communicate to each other important techniques, and steps in their continuing rehabilitation.

The best hope for getting the public attention and social resources necessary to support independent living for disabled people seemed to depend crucially on demonstrating the ways in which that could be successful.

In the following years there would be further name changes, often with less regard to transparency for the general public than to signaling (to the disability community at large) her organization's sensitivity to the constantly evolving social, medical, and political landscape.

In 1970, Iron Lung Polios and Multiplegics became Rehabilitation Gazette, Inc. to signal Laurie's focus on producing a more substantial magazine of the same name – one that would be relevant across many disabilities.

Its only redeeming feature, at least to many of Gini Laurie's loyal admirers, was that it formed the acronym G.I.N.I., which allowed them at last to refer to her and her organization with the same name.

In 1979, Laurie had begun to receive disturbing inquiries and reports from polio survivors about new problems – increased fatigue, muscle weakness, pain, and decreasing mobility.

The Gazette published some of this, and with her usual proactive approach, once she determined that these reports reflected growing concerns among both polio survivors and medical professionals about a constellation of symptoms referred to as post-polio syndrome, she launched a memorable series of national and international conferences on post-polio, independent living, and aging with a disability.

In 1987, Raymond married D. Armin Fischer, MD, Chief of the Chest Medicine Service at Rancho Los Amigos Hospital in Downey, California.

Judith Raymond Fischer remained the volunteer editor of Ventilator-Assisted Living, the organization's publication for ventilator users, and is still a consultant.