  Enlightened by these parallels with their own history, some early disability studies scholars rejected medical practices directed at altering themselves. They characterized the medical model of disability, which takes disability to be a problem requiring medical rather than social intervention and as both the prerogative and the responsibility of medical professionals to fix, as oppressive. They saw medicine itself as a coercive instrument that subordinates disabled people, not the least by inducing feelings of inadequacy and self-hate in them. (See UPIAS 1978; Finkelstein 1980; Oliver 1983.)