In the nine years between the equestrian accident that rendered him a ventilator-dependent quadriplegic and his death in 2005, American actor Christopher Reeve focused on a single goal: he was determined to walk again. “The most famous disabled person after Roosevelt,” Reeve became a national spokesman and public symbol of the “fight for the cure.” In appearances before Congress, on television news shows, and in an address to the Democratic National Convention, Reeve pleaded for funding for innovative research to cure spinal cord injuries. He engaged in intensive rehabilitation efforts and publicized his accomplishments. Explaining that he was “not that interested in lower sidewalks and better wheelchairs,” he kept his focus on a cure: “It's nice to have good equipment and access while you're disabled but I think all of us with these problems should be allowed to regard them as a temporary setback rather than a way of life.”

Reeve's single-minded focus on cure alienated disability activists. Although they acknowledged that finding a cure for spinal cord injuries was a “laudable goal,” the activists found Reeve's attitude counterproductive and insulting to “innumerable disabled people who are more concerned with social injustices than a cure for paralysis.” In her book Make Them Go Away: Clint Eastwood, Christopher Reeve & The Case Against Disability Rights, activist Mary Johnson lamented Reeve's affirmation of the widely held but strongly contested belief “that a disabled person's defining problem is that his body is not ‘whole’; that what he needs – the only thing he needs, really – is to be cured.