Hosanna Krienke - Böcker

Across the nineteenth century, what counted as a beneficial medical intervention narrowed considerably. Diagnostic acts like listening to a patient’s heartbeat or performing a physical examination became the norm for medical doctors, while physical acts of care—such as feeding a patient or listening to her stories—were gradually relegated to realms outside of effective medical treatment. Yet Victorian thinkers worried that something was lost when hospitals and 2 medical practitioners forsook these kinds of pragmatic and holistic practices of care. Thus many argued that such care had a vital—even life-saving—role after the acute phase of illness had passed. Convalescent care thus supplemented scientific medicine by supplying the kind of tailored, interpersonal caregiving that scientific medicine gradually abandoned. Convalescent, or post-acute care, began when a physician stopped seeing a patient daily, and it was generally supplied by experienced women, including professional nurses, philanthropic volunteers, familial caregivers, and servants. This volume thus introduces convalescence and its caregiving practices as a way to contextualize scientific medicine and its limitations in addressing the systemic ill-health of industrialization, urbanization, and imperial expansion. Convalescent care was not merely about physical recovery. Time and again, contemporary thinkers link the benefits of convalescence to the mental rest provided by a period of post-acute relaxation. In fact, many experts saw convalescent leisure as a key antidote to the stressors of modern life itself. Contemporary medical patients, they reasoned, needed to recover not only from their specific disease or condition but also from the systemic stressors of overwork, urban pollution, social isolation, and mental exhaustion that characterized the industrial age. Indeed, this reasoning spawned a host of philanthropic convalescent homes that extended this seeming luxurious care to work-class patients. By exploring such a nexus of issues, this volume explores precisely how common life experiences like work, stress, mental strain, leisure, and social relationships were historically stripped out of the medical purview in ways that still have repercussions for today’s healthcare.

An asset to researchers and students alike this two volume set contextualizes the drastically changing environment of nineteenth-century medicine not merely from the perspectives of famed medical experts, but also those of patients, nurses, caregivers, journalists, and social reformers. Students in particular will learn empathy through reading personal experiences of illness, as well as critical thinking by exploring the cultural debates spawned by systemic ill-health in the period. The physical experiences of both convalescence and invalidism were not confined to the upper class, but instead widely discussed and shared in Victorian Britain. Indeed, these bodily categories applied equally to the rich and poor, men and women, mental sufferers and those with physical disabilities. Given such wide applicability of the key terms, this collection of primary sources will provide readers with a diverse cross-section of Victorian voices, including well-known writers like Wilkie Collins, Harriet Martineau and Florence Nightingale, alongside volunteer caregivers, working-class autobiographers, and world travelers. Through such sources, these volumes will also shed light on major cultural themes for the nineteenth century as a whole, including touchstone topics like industrialization, empire, religion, and mental health.

While convalescence connoted a temporary experience of recuperation after a serious illness, invalidism was pictured as an ongoing—and perhaps endless—experience of ill-health. Invalids, then, were those whose conditions appeared to derive no benefit from scientific medicine’s interventions. Yet nineteenth-century invalidism was not so dire a condition as this definition seems to imply. The assumption of chronicity meant that invalids were freed from what sociology has termed “the sick role,” the set of obligations assigned to medical patients (the most significant of which, in Western cultures, is to try to get better). This volume explores the paradoxical freedom provided by invalidism in the nineteenth century. Under the surety of this label, middle-class invalids travelled the world, ailing soldiers insisted upon returning home, working-class sufferers abstained from strenuous work, and lay patients developed and advertised their own health regimens. Perhaps most counter-intuitively, invalidism created space for educated women to forsake household duties and take on the roles of professional writers and public intellectuals. Freed from the scrutiny of the medical gaze, invalids were able to create distinct subcultures and communities. By highlighting not just the afflictions, but also the opportunities, of chronic ill-health in nineteenth-century sources, this volume reveals that the iconic Victorian invalid is not the isolated shut-in we so often imagine, but a dynamic figure immersed in—and contributing to—contemporary debates about health, climate, industrialization, city planning and globalization.

Victorian Britain witnessed a resurgence of traditional convalescent caregiving. In the face of a hectic modern existence, nineteenth-century thinkers argued that all medical patients desperately required a lengthy, meandering period of recovery. Various reformers worked to extend the benefits of holistic recuperative care to seemingly unlikely groups: working-class hospital patients, insane asylum inmates, even low-ranking soldiers across the British Empire. Hosanna Krienke offers the first sustained scholarly assessment of nineteenth-century convalescent culture, revealing how interpersonal post-acute care was touted as a critical supplement to modern scientific medicine. As a method of caregiving intended to alleviate both physical and social ills, convalescence united patients of disparate social classes, disease categories, and degrees of impairment. Ultimately, this study demonstrates how novels from Bleak House to The Secret Garden draw on the unhurried timescale of convalescence as an ethical paradigm, training readers to value unfolding narratives apart from their ultimate resolutions.