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This book sheds new light on the human cost of industrialisation by examining the lives and experiences of those disabled in an industry that was vital to Britain's economic growth. If disability has been largely absent from conventional histories of industrialisation, the Industrial Revolution has assumed great significance in disability studies. The book examines the economic and welfare responses to disease, injury and impairment among coal workers. It discusses experiences of disability within the context of social relations and the industrial politics of coalfield communities. The book provides the context for those that follow by providing an overview of the conditions of work in British coalmining between 1780 and 1880. It turns its attention to the principal causes of disablement in the nineteenth-century coal industry and the medical responses to them. The book then extends the discussion of responses to disability by examining the welfare provisions for miners with long-term restrictive health conditions. It also examines how miners and their families negotiated a 'mixed economy' of welfare, comprising family and community support, the Poor Law, and voluntary self-help as well as employer paternalism. The book shifts attention away from medicine and welfare towards the ways in which disability affected social relations within coalfield communities. Finally, it explores the place of disability in industrial politics and how fluctuating industrial relations affected the experiences of disabled people in the coalfields.
context. The authors clearly place the medical response in its historical and political context, exposing and exacerbating ‘a profound sense of distrust in the central government and foreign intervention, which was linked to the region’s history of political marginalisation as well as contemporary political upheaval and violence’. The anthropological rather than classic bioethical approach is particularly revelatory, treating the study subjects as ‘interlocutors in ongoing global ethics debates, not
particular on the services provided through workplace ‘sick clubs’, the chapter examines the development of medical responses to sickness and injury in and around coalmining communities in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain and shows how the coal industry was innovative both in the extent of medical provision available to workers 56 DISABILITY IN THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION and in a variety of responses to workplace injury from first aid to specialist convalescent homes. The expansion of medical services made mineworkers, like other industrial workers
This chapter examines the medical responses to the outbreak of the Second World War in Northern Ireland with an emphasis on Belfast. It focuses on the emergence of the Emergency Medical Service (EMS), established throughout the United Kingdom in response to the anticipation of likely air-raid casualties. Pre- Second World War hospital services in Belfast were piecemeal, lacking integration and provided by varying independent bodies including voluntary, municipal and poor law authorities. This chapter argues that the EMS brought a degree of integration previously unknown in Northern Irish health organisation and administration. This new found integration of war time medical services greatly influenced the ‘post war reconstruction’ and ‘planning’ of health. The chapter examines Northern Irish contexts and suggests that Irish and Northern Irish health care systems began to dramatically diverge during wartime. It also examines the relationship between Belfast and London’s Ministry of Health, and the challenges of devolved healthcare. In addition, the chapter examines the public health responses to the 1941 Belfast Blitz, and the overall effectiveness of wartime health services.
Unlike representations of military doctors and nurses in the First and Second World Wars as working heroically against all odds, returning medical personnel from the Vietnam War were seen as an integral part of a vilified military machine. The negative reception on their return home profoundly affected the psychological trauma they carried in the war’s aftermath. In the particular instance of nurses they were even denied the support of veterans groups, since, being women, they were not considered to have a legitimate claim to belonging to these organisations. This chapter focuses on writing (and some interviews) by Vietnam nurse veterans and their importance as the first medical personnel in the 20th Century to claim the legitimacy of their experience as traumatic. As important as their political action, their memoirs paved the way for a broader understanding of what was beginning to be diagnosed as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and the recognition that it was induced not only by combat, but by constant witnessing of and medical response to the violent consequences of war.
This chapter examines discussions on homosexuality among Soviet sexologists and Soviet Interior Ministry (MVD) officials in the 1970s. It reveals that during this time, MVD officials were increasingly influenced by Soviet sexologists’ research on homosexuality and sought to harness it for their efforts to eliminate same-sex activity in Soviet prisons. This chapter also shows that during the 1970s, the Soviet penitentiary was a key site, where Soviet sexual modernity was constructed. Police and doctors negotiated new meanings of homosexuality, experimenting with new forms of controls and seeking to preserve and enforce heterosexuality in prisons. The influence of sexological expertise on Soviet MVD officials, however, did not result in their preference for medical approaches to homosexuality. Instead, MVD officials advocated for a combination of police and medical responses to same-sex activity in prisons, viewing it paradoxically as both a punishable crime and a treatable disease. This peculiar kind of sexual modernity – a conflation of medical and police approaches - was also palpable outside the barbed wire in the practices of Soviet sexopathologists. Although homosexual acts were a punishable crime and there was a steady rise in sodomy convictions during the 1970s, there were doctors who willingly offered medical treatment for homosexuality. These treatments were unofficial and doctors who administered them had to balance their practice along the borders of public and private.
In the early years of the Norwegian HIV/AIDS epidemic, three main groups were
affected: gay and bisexual men, drug users, and people with haemophilia.
However, another group played a dominant role in the political, medical, and
public discourse: sex workers. This chapter analyses the early political and
medical responses to the epidemic, particularly the position of sex workers,
the limits of inclusion in the ‘Norwegian model’, and the impact of the
epidemic on sex worker activism.
Using media sources, public and
private archives, and oral interviews with sex workers, activists, social
workers, and civil servants, this chapter explores how different
representations of 'the prostitute' were constructed and
mobilised. From the mid-1980s, doctors, public health researchers, and the
media constructed sex workers as a potential reservoir for HIV infection.
Gay activists were gradually recognised as 'experts' by
authorities and medical professionals, while it was much more difficult for
sex workers to make their voices heard. This had historical reasons because
prostitution was generally recognised as a social problem on different
levels of society: by politicians, by the police, by social workers, by
feminist groups, and in the media. This chapter examines the remarkable
story of a creative group of people in the health authorities who approached
sex workers as experts, hiring two women for outreach HIV prevention work.
The sex workers reported back to the authorities, who thus had first-hand
knowledge about a community which otherwise was hard to reach. This outreach
work spurred sex worker activism and led to the establishment of the first
Norwegian sex worker activist organisation (PION) in 1990. However, the
Norwegian story shows how much more difficult it has been for sex workers to
get a seat at the table in political decisions than other marginalised
groups.
This book explores whether early modern people cared about their health, and what did it mean to lead a healthy life in Italy and England. According to the Galenic-Hippocratic tradition, 'preservative' medicine was one of the three central pillars of the physician's art. Through a range of textual evidence, images and material artefacts, the book documents the profound impact which ideas about healthy living had on daily practices as well as on intellectual life and the material world in Italy and England. Staying healthy and health conservation was understood as depending on the careful management of the six 'Non-Naturals': the air one breathed, food and drink, excretions, sleep, exercise and repose, and the 'passions of the soul'. The book provides fresh evidence about the centrality of the Non-Naturals in relation to groups whose health has not yet been investigated in works about prevention: babies, women and convalescents. Pregnancy constituted a frequent physical state for many women of the early modern European aristocracy. The emphasis on motion and rest, cleansing the body, and improving the mental and spiritual states made a difference for the aristocratic woman's success in the trade of frequent pregnancy and childbirth. Preventive advice was not undifferentiated, nor simply articulated by individual complexion. Examining the roles of the Non-Naturals, the book provides a more holistic view of convalescent care. It also deals with the paradoxical nature of perceptions about the Neapolitan environment and the way in which its airs were seen to affect human bodies and health.
other nurses were an integral part of the fight against such evil. Notes 1 Gerard Fitzgerald, ‘Chemical warfare and medical response during World War I’, American Journal of Public Health 98, 4 (April 2008), 611–25, 611; Laurence Sondhaus, World War One: The Global Revolution (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2011), 131–2; Mark Harrison, The Medical War: British Military Medicine in the First World War (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2010), 56. 2 In the autumn and winter of 1915, bromine and phosgene began to replace chlorine as the preferred methods of
disabled workers in a period that is significant for the gradual evolution of ‘disability’ as a category distinct from other forms of disease or ill health.12 It examines the role of economic changes in shaping understandings and experiences of disability during this crucial era of industrial development. Different communal, welfare and medical responses to disablement are analysed alongside evidence that indicates the agency of people with impairments. Indeed, rather than seeing ‘disabled’ mineworkers simply as the victims of exploitative economic expansion, a key