University of Wolverhampton, UK


Participants are warmly invited to a conference that explores families and health from a historical perspective. Please find below the programme and abstracts.

Participation is free, but registration is required: please see below for details. Once you are registered, you will receive the Zoom link closer to the date.

For further information, please e-mail Laura Ugolini at: l.ugolini@wlv.ac.uk

 

PROGRAMME

9.00 – 9.30 Tara Calaby, La Trobe University, “Her Daughter Who Is a Patient Visits Her Daily”: Family Relationships in Victoria’s Lunatic Asylums, 1860-1914

9.35 – 10.05 Sutapa Mukhopadhyay, Kishore Bharati Bhagini Nivedita College (Co-ed) Kolkata, A search of Healthcare of middle class Bengali Women in the late 19th to early 20th century Bengal in their autobiographies

10.10 – 10.40 Camille Bajeux, University of Geneva, “My doctor would like to see you” – Women’s management of male sexual and reproductive difficulties during the Trente Glorieuses (France and French-speaking Switzerland)

10.40 – 11.15 Break

11.15 – 11.45 Christine Atha, University of Leeds, Housing Problems – a study in decay and disease in the ‘healthy’ home

11.50 – 12.20 Ian Miller, Ulster University, Ending the ‘Cult of the Broken Home’: Divorce, Children and the Changing Emotional Dynamics of Separating British Families, c. 1945–90

12.25 – 12.55 Sophia Koenig, Leipzig University, (Un-)safe childbirth: German midwives and the evolution of midwifery and infant care in Germany 1918–1933

12.55 – 13.45 Lunch

13.45 – 14.30 Work in progress, ten minute presentations:

Aisling Shalvey, Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina e. V., Little’s Disease During National Socialism; A Comparative Case Study

Andrew Burchell, University of Warwick, Running in the family? Provincial snapshots of stammering in early twentieth-century England (and some parts of Scotland), c.1900-1945

Sadegh Attari, University of Birmingham, Porous Protectors: Plague, Health, and the Home in Late Medieval England

14.35 – 15.05 Steven King, Nottingham Trent University, Constructing Obligation: The Limits to Family Care of the disabled Poor 1750s-1900s

15.05 – 15.30 Break

15.30 – 16.00 Katharina Rowold, University of Roehampton, Is Mother’s Milk Always Best? Maternal and Infant Health at the Turn of the Twentieth Century in Britain

16.05 – 16.35 Cara Dobbing, independent researcher, Families, mental illness and the place of ‘home’ in nineteenth century England

REGISTRATION


ABSTRACTS

Christine Atha, University of Leeds, Housing Problems – a study in decay and disease in the ‘healthy’ home

In the documentary film Housing Problems produced in 1935, we witness a building collapsing in on its inhabitants. Babies die, men and women despair, and infestations creep in everywhere. This paper examines the physical and emotional manifestations of a ‘healthy’ home. This home is an environment occupied by men, women and children struggling to live with the building as it seems to respire and expire around the occupants. As the narrator puts it “ Here’s a typical interior of a decayed house.”

The spaces filmed in Housing Problems present the experiences of the tenants in their own words as they are preyed upon by insects and rodents, threatened by collapsing walls and ceilings, and desperately try to stay clean.

In spite of this they maintain their dignity and sense of homeliness with masses of decorative objects displayed throughout the rooms, artefacts that provide an essential homeliness, a glimmer of a ‘healthy’ home, objects that the 1930s design reformers would almost certainly have removed immediately as a gaudy, tasteless, unnecessary trap for dust.

The film attempts to reconcile their suffering with the promise of a new type of housing development in the example of the ill-fated Quarry Hill flats housing development in Leeds.

Sadegh Attari, University of Birmingham, Porous Protectors: Plague, Health, and the Home in Late Medieval England

This paper examines the medical and spiritual attitudes towards both the healthy and plague-infected domestic environment during plague outbreaks. This is done in light of the advice on how to prevent contracting plague as well as that on containing it within the domestic environment in medical, civic, and religious texts from the Black Death (1348–52) to mid-sixteenth England. The paper argues that in terms of prevention, the medical and civic guidelines conceived of the home as a body-like unit invested with a kind of bodily integrity, from which the plague-causing ‘corrupt air’ must be expunged or withheld through adhering to a hygienic conduct. In the religious sense, the domestic environment was understood similarly, and the majority of spiritual measures, which, to the medieval mind, were not distinct from the medical guidelines, concerned leading a moral life and expelling the corrupt air. These included not only withstanding temptation, but also holding masses within the abode. One measure to prevent plague from entering homes, however, was to keep prayer books and prayer rolls devoted to Christ and saints with protective powers against plague within the domestic environment, many of which were illustrated with images of Christ and the saints. These saints included Ss Sebastian, Roch, and Etheldreda, who were thought to have had the plague; martyred saints associated with plague such as Ss George, Katherine, and Edmund, among others; and depictions of Christ’s crucifixion in the Man of Sorrows tradition or alongside the instruments of Passion portraying the arma Christi trope. All of these figures were represented as bodily violated, either showing open wounds or holding the instruments with which they were killed (for instance, arrows, Katherine’s wheel, or the windlass involved in St Erasmus’ martyrdom), but their bodily violation did not symbolise a threat to the health of the home. Rather, their bodily disintegration marked their protective power, their reliability, and their spiritual perfection. In this way, while the domestic body needed to be purged from disintegrating corruption, it simultaneously needed to be populated and guarded by figures who embody plague-stricken bodily disintegration. Thus, the home became a body which is invested with bodily integrity and porousness at the same time. Once infected, furthermore, the house, instead of being expunged, was contained from the rest of the town, which was also considered a body paralleling the human body. Thus, the infected house made the urban environment porous, too.

Camille Bajeux, University of Geneva, “My doctor would like to see you” – Women’s management of male sexual and reproductive difficulties during the Trente Glorieuses (France and French-speaking Switzerland)

Alongside significant economic prosperity, the period of the Trente Glorieuses (1946 to the mid-1970s) coincided in France and French-speaking Switzerland with a growing medical interest and a ‘disciplinarization’ (Clarke, 1998) of sex research. A central tenet of this new field of practice was to consider sexual and reproductive difficulties as concerning both partners in heterosexual couples. The idea that mutual pleasure was a central component of a healthy marriage had become a commonplace in 1950s and 1960s France and French-speaking Switzerland (Garibian, 2017; Thomé, 2019). A growing anxiety about divorce rates led medical authorities to reframe sexual disorders as connected with relationship problems in marriage rather than individual deficiencies (Guimel & Kraus, 2018). In the growing field of the reproductive sciences, infertility specialists also increasingly believed that both partners must be examined to find the ‘true’ cause of sterility (Bajeux, 2020; Marsh & Ronner, 1996).

Although some historical research has shown that women have been encouraged to care for their husbands’ feelings when they encountered a sexual or reproductive difficulty (Bajeux, 2020; Rusterholz, 2019; Herbst Lewis, 2010), little attention has been paid to the ways in which doctors interacted and negotiated with heterosexual couples. Drawing from patient records, medical literature, media archives, and feminist literature (in the form of monographs, testimonies, etc.), I argue that the medical ideal of treating heterosexual couples as a unit often relied on the invisible and emotional labor (Strauss et al., 1982; Thievenaz, 2017) performed by women on behalf of their husbands.

I argue that women performed most of the patient work of initiating treatments, setting up appointments and keeping track of medical histories and records. Those who faced their partners’ reluctance also engaged in sentimental work to persuade them to have their semen examined or to seek medical attention. I contend that doctors simultaneously relied on women to reach male patients, while blaming them when they acted ‘inappropriately’ and were thought to have a negative impact on their partners’ wellbeing. Rather than passive subjects, women also exerted agency in their relation to both doctors and their husbands; sometimes forming alliances with practitioners or ignoring their advice when they believed necessary.

References:

Bajeux, C. (2020). Managing masculinities. Doctors, men, and men’s partners facing male infertility in France and French-speaking Switzerland (c. 1890–1970). Norma, 15(3‑4), 235‑250. https://doi.org/10.1080/18902138.2020.1805887

Clarke, A. E. (1998). Disciplining Reproduction. University of California Press. https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520310278

Garibian, T. (2017). De la question sexuelle à la sexologie médicale : une histoire des savoirs sur les sexualités (Suisse romande , 1890-1970). Université de Lausanne.

Guimel, C., & Kraus, C. (2018). Désirer ? Une brève histoire de la sexologie à Lausanne depuis les années 1950. In D. Gardey & M. Vuille (Éds.), Les sciences du désir. La sexualité féminine de la psychanalyse aux neurosciences (p. 71‑86). Éditions Le Bord de l’Eau.

Herbst Lewis, C. (2010). Prescription for Heterosexuality. Sexual Citizenship in the Cold War Era. The University of North Carolina Press.

Marsh, M., & Ronner, W. (1996). The Empty Craddle. Infertility in America from Colonial Times to the Present. The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Rusterholz, C. (2019). « You Can’t Dismiss that as Being Less Happy, You See it is Different ». Sexual Counselling in 1950s England. Twentieth Century British History, 30(3), 375‑398.

Strauss, A., Fagerhaugh, S., Suczek, B., & Wiener, C. (1982). Sentimental work in the technologized hospital. Sociology of Health and Illness, 4(3), 254‑278. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9566.ep10487954

Thievenaz, J. (2017). L’analyse des activités du patient: une occasion de réinterroger la notion de travail. Éducation et socialisation, 44.

Thomé, C. (2019). La sexualité aux temps de la contraception. Genre, désir et plaisir dans les rapports hétérosexuels (France, années 1960-années 2010). École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales.

Andrew Burchell, University of Warwick, Running in the family? Provincial snapshots of stammering in early twentieth-century England (and some parts of Scotland), c.1900-1945

Under the impetus of mass schooling and compulsory medical inspection in the first three decades of the twentieth century, the attention of local elites increasingly alighted on children who ‘stammered’ or whose speech was judged ‘inarticulate’. Classified variously as suffering from a ‘defect’, ‘handicap’, or merely as ‘educationally backward’, such children were problematised not merely due to the impact their perceived disability had on classroom life, but also for their reduced employment prospects when faced with popular prejudice and an economy newly-reliant on communicative technologies such as the telephone. Local newspapers carried advertisements from elocutionists who promised to ‘cure’[1] stammering in adults and children, while the elected representatives of local authorities and their medical staff were also employing – and helping to legitimate – new forms of expertise in speech impediments. This work-in-progress paper draws from early research undertaken on my project: ‘The Child’s Speech: speech therapy, stammering and activism in Britain, c.1906-2000’. It will ground the connections between stammering and the family within the local ecologies of provincial England (with some attention also being paid to Scotland), and through consideration of ‘patient’ and ‘practitioner’ perspectives.

Firstly, it explores how early therapists and School Medical Officers placed the family within their conceptualisation of stammering’s cause and aetiology, drawing from contemporary treatises, advice manuals, and annual statistical reports. In these conceptualisations, ‘the family’ could become a conduit for articulating concerns around the nexus of class, gender and speech. Moreover, there was a tension in which families and their urban environments could be simultaneously imagined as an important element of psychosocial ‘treatment’ for the child who stammered and condemned as inherently pathological and inimical to the development of ‘fluent’ speech in children.

However, by turning our attention equally to the families and family lives of those who offered therapy, or claimed to ‘cure’ stammering, it is also possible to examine the family’s ambiguity through another lens: how was family life and ‘good’ speech actively modelled for those undergoing ‘treatment’? And how did negotiations around the fluid boundary of elocution and medicalised therapeutics provide a basis for strategies of familial advancement in the quickly evolving, localised market-place of ‘stammering cures’?

Tara Calaby, La Trobe University, “Her Daughter Who Is a Patient Visits Her Daily”: Family Relationships in Victoria’s Lunatic Asylums, 1860-1914

On the 20th of April, 1886, Philip and Jane Ryan were admitted to Yarra Bend Asylum, along with their two daughters, Margaret and Elizabeth. No member of the Ryan family would ever return to the outside world. When Jane Ryan was dying of tuberculosis in Sunbury Asylum, however, Margaret was permitted to visit her every day.

Recent research on the families of nineteenth-century lunatic asylum patients has revealed that family members played a greater role than was previously understood in asylum admission, discharge and even treatment. However, this research depicts family as an external force that only occasionally permeated the walls of the asylum. In this paper, I argue that it was not uncommon for asylum patients to find themselves confined alongside one or more members of their family, thus breaking down the walls between the asylum ward and the social world outside. I conducted an detailed study of the female casebooks of Victoria’s public lunatic asylums between 1860 and 1914, identifying those patients whose case notes indicated a familial relationship with another patient also present in the asylum during the patient’s confinement. Where such relationships were found, I used the broader asylum archives and other existing historical sources to place these relationships within a greater biographical context.

My research reveals that references to other family members are fleeting but surprisingly common. In several cases, multiple family members were admitted at the same time. More commonly, however, a family member would join an existing asylum patient at a later date. Women often gave birth within the asylum, which allowed for only a few, brief days of mothering before the baby was sent away. In some cases, a family member might be placed in the same ward, allowing for regular contact; male relatives, however, would likely only have been seen at mixed-sex entertainments.

I argue that the presence of family within the asylum could greatly alter a woman’s experience of inpatient psychiatric treatment—for better or for worse. However, the significance of these internal familial relationships was underplayed by asylum doctors, despite the challenge they provided to both the therapeutic ideal of removal of a patient from the influences and anxieties of their outside life and to the image of the asylum itself as a family, with the asylum superintendent as its patriarchal head.

Cara Dobbing, independent researcher, Families, mental illness and the place of ‘home’ in nineteenth century England

Mental illness and experiences of it have traditionally been shrouded in shame, and hidden from view. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, aided by legislation, the mentally unwell were brought out of homes and into public lunatic asylums, as the ‘place’ of insanity shifted from the private into the public sphere. Despite this, mainly due to chronic institutional overcrowding, some individuals remained in the family home whilst being certified as insane. This paper will interrogate the role of the family in both their involvement care of relatives in their own homes, and their continued relationship with relatives whilst in an asylum. Within the vast historiography of the Victorian lunatic asylum, the voice of the family of a pauper patient lies somewhat neglected. Their experience is confined to their role in committal, and predominantly with regard to that of juvenile lunatics. This paper will redress this imbalance through looking at the experience of the pauper insane in nineteenth century Cumberland and Westmorland. With the view to recount ‘history from below’, this paper will offer an insight into how the family coped with a mentally ill member in an era when a huge stigma was attached to mental illness, and asylum committal. Using surviving annual lunatic returns, asylum admission papers, case books, visitation registers and several more documents of one English asylum, along with census material and local newspapers, this paper will attempt to assess how families coped with, and adapted to mental illness. This will help us to reassess the role of relatives and their experience of mental illness. In particular, it shall redress the overarching view that care was delivered in asylums with families remaining on the periphery of decision making and caregiving. There will also be space to discuss why some individuals made the asylum their ‘home’, and the reasons why families could be the trigger for mental conditions.

Steven King, Nottingham Trent University, Constructing Obligation: The Limits to Family Care of the disabled Poor 1750s-1900s

This paper draws on a unique dataset of pauper and advocate letters and witness statements which stretches from the 1750s through to the Liberal Welfare Reforms and covers every English and Welsh county. The 4,000,000+ words in the corpus afford us an opportunity to look at a variety of aspects of sickness and health amongst the dependent poor, not least because sickness widely defined was the single most important cause of dependence on the state in this period. In this context, one of the most remarkable aspects of the material are the continuities and changes in the way individuals and families write about disabled (mentally, physically and sensory) people within their kin group. This paper will explore such writing and ask three questions: (i) How were disabled people constructed in a rhetorical sense? (ii) What were the continuities and changes in the way that family care was provided over time and were there variations within and between England and Wales? (iii) How did families understand and represent themselves as reaching the limits of family care? I will show that families provided a deep and complex reservoir of care for those with different sorts of disability and that having done so they imposed a rhetorical and actual duty on the state to step in when the limits of that care were reached. I will further argue that the state in the guise of the Old and New Poor Laws understood and reacted to that obligation, and in doing so gave life to a moral framework within which obligations to the disabled were constructed much as those that emerged to children.

Sophia Koenig, Leipzig University, (Un-)safe childbirth: German midwives and the evolution of midwifery and infant care in Germany 1918–1933

During and after WW1, infant mortality had become a major political and social concern and reforms in midwifery and infant care were deemed necessary to reduce its occurrence. My presentation aims to provide insight into the evolution of midwifery and infant care in Germany 1918­–1933. I would like to focus on two major reform-steps that were taken, their significance and their effect. Throughout my presentation, I am going to explain why midwives played a central role in this development. I will focus on general developments across Germany, but also include sources from my research in Saxony.

Hospital deliveries gained popularity from around 1910 onwards. However, homebirths continued to be the norm. In 1918, almost 90% of German women delivered their babies at home with assistance from midwives. In these cases, midwives also provided post-partum as well as basic infant care. With the first weeks in life being crucial to the infant survival[2],  it seemed clear to “Sozialhygieniker” (Socialhygienists) that any reform measures to reduce infant mortality had to start with pregnancy, (home)births and the quality of care provided by midwives. They, along with midwives’ representatives, considered the desolate economic situation of most midwives to be the biggest issue. One in every two midwives did not earn enough to avoid poverty. As a result, many midwives worked several jobs and were unable to retire, regardless of their health. There was a clear consensus that a midwifery reform was necessary to ensure that midwives were healthy and content enough to provide mothers with quality care. I would like to outline the central reform steps and how they were thought to improve the quality of midwifery.

Improving the quality of maternal healthcare was one important area of concern, but these reforms only covered the first few weeks after delivery and further steps were deemed necessary. Therefore, the second step I am going to be focusing on is the involvement of midwives in “Stillerziehung” (“breastfeeding education”). Breastfeeding was considered to be a major factor in reducing infant mortality and by 1918, most local German health departments had come up with a variety of strategies to educate mothers on breastfeeding. However, the most successful approaches were those that involved midwives. I would like to explain what steps were taken to increase breastfeeding rates and why midwives were key to “Stillerziehung”.

Ian Miller, Ulster University, Ending the ‘Cult of the Broken Home’: Divorce, Children and the Changing Emotional Dynamics of Separating British Families, c. 1945–90

This paper examines the 20th-century transition from stigmatising children from ‘broken homes’ to thinking of them as ‘emotionally vulnerable’. From the 1960s, rising divorce rates forced a re-imagining of family dynamics beyond the nuclear. Until then, psychologists and the public often presumed that (usually working-class) children affected by divorce developed psychopathologies, triggering a drift into juvenile delinquency. However, as divorce became more common, and across all classes, this simplistic model proved unsustainable. Instead, a fuller spectrum of emotional responses among affected children were examined. A new consensus emerged that psychological and behavioural problems could be avoided if parents created appropriate emotional conditions while separating and divorcing, and if parents and children openly communicated their feelings throughout the process, a radically different approach from associating children from ‘broken homes’ with crime. Children themselves were actively encouraged, through a new genre of divorce books written for them, to express their emotions with parents and friends. Using a broad range of mostly unexplored divorce literature, this article argues that divorce was radically rethought as an emotional experience for all involved and one requiring careful management of emotional behaviour and expression to ensure that the bonds of love in the now separating biological family remained intact in challenging domestic circumstances.

Sutapa Mukhopadhyay, Kishore Bharati Bhagini Nivedita College (Co-ed) Kolkata, A search of Healthcare of middle class Bengali Women in the late 19th to early 20th century Bengal in their autobiographies

Since the 19th century a public health policy was initiated by the colonial government. Medical care provided by the British administration was an expression of imperial benevolence which justified the colonial domination as a superior power to the colonised. Gender played a very important role in the arena of health care. James Mill constructed the image of the Indian women as victim of an uncivilized society. Rescuing Indian women from their plight continued to be seen as a necessary precondition for modernizing India and a tool for legitimizing the colonial rule. Meredith Borthwick in her book The Changing Role of Women in Bengal 1849-1905 says that neither the bhadralok nor the Hindu society was ready to grant women the same freedom as men, but the energies that had been generated by social change could not be ignored. Along with women education women healthcare became a matter of concern for the Bengali society, though women’s healthcare was related to the reproductive health only. There arose the question of national health which according to the Bengali bhadralok class was feasible if the mothers were healthy. The concept of healthy mother and healthy child gained momentum during the period of political struggle against the British government. My paper would like to focus on the Bengali middle class women’s own idea of their health and how they described healthcare and awareness of their families in their autobiographies. They witnessed different health problems in their families and how they were treated is a matter of interest. Child marriage in the Bengali society became a menace to the women’s health. There were many diseases faced by the Bengali society and the women were the most vulnerable members of the family. There is a general belief that purdah practicing women were reluctant to see a male doctor. However there were examples of male doctors treating female patients in the family. The autobiographies of Bengali middle class women give a very interesting picture of the healthcare system of Bengal.

Katharina Rowold, University of Roehampton, Is Mother’s Milk Always Best? Maternal and Infant Health at the Turn of the Twentieth Century in Britain

In 1902, Ralph Vincent, soon-to-be the chief physician of the first Infants’ Hospital in Britain, declared that breast milk was not always an ‘ideal food’ for babies: the composition of the bodily fluid was too variable. It was plain to him that breastfeeding as a means of infant feeding could have its drawbacks and disadvantages. Victorian advice and medical literature had long encouraged maternal breastfeeding over other means of infant feeding, such as wet nursing and bottle feeding. However, as this paper will explore, embedded in contemporary conceptualisations of breast milk and feeding was the understanding the maternal body could not always be relied on to produce milk of satisfactory quality and quantity. Indeed, under certain circumstances, this manner of feeding could be dangerous to babies. Equally, it was thought that mothers could not always withstand the demands that breastfeeding placed on their bodies and minds, putting maternal health at risk. However, during the early twentieth century, in the context of growing concern about the infant mortality rate, the developing infant welfare movement increasingly positioned maternal breastfeeding as the pre-eminent determinant of babies’ healthy development. Redefining earlier understandings of the maternal-infant feeding relationship, this process was underwritten by exploration of how careful medical management and maternal self-regulation vis-à-vis diet, levels of exercise and emotional states would ensure satisfactory production of milk. This paper will explore how these ideas on breastfeeding and maternal and infant health were negotiated and interpreted in various ways by infant hygienists, family doctors, and mothers during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Aisling Shalvey, Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina e. V., Little’s Disease During National Socialism; A Comparative Case Study

Little’s Disease, also known as Spastic Diplegia, is a form of cerebral palsy which was first described by Dr William John Little in 1861.  Studying this particular illness is interesting as it formed a point of contention about exactly what this disease encompassed, and how it was caused. Dr Little considered it to be caused by asphyxia at birth, but Dr Sigmund Freud considered it to be caused by something inherited before birth. The symptoms could vary from jerky movement and tension in the lower limbs, but in some cases it resulted in learning difficulties and further disabilities. It remained largely unclear as to how the illness developed, if it could be prevented, and what treatments were most helpful. Scientific study on Little’s disease largely stagnated after Freud’s publication, even though there was no consensus as to how it began, or indeed, what the core hallmarks of the disease were. Despite this lack of clarity, Little’s disease was one of the illnesses selected for ‘elimination’ during the Nazi era through compulsory registration of births, and subsequent killing at a medical facilty. Concepts of heritability of disease, disability, and the importance of family in the care of these children was integral to how patients were treated with disease. This paper discusses how under the same regime, some were subject to physiotherapy and orthopaedic operations to improve their quality of life, while others were murdered in institutions due to ableist ideas of the German ‘Volk’. Indeed, this lack of clarity about what this disease was, and the decision to list it as part of the compulsory registration order, served only to encourage unethical medical research to examine the illness further. Dr Hallervorden, an infamous Nazi neuropathologist, conducted a considerable amount of neuropathological research on Little’s Disease using the brains of those who had been killed. This paper then considers this discrepancy in how patients were treated, in spite of this compulsory registration of illness. This work-in-progress paper will examine case studies of those with Little’s disease side by side and illustrate the role played by families and medical practitioners in response to this complex and not well understood illness.