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Manon Mathias analyses new attitudes towards disease and hygiene in the nineteenth century in the context of the unprecedented growth of cities in this period, which provoked a parallel rise in diseases from human excrement (such as typhus, typhoid fever, and cholera). This analysis is placed in the context of new scientific understandings of bacteria that began to develop in the late nineteenth century, as the realisation that germs spread through human contact led to an acute fear of dirt and an increased obsession with cleanliness. As human excrement came to dominate discussions of public health and disease, fictions of the period provoked and explored imaginative extensions of these concerns. Jules Verne’s Cinq cents millions de la Bégum (1880), Camille Flammarion’s Uranie (1889), and William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890) each created compelling fantasies of alternative, faeces-free societies in which bodily waste and dirt have been eradicated. These somewhat anodyne and sterile hygienic utopias, however, also reveal the potential unintended consequences of extreme cleanliness. Implicated in the rational rejection of disease and infection, Mathias argues, is a rejection of human physicality, intimacy, and passion.
(London: HMSO, 1953), 3. 10 Santanu Das, Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 16 Introduction 11 Christine E. Hallett, Containing Trauma: Nursing Work in the First World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009). See also Christine E. Hallett, Veiled Warriors: Allied Nurses of the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Christine E. Hallett, ‘“This fiendish mode of warfare”: Nursing the victims of gas poisoning in the First World War’, in Jane Brooks and Christine E. Hallett (eds
Battlefield: Women, Modernism and the First World War 206 The British ‘VAD’ (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), Chapter 3, ‘Accidental Modernisms’: 70–101; Santanu Das, Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), Chapter 5, ‘ “The Impotence of Sympathy”: Service and Suffering in the Nurses’ Memoirs’: 175–203, and Chapter 6, ‘The Operating Theatre’: 204–28. 5 Finzi, Eighteen Months in the War Zone: 30–4. 6 For a commentary on the emotional pressures faced by nurses in military hospitals, see
sisters of the British Army were eventually posted to all war zones of the Second World War to care for combatants. The chapter maps the nursing practices on active service overseas that recovered men, including body care, feeding work, the management of pain and support for the dying. These four areas of nursing practice are commonly associated with nursing work, yet, in war zones, they demanded complex gendered brokery. The intimacy of body care, the moment when the single young female nurse meets the young male patient, required skilful negotiations in order to
Africa (London: HMSO, 1957), 255. 129 Toman, An Officer and a Lady, 109. 130 Allen, A Nursing Sister’s Desert Experience with the 8th Army. 131 Hilder, ‘All in the day’s work IV. – Darkest Africa!’, 93. 132 Hilder, ‘All in the day’s work IV. – Darkest Africa!’, 93. 133 Newlands, Civilians into Soldiers, 162. 91 Negotiating nursing 134 Crew, The Army Medical Services: Volume II, 261. 135 Harrison, Medicine and Victory, 109. 136 Santanu Das, Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), especially ch. 6, 204
: Oxford University Press, 2010). 27 Santanu Das, Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 28 Paul Berry and Mark Bostridge, Vera Brittain: A Life (London: Virago Press, 2001). 29 Margaret Higonnet, ‘Not So Quiet in No-Woman’s Land’, in Cooke and Woollacott, Gendering War Talk: 205–26; Margaret Higonnet, Lines of Fire: Women Writers of World War I (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999); Margaret Higonnet, Nurses at the Front: Writing the Wounds of the Great War (Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 2001
) each created compelling fantasies of alternative, faeces-free societies in which bodily waste and dirt have been eradicated. These somewhat anodyne and sterile hygienic utopias, however, also reveal the potential unintended consequences of extreme cleanliness. Implicated in the rational rejection of disease and infection, Mathias argues, is a rejection of human physicality, intimacy, and passion. In Chapter 6 , Steffan Blayney pursues this concept of the human being who is at odds with their environment by tracing an ongoing tension between the
: Paris to Albania by Model T Ford (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1983): 6–7, 9. 34 Santanu Das, Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005): 175–203; Hallett, Containing Trauma: 10–15. 35 Holtz, Travels with Zenobia: 6. 36 Jensen, ‘A Base Hospital Is Not a Coney Island Dance Hall’. 37 Although there is evidence that a unit from Harvard University was in France much earlier than this. Alice Fitzgerald, unpublished memoirs incorporating war diary, c. 1936, Alice Fitzgerald Papers, Md HR M2633, Md HR M
Vietnam War’, Nursing History Review 14 (2006): 135. 34 Christine E. Hallett, Containing Trauma: Nursing Work in the First World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), 158. 35 Santanu Das, Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 188. 120 Nursing presence 36 Christine E. Hallett, ‘“This fiendish mode of warfare”: Nursing the victims of gas poisoning in the First World War’, in Jane Brooks and Christine E. Hallett (eds), One Hundred Years of Wartime Nursing Practices, 1854–1953 (Manchester
the desperation of unsettledness; the other the stultifying stuckness of settledness in a dehumanising environment. In each I use contemporary fiction to interrogate an ambiguous historical record. Literary artists claim access to characters’ senses of self and world, including individuals’ understandings of and responses to the stresses of their lives. Historians rarely aspire to such intimacy; rarely do our sources encourage it. Cold women To illustrate the importance and potential of ‘complaint’, it may help to consider its