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
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
“Asian Rickets”? Medical Responses to Postcolonial Immigration ’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine , 81:3 (2007), 533–68. 11 Franz Thedering, Sunlight as Healer: A Popular Treatise ( Slough : Sollux, 1926), p. 24. 12 William Beaumont, Fundamental
concerns and are, in this process, substantially revived; three forms of currently virulent anti-computing include addiction tropes and (less seen but still evident) other medicalized responses to pervasive connectedness, digital detox as a suggested response, and concern around noise and silence, screen life, and compulsive sociality, which becomes a figure for the lack of solitude or private life per se. None of these tropes is new (they appear in Leavis’ accounting with technologico-Benthamism, figure in moral panics around television and family life, reach back to
The present volume, which examines the correlations that were being drawn between notions of progress and pathology across a diverse range of socio-economic cultures in the long nineteenth century beginning with the French Revolution, interrogates such notions of exceptionalism. Our purview is deliberately transnational, drawing on case studies from Britain, America, France, Germany, Finland, Bengal, China, and the South Pacific, in order to provide rich comparative perspectives on medical responses to, and constructions of, modernity, while demonstrating that
opening scene introduces the viewers to the prototypical imagery of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, showing ‘emaciated gay men in hospital beds’ (Hallas, 2009: 12). An object of intense debate since the early years of the epidemic, these deathbed images have been fiercely criticised for sustaining ‘stigmatizing ideological narratives about homosexuality’s “innate pathology” ’, instead of persuading ‘readers to demand a greater political and medical response to the AIDS crisis’ (Crimp, 2002; Hallas, 2009: 12; Treichler, 1988; Watney, 1987; 1996). Nevertheless, the opening shot
were aware of the significance of the patient's autonomy before the Second World War. Indeed, in contrast to histories that present doctors as all-powerful agents in the patient/client–doctor relationship, the historical practice of sexual counselling in many ways provides a more positive vision of this relationship. By developing an appropriate medical response to the sexual difficulties faced by their patients, women doctors took their patients’ demands and needs seriously and used them to shape, to a certain extent, the development and content of sexual
-preservation helped ensure that the EAMS recommendations of the 1950s were acted upon. In Buganda, medical responses to malnutrition during the colonial period were shaped not just by the interests of a range of medical actors and funders, including the World Health Organization, UNICEF and the Medical Research Council, but also by the findings of a cohort of anthropologists and psychologists, and by Buganda’s royal