On this page you will find links to resources related to Modern History from roughly 1750-1945CE.
Birth Defects
Chronic Fatigue
A cultural history of disability in the long eighteenth century by
ntroduction / D. Christopher Gabbard and Susannah B. Mintz -- Atypical bodies: difference and assertion / Sara van den Berg -- Mobility impairment: experiences of "lameness" in eighteenth-century England / David M. Turner -- Chronic pain and illness: Enlightenment and romantic responses / Isabella Cooper -- Blindness: conversations with the blind, or "aren't you surprised I can speak?" / Kate E. Tunstall -- Deafness: language and personhood in the Enlightenment / Kristin Lindgren -- Speech: the sound of disability / Dwight Codr and Jared S. Richman -- Learning difficulties: intellectual disability in the long eighteenth century / Simon Jarrett and C.F. Goodey -- Mental health issues: listening for ghosts: mad people in the eighteenth century / Allison P. Hobgood
A cultural history of disability in the long nineteenth century by
Introduction: negotiating normalcy in the long nineteenth century / Joyce L. Huff and Martha Stoddard Holmes -- Atypical bodies: the cultural work of the nineteenth-century freak show / Nadja Durbach -- Mobility impairment: from the bath chair to the wheelchair / Karen Bourrier -- Chronic pain and illness: "the wounded soldiery of mankind" / Maria Frawley -- Blindness: creating and consuming a nonvisual culture -- Deafness: representation, sign language, and community, ca. 1800-1920 / Esme Cleall -- Speech: dysfluent temporalities in the long nineteenth century / Daniel Martin -- Learning difficulties: the transformation of "idiocy" in the nineteenth century / Patrick McDonagh -- Mental health issues: alienists, asylums, and the mad / Elizabeth J. Donaldson
Disability in the Industrial Revolution: physical impairment in British coalmining, 1780-1880 by
An electronic version of this book is also available under a Creative Commons (CC-BY-NC-ND) license, thanks to the support of the Wellcome Trust. The Industrial Revolution produced injury, illness and disablement on a large scale and nowhere was this more visible than in coalmining. Disability in the Industrial Revolution 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. Although it is commonly assumed that industrialisation led to increasing marginalisation of people with impairments from the workforce, disabled mineworkers were expected to return to work wherever possible, and new medical services developed to assist in this endeavour. This book explores the working lives of disabled miners and analyses the medical, welfare and community responses to disablement in the coalfields. It shows how disability affected industrial relations and shaped the class identity of mineworkers. The book will appeal to students and academics interested in disability, occupational health and social history.
Disability and the Victorians: attitudes, interventions, legacies by
Disability and the Victorians brings together in one collection a range of topics, perspectives and experiences from the Victorian era that present a unique overview of the development and impact of attitudes and interventions towards those with impairments during this time. The collection also considers how the legacies of these actions can be seen to have continued throughout the twentieth century right up to the present day. Subjects addressed include deafness, blindness, language delay, substance dependency, imperialism and the representation of disabled characters in popular fiction. These varied topics illustrate how common themes can be found in how Victorian philanthropists and administrators responded to those under their care. Often character, morality and the chance to be restored to productivity and usefulness overrode medical need and this both influenced and reflected wider societal views of impairment and inability.
Fictions of Affliction: physical disability in Victorian culture by
Tiny Tim, Clym Yeobright, Long John Silver---what underlies nineteenth-century British literature's fixation with disability? Melodramatic representations of disability pervaded not only novels by Dickens, but also doctors' treatises on blindness, educators' arguments for "special" education, and even the writing of disabled people themselves. Drawing on extensive primary research, Martha Stoddard Holmes introduces readers to popular literary and dramatic works that explored culturally risky questions like "can disabled men work?" and "should disabled women have babies?" and makes connections between literary plots and medical, social, and educational debates of the day. The first book of its kind, Fictions of Affliction contributes a new emphasis to Victorian literary and cultural studies and offers new readings of works by canonic and becoming-canonic writers like Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and others.
The Borderland of Imbecility: medicine, society, and the fabrication of the feeble mind in late Victorian and Edwardian England by
This book is about the life and work of David Milch, the writer who created NYPD Blue, Deadwood and a number of other important US television dramas. It provides a detailed account of Milch's journey from academia to the heights of the television industry, locating him within the traditions of achievement in American literature over the past in order to evaluate his contribution to fiction writing. It also draws on behind-the-scenes materials to analyse the significance of NYPD Blue, Deadwood, John From Cincinatti and Luck. Contributing to academic debates in film, television and literary studies on authorship, the book will be of interest to fans of Milch's work, as well as those engaged with the intersection between literature and popular television.
Mental Disability in Victorian England: the Earlswood Asylum, 1847-1901 by
This book contributes to the growing scholarly interest in the history of disability by investigating the emergence of 'idiot' asylums in Victorian England. Using the National Asylum for Idiots, Earlswood, as a case-study, it investigates the social history of institutionalization, privileging the relationship between the medical institution and the society whence its patients came. By concentrating on the importance of patient-centred admission documents, and utilizing the benefits of nominal record linkage to other, non-medical sources, David Wright extends research on the confinement of the 'insane' to the networks of care and control that operated outside the walls of the asylum. He contends that institutional confinement of mentally disabled and mentally ill individuals in the nineteenth century cannot be understood independently of a detailed analysis of familial and community patterns of care. In this book, the family plays a significant role in the history of the asylum, initiating the identification of mental disability, participating in the certification process, mediating medical treatment, and facilitating discharge back into the community. By exploring the patterns of confinement to the Earlswood Asylum, Professor Wright reveals the diversity of the 'insane' population in Victorian England and the complexities of institutional committal in the nineteenth century. Moreover, by investigating the evolution of the Earlswood Asylum, it examines the history of the institution where John Langdon Down made his now famous identification of 'Mongolism', later renamed Down's Syndrome. He thus places the formulation of this archetype of mental disability within its historical, cultural, and scientific contexts.
Progress and Pathology: medicine and culture in the nineteenth century by
This volume explores changing perceptions of health and disease in the context of the burgeoning global modernities of the nineteenth century. With case studies from Britain, America, France, Germany, Finland, Bengal, China and the South Pacific, it demonstrates how popular and medical understandings of the mind and body were reframed by the social, cultural and political structures of 'modern life'. Chapters in the collection examine ways in which cancer, suicide and social degeneration were seen as products of the stresses and strains of 'new' ways of living. Others explore the legal, institutional and intellectual changes that contributed to modern medical practice. The volume traces how physiological and psychological problems were constituted in relation to each other and to their social contexts, offering new ways of contextualising the problems of modernity facing us in the twenty-first century. This book is relevant to United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 3, 'Good health and well-being'.
Disability in Industrial Britain: a cultural and literary history of impairment in the coal industry, 1880-1948 by
An electronic version of this book is also available under a Creative Commons (CC-BY-NC-ND) license, thanks to the support of the Wellcome Trust. Coalmining was a notoriously dangerous industry and many of its workers experienced injury and disease. However, the experiences of the many disabled people within Britain's most dangerous industry have gone largely unrecognised by historians. This book looks at British coal through the lens of disability, using an interdisciplinary approach to examine the lives of disabled miners and their families. A diverse range of sources are used to examine the economic, social, political and cultural impact of disability in the coal industry, looking beyond formal coal company and union records to include autobiographies, novels and existing oral testimony. It argues that, far from being excluded entirely from British industry, disability and disabled people were central to its development. The book will appeal to students and academics interested in disability history, disability studies, social and cultural history and representations of disability in literature.
Shell-Shocked British Army Veterans in Ireland, 1918-39: a difficult homecoming by
With a focus on mental illness, Shell-shocked British Army veterans in Ireland provides the first in-depth investigation of disabled Great War veterans in Ireland. The book is a result of five years of researching previously untouched archival sources including psychiatric records of former patients otherwise closed to the public. The remit of the work contributes to various historiographical fields including disability history, the social history of medicine, the cultural history of modern war, the history of psychiatry and Irish studies. It also seeks to extend the scope of the First World War with an emphasis on how war-induced disability and trauma continued to affect large numbers of ex-servicemen beyond the official cessation of the conflict.
Measuring Difference, Numbering Normal: setting the standards for disability in the interwar period by
This book is available as an open access ebook under a CC-BY licence. Measurements, and their manipulation, have been underestimated as crucial historical forces motivating and guiding the way we think about disability. Using measurement technology as a lens, and examining in particular the measurement of hearing and breathing, this book draws together several existing discussions on disability, phenomenology, healthcare, medical practice, big data, embodiment, and emerging medical and scientific technologies around the turn of the twentieth century. These are popular topics of scholarly attention but have not, until now, been considered as interconnected topics within a single book. As such, this work connects several important, and usually separate academic subject areas and historical specialisms. The standards embedded in instrumentation created strict, but, ultimately arbitrary thresholds of what is categorised as normal and abnormal. Considering these standards from a long historical perspective reveals how these dividing lines shifted when pushed.
Rethinking Modern Prostheses in Anglo-American Commodity Cultures, 1820-1939 by
This book explores the development of modern transatlantic prosthetic industries in nineteenth and twentieth centuries and reveals how the co-alignment of medicine, industrial capitalism, and social norms shaped diverse lived experiences of prosthetic technologies and in turn, disability identities. Through case studies that focus on hearing aids, artificial tympanums, amplified telephones, artificial limbs, wigs and dentures, this book provides a new account of the historic relationship between prostheses, disability and industry. Essays draw on neglected source material, including patent records, trade literature and artefacts, to uncover the historic processes of commodification surrounding different prostheses and the involvement of neglected companies, philanthropists, medical practitioners, veterans, businessmen, wives, mothers and others in these processes.
Recycling the Disabled: army, medicine and modernity in WWI Germany by
Recycling the disabled: Army, medicine, and modernity in WWI Germany examines the 'medical organisation' of Imperial Germany for total war. Faced with mounting casualties and a growing labour shortage, German military, industrial, and governmental officials turned to medical experts for assistance in the total mobilisation of society. Through an investigation of developments in orthopaedic medicine, prosthetic technology, military medical organisation and the cultural history of disability, Heather Perry reveals how the pressures of modern industrial warfare not only transformed medical ideas and treatments for injured soldiers, but also transformed social and cultural expectations of the disabled body - expectations that long outlasted the war. This book is ideal for scholars and students interested in war, medicine, disability, science and technology, and modern Germany.
Framing the Moron: the social construction of feeble-mindedness in the American eugenic era by
Many people are shocked upon discovering that tens of thousands of innocent persons in the United States were involuntarily sterilized, forced into institutions, and otherwise maltreated within the course of the eugenic movement (1900-30). Such social control efforts are easier to understand when we consider the variety of dehumanizing and fear-inducing rhetoric propagandists invoke to frame their potential victims. This book details the major rhetorical themes employed within the context of eugenic propaganda, drawing largely on original sources of the period. Early in the twentieth century the term "moron" was developed to describe the primary targets of eugenic control. This book demonstrates how the image of moronity in the United States was shaped by eugenicists. This book will be of interest not only to disability and eugenic scholars and historians, but to anyone who wants to explore the means by which pejorative metaphors are used to support social control efforts against vulnerable community groups.
Worth Saving: disabled children during the Second World War by
Early in the war, when faced with an acute shortage of accommodation for evacuees, a government official questioned whether disabled children were 'worth saving'. This book examines how the evacuation in England was planned, executed and evaluated for children with various disabilities (including the 'excluded') and explores how this wartime experience influenced public and professional attitudes towards the children long after the war had ended. Through the use of official documents, newspapers and personal testimony, the book illustrates both positive and negative experiences of the government evacuation scheme, and shows the impact of the attitudes held by the authorities, the general public, and the teaching and nursing staff. It demonstrates how wartime conditions changed special education, both during and after the war, and will appeal to social and medical historians, as well as those studying childhood, the voluntary sector and social policy.
Destigmatising Mental Illness? professional politics and public education in Britain, 1870-1970 by
This historical study of mental healthcare workers' efforts to educate the public challenges the supposition that public prejudice generates the stigma of mental illness. Drawing on extensive archival research, this book argues that psychiatrists, nurses and social workers generated representations of mental illness which reflected their professional aspirations, economic motivations and perceptions of the public. Sharing in the stigma of their patients, healthcare workers sought to enhance the prestige of their professions by focussing upon the ability of psychiatry to effectively treat acute cases of mental disturbance. As a consequence, healthcare workers inadvertently reinforced the stigma attached to serious and enduring mental distress. This book makes a major contribution to the history of mental healthcare, and critiques current campaigns which seek to end mental health discrimination for failing to address the political, economic and social factors which fuel discrimination. It will appeal to academics, students, healthcare practitioners and service users.
Those They Called Idiots: the idea of the disabled mind from 1700 to the present day by
Those They Called Idiots traces the little-known lives of people with learning disabilities from the communities of eighteenth-century England to the nineteenth-century asylum, to care in today's society. Using evidence from civil and criminal courtrooms, joke books, slang dictionaries, novels, art, and caricature, it explores the explosive intermingling of ideas about intelligence and race, while bringing into sharp focus the lives of people often seen as the most marginalized in society.
The Ugly Laws: disability in public by
In the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, municipallaws targeting "unsightly beggars" sprang up in cities across America. Seeming to criminalize disability and thus offering a visceral example of discrimination, these “ugly laws” have become a sort of shorthand for oppression in disability studies, law, and the arts.In this watershed study of the ugly laws, Susan M. Schweik uncovers the murky history behind the laws, situating the varied legislation in its historical context and exploring in detail what the laws meant. Illustrating how the laws join the history of the disabled and the poor, Schweik not only gives the reader a deeper understanding of the ugly laws and the cities where they were generated, she locates the laws at a crucial intersection of evolving and unstable concepts of race, nation, sex, class, and gender. Moreover, she explores the history of resistance to the ordinances, using the often harrowing life stories of those most affected by their passage. Moving to the laws’ more recent history, Schweik analyzes the shifting cultural memory of the ugly laws, examining how they have been used—and misused—by academics, activists, artists, lawyers, and legislators.
The Empire of Depression by
Depression has colonized the world. Today, more than 300 million of us have been diagnosed as depressed. But 150 years ago, "depression" referred to a mood, not a sickness. Does that mean people weren't sick before, only sad? Of course not. Mental illness is a complex thing, part biological, part social, its definition dependent on time and place. But in the mid-twentieth century, even as European empires were crumbling, new Western clinical models and treatments for mental health spread across the world. In so doing, "depression" began to displace older ideas like "melancholia," the Japanese "utsushô," or the Punjabi "sinking heart" syndrome. Award-winning historian Jonathan Sadowsky tells this global story, chronicling the path-breaking work of psychiatrists and pharmacists, and the intimate sufferings of patients. Revealing the continuity of human distress across time and place, he shows us how different cultures have experienced intense mental anguish, and how they have tried to alleviate it. He reaches an unflinching conclusion: the devastating effects of depression are real. A number of treatments do reduce suffering, but a permanent cure remains elusive. Throughout the history of depression, there have been overzealous promoters of particular approaches, but history shows us that there is no single way to get better that works for everyone. Like successful psychotherapy, history can liberate us from the negative patterns of the past.
