A Healing Sense of Place: The Importance of Environment on healing in the nineteenth century

Throughout the 19th century healing spaces were constantly adapting and changing due to understandings of illness, popular treatment options and public opinion for example, while many people would consider a hospital nowadays to be a site of healing, the 1832 Anatomy Act left many poorer patients and their families concerned that they would face post…

In/Visibility in Practice

Visibility is important to an individual’s identity because it is linked to power through recognition[1], therefore disability is important to approach and deconstruct the concept of in/visibility in how it impacts intersectional identities within a society that queries the existence and rights of disabled people. In/visibility is a paradox because it exists within a social…

Christina Rossetti (1830–1894)

 “anyone who did not understand that Christina was an almost constant and often a sadly-smitten invalid, seeing at times the countenance of Death very close to her own, would form an extremely incorrect notion of her corporeal, and thus in some sense her spiritual, condition”[1] Disability and/or Chronic Illness Victorian poet Christina Rossetti (1830–1894) had…

Key questions to consider when reading texts

Critical Reading Critical reading is a form of reading that involves a deeper engagement with the text. It goes beyond just reading and understanding a text but is a multi layered approach that involves evaluating the reading, its strengths and weaknesses, the intent of the author, the audience of the text as well as the…

Brief discussion on Gender, Illness and the Asylum

Patients who were brought to the asylum were not solely brought on the grounds of mental ill health, but sometimes due to physical ailments or a combination of both, according to Dr Heise of the Ballinaslow Asylum 1846, "the patients have been all of a most wretched class, and chiefly affected with chronic disease... the…

Illness as a Metaphor and the Absent Referent

Absent Referent: The interaction between physical oppression and the dependence on metaphors that rely on the absent referent indicates that we distance ourselves from whatever is different by equating it with something we have already objectified. According to Carol J. Adams, "The absent referent functions to cloak the violence inherent to meat eating, to protect…