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…

Harriet Martineau – Radical Activism

Abstract Harriet Martineau (1802-1876) was a unique figure in Victorian culture, who contributed to a wide range of intellectual and social debates of the period. She was a writer, sociologist, economist, feminist and disabled activist and abolitionist. As a historical figure she attracts cross-discipline interest for her varied and interesting life. It would be impossible to fit…

Swansea Association of Independent Living Presentation

When I was asked to present, I struggled to decide on what to present. As a PhD student my research has at times become my life, but as a disabled woman my identity has permeated into those studies and influenced them and my ability to engage with the university. Everyday ableism is something we all…

In/Visibility, Invalidism and Identity

This presentation was given on 04/10/2019 at the Royal Hospital for Neuro-Disability in London, as part of a Conference on Disability History and Heritage called, "Opening up the Archives"   When I was asked to present, I wasn’t too sure what to present, while my research is interesting, it still feels like it is in…

The Victorian Era – Introduction (Part 1)

The Victorian era was a time period where Queen Victoria was on the throne of Great Britain (and at this time Ireland) between becoming queen on the 20th June 1837 until her death on the 22nd January 1901, a reign of 63 years and 7 months, which at the time was the longest of any…

Postmodernism, Historicism and Anthropology

Postmodernists use the term historicism (coined by Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel) which basically means that any questions or queries about something must be considered within the social context within which the question arises. Much like in anthropology, in which a researcher must be conscious of their own ethnocentrism when exploring another culture, a historian must…

Conceptual and methodological problems with sources in my research

Direct accounts of the lived experience of disability are some of the least represented sources and many that are available are only available due to the social status of the writer, a status which will invariably impact how their lived experience compared to someone who is disabled and working class. This doesn’t mean that such…

What is In/Visibility?

It is too simplistic to say that the visible is simply what is seen and the invisible is what is not seen, and this can be seen in how scholars have approached the topic of in/visibility. Within the concept of the visible, there is a partition between what is seen and what is not seen,…

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…

Epilepsy – 19th Century

Throughout history epilepsy has been associated with behavioural and personality disorders, however, it was only in the 19th century along with the rise of industrialisation and the push for standards across medical professionalism, that epilepsy began to be examined closer and the associations that linked epilepsy with mental illness were examined, studied and documented, for…