Conference Programme, Abstracts & Papers

Session 3 - Panel: Recovering Voices: Narratives of Disease, Illness and Pain
Chair: Peter Schulz

Narratives about pain, illness, and disability are not only a popular contemporary literary genre, but an important focus for scholars interested in cultures of health and illness.  Specifically, many analysts have taken as their starting point Arthur Frank’s The Wounded Storyteller (1995), which examines the individual and social functions of storytelling about illness in the late twentieth-century West.  Frank argues that ill people reclaim authority over their bodies and their lives by constructing their own narratives – narratives which empower individuals to make their own sense of what has happened to them, why, and what it means.
The papers in this panel consider different kinds of stories told about suffering and/or surviving bodies, whether told by those whose bodies are suffering or by those who claimed to speak for them.  We consider how individual, social and cultural negotiations shaped the stories that were told – and the ones that were never told – about blinded war veterans, men injured in combat, and women reckoning with breast cancer.  All these men and women, we show, had to make sense of their experiences and their stories within particular historical contexts, contexts which in turn very much shaped what stories could be told and how.  How, we ask, can historians consider stories about disability, pain, and illness as a genre with its own forms and conventions, but still remain attentive to the particular cultural forces and social relationships that produce different kinds of subjectivities and (and thus different kinds of stories) in different times and places?

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‘Spare Your Tears’: Representing and Narrating Blind Bodies in Britain, 1915-1925
Julie Anderson
Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, University of Manchester, Manchester, United Kingdom

‘Spare Your Tears’ - a 1918 advertisement in The Times commanded, exhorting British readers to stop pitying those blinded by war and instead see them as useful citizens, ready to work and take their place in society.  One way to enact that vision, the ad continued, was to donate to St Dunstan’s, an institution representing the thousands of British men who lost their sight in the First World War.  In this paper, I examine how media narratives such as these reconstructed the war-blinded body as a body that was useful to society.
During and immediately following the war, St Dunstan’s work was advertised in the British press, in journals and in books.  Discussions such as these, I show, set out to represent blind bodies positively.  In fact, war-blind bodies were imbued with a different set of values and norms from that of other types of disability: these men’s bodily ‘wholeness’ was more appealing to the public than some of the mangled remains that arrived home from the Front, while the notion that their last ‘vision’ had been one of death, putrefaction and destruction gave them a unique kind of moral authority compared to others disabled by the war.  Stories about the war-blinded men of St Dunstan’s as a group, were widely disseminated, and thanks to the institution’s association with politicians and society figures, the blind men of St Dunstan’s even acquired a measure of glamour.  This group narrative was intended to maintain a consistent and positive view of the institution, and very few of the men at St Dunstan’s produced their own accounts of their experiences for public consumption.  What, I ask, were the long term effects of this institutional control over the individual’s and the group’s story, when public narratives about disability were intended to support very particular representations?

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Men in Pain: Narratives, Agency and Military Medicine
Ana Carden-Coyne
Centre for the Cultural History of War and Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in the Arts (CIDRA), School of Arts, Histories and Cultures, University of Manchester, Manchester, United Kingdom

This paper considers structures of subjectivity in the narrativisation of pain.  How, I ask, did injured and disabled Australian soldiers during the First World War negotiate masculine subjectivity through their narratives of experiencing and witnessing pain?  This paper argues that wounding stories are unidirectional devices testing and affirming the boundaries of masculinity.  Patients narrate significant events, medical incidents and interactions. As narrative devices, these stories can substantiate the independent character of the writer, but also navigate the precarious nature of masculinity in response to pain and the passivity of hospitalisation.  Military hospitals were spaces where medical authority governed soldiers' bodies, and yet, as I show, the conditions of wartime meant that patients could exert forms of agency.  Whereas medical charts are public and professional property, the diary becomes a private document of personal agency. Patient diaries, I demonstrate, created a space where medicine and medical staff were observed and reported upon, and where treatment was negotiated on the patient's terms.  I argue that hospital diaries were more than personal testimony, but also counter narratives to medical case reports and official papers, enabling patients with an imagined 'therapeutic authority' in accounting for medical systems, staff and treatments.

‘She Demanded to Have the Breast Removed’: Medical Case Reports and Women’s Experiences of Cancer in Mid-20th-century Britain
Elizabeth Toon
Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, University of Manchester, Manchester, United Kingdom

Personal narratives of women’s experiences of breast cancer are very common today.  But before the 1970s, very few British women wrote about their experience with cancer for public consumption, and private accounts such as diaries and letters are very difficult to locate.  But something of these women’s voices can be heard, in their doctors’ discussions of their cases.  In this paper, I analyse surgeons’ and other medics’ published case reports about breast cancer from the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, asking what it is possible for us to learn about women’s experiences of breast cancer treatment.  Of course, case reports were a mechanism whereby doctors could account for their successes, their failures, and thus themselves to their colleagues; these reports, I show, also provided a venue for medical professionals to make sense of an uncertain disease and their own inability to control it.  With this in mind, I show how these reports represented women being seen for breast cancer.  Sometimes the phrasing of these reports offer us a glimpse of women who asserted control over their bodies and the treatment of their disease; in other case reports the women are silent, while their bodies are taken to speak for them.  Finally, I ask how the gradual replacement of the case report by other representational strategies – tables, charts, photographs – offered new glimpses of the patient and her relationship with her doctors, even though these strategies increasingly silenced her voice.