Situating Medicine: New Directions Conference, 5-6 June 2014
Centre for the History of Medicine, University of Warwick
Panel: The History of Medicine in the 20th Century
ABSTRACTS
Dr Vicky Long, Glasgow Caledonian University
Conceptualising work-related mental distress in the British coalfields, c.19001950
The changing profile of occupational morbidity in the UK has typically been located
within the transformation of the labour market; with the demise of the industrial sector in
the UK, we have witnessed a corresponding decline in physical illnesses and disabilities
linked to work. Meanwhile, the surge in mental health issues has been linked to the rise
of the service sector and changing workplace cultures, such as longer working hours,
zero hour contracts, and a blurring of boundaries between home and work.
This paper interrogates these assumptions by exploring the history of work-related
mental distress in coal mining, an occupation traditionally associated with physical as
opposed to psychological health risks. To date, the historiography of occupational
health has primarily focused upon the detrimental impact that work - particularly
industrial labour – has had upon physical health, while the historiography on mental
healthcare, in turn, has largely neglected occupation as a category of analysis.
However, the high accident rate in coal mining, which was acknowledged to pose a risk
to physical health, could also trigger mental distress. Locating the distressed miner in a
diverse range of source materials – asylum case notes, Ministry of Pension appeals,
newspaper reports of miners’ suicides, and files produced by the National Coal Board
and Medical Research Council – this paper examines the responses of different
organisations to miners who experienced work-related mental distress. I argue that the
low visibility of work-related mental disturbance in mining cannot be equated to a low
incidence of work-related mental disturbance, for the prioritisation of tangible risks to
physical health in the past has served to marginalise and conceal understandings of,
and responses to, work-related mental distress.
Roberta Bivins, University of Warwick
Assimilation, Integration, Exclusion: Interpreting Medical Responses to Migration
in Post-War Britain
What did it mean to think of Britain as a migrant receiving nation in the post-war period,
and how did British medical professionals and institutions respond to what was
perceived as a striking new phenomenon? While it is certainly the case that Britain was
exceptional within Europe (as among its former Dominions) in maintaining remarkably
unmedicalised borders, this paper will ask whether the range and diversity of medical
responses to the migrants too were unusual, and what they reveal about wider themes
in the history of post-war Britain. The medical history of immigration to Britain cannot be
written in terms of port health, but it is rich in the familiar tropes of the immigrant as a
source of contagion, contamination, and debility. At the same time, the diversity of the
migrants themselves, and the close relationship imagined between immigration, race
and Britain’s National Health Service also generated new and sometimes unexpected
narratives and responses. Often framed in relation to health and illness of both bodies
and the body politic, they challenge the currently polarised historiography of citizenship
and race in late twentieth century Britain.
Jonathan Toms, Honorary Research Fellow, University of East Anglia
Self-Government and Mental Health: Re-Appraising Foucauldian Interpretations
of the History of Psychiatry in the Twentieth Century.
What is self-government? How has it been related to mental health? Over recent
decades, Foucauldian analyses of psychiatry and governance have dominated the
answers to these questions.
This paper examines Foucault’s early interpretation of the relationship between notions
of self-government and modern Western psychiatry in his Madness and Civilization. It
argues that his understanding of this relation had the merit of highlighting authority as a
crucial linking concept along with the association of madness with childhood. However,
Foucault’s binary distinction between Reason and Unreason prevented an appreciation
that it was the very fact that madness and childhood were associated which led to a
transformation in attitude towards the dynamics of authority and its role in madness and
mental health. This paper explores this transformation through an examination of key
issues in the history of the mental hygiene movement in Britain.