Convalescence and Invalidism in Victorian Britain

Across the nineteenth century, what counted as a beneficial medical intervention narrowed considerably. Diagnostic acts like listening to a patient's heartbeat or performing a physical examination became the norm for medical doctors, while physical acts of care-such as feeding a patient or listening to her stories-were gradually relegated to realms outside of effective medical treatment. Yet Victorian thinkers worried that something was lost when hospitals and 2 medical practitioners forsook these kinds of pragmatic and holistic practices of care. Thus many argued that such care had a vital-even life-saving-role after the acute phase of illness had passed. Convalescent care thus supplemented scientific medicine by supplying the kind of tailored, interpersonal caregiving that scientific medicine gradually abandoned. Convalescent, or post-acute care, began when a physician stopped seeing a patient daily, and it was generally supplied by experienced women, including professional nurses, philanthropic volunteers, familial caregivers, and servants. This volume thus introduces convalescence and its caregiving practices as a way to contextualize scientific medicine and its limitations in addressing the systemic ill-health of industrialization, urbanization, and imperial expansion. Convalescent care was not merely about physical recovery. Time and again, contemporary thinkers link the benefits of convalescence to the mental rest provided by a period of post-acute relaxation. In fact, many experts saw convalescent leisure as a key antidote to the stressors of modern life itself. Contemporary medical patients, they reasoned, needed to recover not only from their specific disease or condition but also from the systemic stressors of overwork, urban pollution, social isolation, and mental exhaustion that characterized the industrial age. Indeed, this reasoning spawned a host of philanthropic convalescent homes that extended this seeming luxurious care to work-class patients. By exploring such a nexus of issues, this volume explores precisely how common life experiences like work, stress, mental strain, leisure, and social relationships were historically stripped out of the medical purview in ways that still have repercussions for today's healthcare.