Manchester University Press - Patient voices in Britain, 1840-1948

Historians have long engaged with Roy Porter's call for histories that incorporate patients' voices and experiences. But despite concerted methodological efforts, there has simply not been the degree and breadth of innovation that Porter envisaged. Patients' voices still often remain obscured. This has resulted in part from assumptions about the limitations of archives, many of which are formed of institutional records written from the perspective of health professionals. Patient voices in Britain repositions patient experiences at the centre of healthcare history, using new types of sources and reading familiar sources in new ways. Focusing on military medicine, Poor Law medicine, disability, psychiatry and sexual health, this collection encourages historians to tackle the ethical challenges of using archival material and to think more carefully about how their work might speak to persistent health inequalities and challenges in health-service delivery.

Reviews

Unlike many edited volumes, the editors and contributors have made a concerted effort here to integrate their contributions speak to each other. Particularly valuable are the efforts that each chapter makes to show how historical research can improve contemporary policy making. The volume convincingly shows that patients-including those outside the entitled classes-were far from voiceless; by reading records 'against the grain' or mining extant archival collections with them in mind, these historians have lived up to Roy Porter's call to write more patient-centred narratives.
Social History of Medicine

Introduction: searching for the patient - Anne Hanley and Jessica Meyer
Part I: Locating the patient: new approaches
1 The non-patient's view - Michael Worboys
2 Family not to be informed? The ethical use of historical medical documentation - Jessica Meyer and Alexia Moncrieff
Part II: Voices from the institution
3 Lunatics' rights activism in Britain and the German Empire, 1870-1920: a European perspective - Burkhart Brückner
4 Narrating and navigating patient experiences of farm work in English psychiatric institutions, 1845-1914 - Sarah Holland
5 The patient's view as history from below: evidence from the Victorian poor, 1834-71 - Paul Carter and Steve King
Part III: User-driven medicine
6 Respiratory technologies and the co-production of breathing in the twentieth century - Coreen McGuire, Jaipreet Virdi and Jenny Hutton
7 The patient's new clothes: British soldiers as complementary practitioners in the First World War - Georgia McWhinney
Part IV: Negotiating stigma and shame
8 'Dear Dr Kirkpatrick': recovering Irish experiences of VD, 1924-47 - Lloyd (Meadhbh) Houston
9 'I caught it and yours truly was very sorry for himself': mapping the emotional worlds of British VD patients - Anne Hanley
Index

Editors

Anne Hanley is a Lecturer in History of Science and Medicine at Birkbeck, University of London

Jessica Meyer is Associate Professor of Modern British History at the University of Leeds