Convalescence and Invalidism in Victorian Britain

While convalescence connoted a temporary experience of recuperation after a serious illness, invalidism was pictured as an ongoing—and perhaps endless—experience of ill-health. Invalids, then, were those whose conditions appeared to derive no benefit from scientific medicine’s interventions. Yet nineteenth-century invalidism was not so dire a condition as this definition seems to imply. The assumption of chronicity meant that invalids were freed from what sociology has termed “the sick role,” the set of obligations assigned to medical patients (the most significant of which, in Western cultures, is to try to get better). This volume explores the paradoxical freedom provided by invalidism in the nineteenth century. Under the surety of this label, middle-class invalids travelled the world, ailing soldiers insisted upon returning home, working-class sufferers abstained from strenuous work, and lay patients developed and advertised their own health regimens. Perhaps most counter-intuitively, invalidism created space for educated women to forsake household duties and take on the roles of professional writers and public intellectuals.
Freed from the scrutiny of the medical gaze, invalids were able to create distinct subcultures and communities. By highlighting not just the afflictions, but also the opportunities, of chronic ill-health in nineteenth-century sources, this volume reveals that the iconic Victorian invalid is not the isolated shut-in we so often imagine, but a dynamic figure immersed in—and contributing to—contemporary debates about health, climate, industrialization, city planning and globalization.