Welcome to Big Tent, Big Ideas. The live online event series from the University of Oxford as part of the Humanities Cultural Programme.
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So thank you. And so now to introduce our excellent speakers tonight.
It's an honour to honour, to honour.
It is an honour to host and welcome Sadie Shuttleworth from the English faculty and Erika Charters from the history.
I Shuttleworth is professor of English literature here at the University of Oxford.
She works on the interrelations of medicine, science and culture between 2014 and 2019.
She ran the large ELC research project. Diseases of Modern Life 19th century.
This project explored the medical, literary and cultural responses to the victory in the Victorian age,
to the perceived problems of stress and anticipating many of the preoccupations of our own era.
Sally's most recent book is co-authored Anxious Times, Medicine and Modernity in 19th Century Britain, published in 2019.
Erica Charles is associate professor in global history and the history of medicine at the University of Oxford,
which is also director of Oxford Centre for Global History and the Oxford Centre for the History of Science, Medicine and Knowledge.
Research examines how war and disease intersect with state formation and state power, particularly in colonial contexts.
A monograph, Disease, War and the Imperial States.
The welfare of British armed forces during the Seven Years War was published in 2014 and awarded the George Rosen PRISE by the
American Association for the History of Medicine and the Templer Medal for Best First Book by the Society for Army Stocco Research.
So thank you, both of you, for participating today. I hand over now to for what will I'm sure will be a brilliant discussion.
Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you for the kind of introduction and thank you, all of you, for joining us.
This discussion came out of a discussion that Sally and I were having about her research and
specifically the context that we're on right now where we're being told to stay at home,
not go out to basically not move.
And in various ways, how we're completely immobilised for the sake of our health and for the sake of other people's health as well.
And Sally, you were talking about how this really contrasts with the research that you're doing on the 19th century in Britain
when people who are ill invalids were actually advised to move and to travel around precisely to improve their health,
which we thought was kind of interesting contrast. Sally, do you want to say a little bit more about these villains on the move?
Yes. So as you're saying that the extraordinary contrast to me thinking daily about people being imprisoned
in their homes whilst I'm actually sitting here trying to write about those who are travelling.
So it's it links to the ideas in the 19th century that actually health really depended upon climate and what they called medical climatology.
And I'm looking in particular at health resorts that sprung up especially to cater for the ends of it.
And so these communities that were created that had only invalids and their families.
And so the ones I'm looking at particularly long tome on the French Riviera and Davos in Switzerland, which became international resorts.
But both of them had very strong English colonies. And so I'm looking at the whole ideas of why it was that they thought you should travel.
And what sorts of treatments. And then the whole interrelations of these communities that are focussed entirely around sickness,
which is in many ways what we're experiencing now, I think, because all unus is utterly dominated by it.
And it seems to me that the ways in which people were thinking of these resorts was also
very similar to how we're experiencing the world now is one dominated by forms of disease.
But I should note that the diseases where you had to travel were not something like smallpox,
but rather a tuberculosis or consumption, as they called it,
or other diseases such as overwork, which I'm rather fond of, particularly the professional people in other diseases such as the clerical self raped.
Just a wonderful invention of the 19th century.
My my sense of that, probably many people have heard of these places, these kind of health resorts, these health spies through literature,
because my sense is that in 19th century literature, you have a lot of references, this notion of the envelope travelling the location.
So it's almost a kind of trope, but also that there's some famous individual.
So can you give us a few examples of who we might know,
what we might recognise in terms of this notion of travelling and going to the health resorts and prove one's health?
Yes. So two primary examples would be Robert Louis Stevenson,
who was both at Monto and then at Davos and then various other resort results of Sara Lake in the States,
for example, or John Haddington Simmons, who's less well known,
but was a very major writer in the 19th century who again was in Montreal and then in Davos.
And in fact, it was his writing about Davos that really created the whole move of the English there.
And I think that the whole Davos phenomenon now is actually arising from the whole intellectual
and some literary enclave that dealt that simmons' created for himself whilst he was in Davos,
because he lived there for 16 years and he maintained that he was a man who could only live above 5000 feet.
Because what I'm also looking at is the ways in which there was a complete shift in understanding of how you should kill things.
And so, first of all, it was you had to be warm. So you went to Montauban in the winter because you had blue skies and could
be out in the open air exercising and then suddenly almost overnight shifts.
And you have to go to the Alps in the winter and be frozen to death or not to death, to life.
And so I'm also interested in how medical diagnoses and regimes change to the prime examples.
But there are all sorts of others.
And then literary references to go into Devil's Ultimo to another famous person would be Katherine Mansfield in the 20th century, who isn't long.
I interested. I suppose there's two things that kind of crop up out of this, because one is thinking about the role of doctors in the service.
So do is it. Do you wait for it? Kind of.
Is your doctor prescribing you to go and travel? Are they the ones who are actually controlling this or how much is this actually up to individuals
who I'm guessing might have strong preferences for where they'd like to spend their time,
especially if it's seen as part of a kind of cultural or literary personality to go to these places?
Yes, doctors were immensely powerful because what happened was that just about every resort that
set up published its own statistics as to its climate that we're all rivals with each other.
And then lots of handbooks were published, but they all insisted that it depended on what stage of your disease as to which resort you should go to.
And so only your doctor could tell you which one you need to go to.
And so this particularly society doctors in London, as Andrew Clark, who is doctor to Gladstone famous,
they all said to Darwin, to George, and he said that all the brain workers in Tennyson.
Another one said he advised and first of all, he advised Moton and then he switched to devils.
And so you were you were very much in the hands. But sometimes the patients managed to get the doctor to send the way they wish to go.
So Stephen sent them with was trying to evade his parents and he managed to get some
clerk to tell him he had to go to to but without his parents to look after him.
He was very tense. So, as always, there was a bit of negotiation going there.
So I just didn't say that the other role of the doctor was really in creating the results.
Similar tone was was created and often that they have a mystique around them and a narrative.
So James, Henry Bennett went to Moton, which was just a little fishing village with his oil consumption.
Miraculously, he declares, I was cured. And then he sets up his his own practise.
But he and he he's credited as being the creator.
Tom Course.
What he popularised and it became a resort because of his writings, because he published all over the place, both in the medical and other journals.
But he practised in the resort during the winter and then in London in the summer.
So you can't you get your market that way because you send all your own patients from London.
And the same in Devils. It was a doctor who went there, discovered it.
It was. And then people write about it and said, you doctors.
I had a real stake in these resorts often.
And of course, because I forget the privilege I find very interesting is this kind of commercial aspect, right.
That these are commercial enterprises as well. And I was thinking a lot about how we talk about this notion of medical tourism.
So the ability of some groups of people to travel abroad, get their medical operations done,
which obviously is also a function of how much money, how much leisure time surgeons might have.
And as a historian, I'm always curious about how in some ways we want to draw parallels with what's similar in the past,
but we also want to highlight what's different. So can this be likened to our practise of medical tourism?
In what ways is it different, especially as a kind of commercial enterprise?
Yes. Yes, it is. I always resist medical tourism as a definition for what I'm looking at in the 19th century because
it suggests a level of seriousness and they are always insisting that they were health seekers,
not tourists. And there's a distinction between the resorts that became sort of more for pleasure and those that really did focus on illness.
But there are parallels, obviously, in going to a place for a particular medical reason.
I mean, the other part which you mentioned, which I think is so fundamental to all of this, is this notion of narratives, right.
Of viability, both of the doctors and of the patients and those travelling of the ambulance to
write about their experience and probably use it to promote it to other people,
but also partly to form the expectations of what other people will also record.
I've been thinking a lot in the context of the current pandemic.
How many people have been encouraging us to keep diaries and to write records and to use them for a future in story?
And one of the things I often think about as an historian working on the seventeen hundreds is how when we look back,
you know, 200, 300 years later, we can see reading people's writings that they actually all kind of format.
Right. There's a kind of trope that actually people unconsciously even follow what other people are writing about,
model themselves on things in terms of what they think is worth recording and also what they think isn't worth recording.
So I was wondering, you know, how how much you see the certain kind of trope of what it means to be an invalid in these contacts.
Are there certain formats that people follow? And especially because my understanding is it becomes such a literary giant, right?
It's very much as you said, it's formed by side people of the words man and woman, right?
Yes. Yes. And it's very interesting, you can see, because that they tended to write a lot, in particular the literary invalid's.
And so you have an endless lectures, but also then they the articles that they formed from the letters.
So you can actually see them moving materials from the personal letter to the mother who becomes part of the article.
But yes, that there are there are definite tropes and in part it depends whether you are religious or not,
because the religious ones have a very definite form,
which is insisting that they don't mind death and they were well committed, etc. for those who are not religious.
Huge Soul-Searching. Largely the ones I've been looking at.
It's to do with work. It's whether you've really justified your existence yet on it's so constantly going over.
This is what more they should do.
This is some wonderful examples actually, of the ways in which they would often keep working right until day of death.
There was a historian, John Green, who I should say that many of these invalids,
they actually it was 20 years in the dying sentence that they that they have the condition.
And it came and went. But they were living with it and trying to frame their life around it or not around it, if they could, for that length of time.
But greens are struggling over and over. And then in the final year, when it became clear that he really was dying, he was writing a story.
So for the academic sitting here at the moment thinking, oh, I should be writing an extraordinary example because he.
So he had his wife bring all the books to his bedside and then he'd dictate.
And as it became clearer that he'd only got two weeks left. He said, just give me sleeping draughts every night because I have work to do.
And he continued dictating even that his poor wife.
She got substrate in both of her wrists, attempting to keep up with the words that were flowing out.
So. Extraordinary examples. But also, it is very, very moving, seeing the response of the relatives as well to how you cope with a loved one.
At this point, yes.
I mean, I think I often think as a historian, what's interesting is, of course, there's long periods of history in which ordinary people didn't.
Right. And not only because they weren't literate, but because the notion that you would keep your kind of daily experiences as being useful.
It just wasn't assumed to be something that was significant. And and again, within history, medicine,
I always thought was very interesting that with the rise of social history in the 1960s and this kind of notion,
we got away from just looking at great men and great woman at political institutions and then got instead to look at the experiences of the everyday.
And you see the same movement that happened with the history of medicine to try to access the patient experience rather than just thinking about
doctors and mothers and thinking about scientific achievements to think about what is it what is it like to actually have the experience of illness?
But then I also find that historians have this constant debate about whether you can ever access what it
means to be a patient and to suffer from something beyond the medical framework that's already set up.
Right. Beyond these kind of assumptions. Yes.
Well, you see people constantly trying to cast their own lives in in light of what the doctors are
saying and the new treatments that are coming in and how that and how they'd orient themselves,
particularly if you've gone from sort of being coupled, as I said, in the Winter Garden of the South, to being expected to sort the baby in the.
Cold all day and night. And so the constant sort of processes of adjustment.
But in terms of these of the writing from below and sort of getting a little bit more working class figures from what for what I'm doing,
there's very little because it was mostly the wealthy or the middle wealthy who travelled.
And although they had charities for the indigent cause, they consumptive, et cetera, these were not really the poor.
I wouldn't say. And so it's not until you get the sanitaria coming in at the end of the 19th century that you get working class patients.
And I haven't gone that far. But I think it would be an absolute treasure trove to look at the writings of the lectures from the various semitone.
So can we talk about what what people were actually suffering from?
Because I think this helps us also to think about the disease as it's that tuberculosis.
So what actually are these diseases? And also what is the theory of causation in terms of why people have these diseases?
Yes. So to start with tuberculosis consumption until 1882, when Coke discovered that there was a bacillus causing it.
There were various theories. But one of the dominant ones that it was, was simply that it was hereditary.
And so it was in the family.
And so you actually I was quite astonished to discover that it was there were lots of books saying that if it was in the family.
Actually, it was your duty to send your child or to take your child to another climate.
In order to prepare them for entry into the British climate.
And so several years should be spent in devils or awful movietone,
or you should take a boat and go right round the world in order to experience the sail journey or on the sea.
So that sense that to be an invalid, you didn't actually have to have any symptoms.
But it's just this fear that you might suffer. And again, you miss the experiences.
Now, it's really helping me understand. I think what it must have been like to live in that fear, nothing showing, but the possibility that.
And so you move heaven and earth to actually make sure that that your children could actually survive.
But the other element then, all of TB was also that it was and then it described it as a disease of debility.
And that's how it got then linked to overwork, because anybody who is seen as sort of working too many hours too long or as a woman
actually doing more than you ought in terms of thinking you could actually then suffer.
And so have to be sent away. And I'm divided on this because I like the notion of Daniel for six months, because you work too hard.
But there is also the worries about malingering. And that was came very much with the idea of the clergyman's sore throat or dysphonia clavichord,
as it was called, which was really described as giving too many sermons and therefore weakening your friend.
There was a lot of scepticism about this, but I have to say that every resort is described as having lots and lots of clergy.
It's clear that they took advantage of this notion that a sore throat and trollops at Barchester Towers,
the Reverend Vaizey Stonn hope was meant to be the things that Canon and residents of the cathedral is never in residence because 10 years ago,
Reid had. Right now, he's famous for his collection of butterflies for me, too.
I'm always fascinated how, of course, there's these different types of diseases, not only according to how they're transmitted,
whether or not people think they're contagious, but as we're seeing right now,
this difference between what we classify as an epidemic and an endemic disease, randomness.
I was thinking how the epidemic that's ongoing right now and the discussions we're having about is it worse than flu?
And I think also people's recognition that maybe we don't talk about about the
number of people who do die from the flu each year as this kind of reminder that,
of course, the onset of an epidemic is an no disease at all, but it's rather epidemic disease.
That's right. So these diseases that a society lives with,
even though it causes very high death rates and I was struck thinking about how some ways what you're discussing is the society that's come to accept
a certain kind of disease as being just part of it and has kind of built built up cultural practises around it or different practises around it.
Because, of course, this is the same period you have cholera. It is very much described as a foreign epidemic disease coming in with quite violent.
Striking symptoms, which people are very worried.
But, of course, over the long period, more people are dying from these endemic diseases, fevers, tuberculosis.
Yes. And again, I think we hear the statistics about how many children died in the Victorian period.
But in up to actually understand what it meant for them because it was different.
I thought that actually they couldn't be so invested in their children.
But you read the letters and of course, they were. And so it is not that sense that they lived almost perpetually in the way that we're living now.
And so although, yes, we have an epidemic. For them, it was actually more lethal than what's happening to us now.
The sheer numbers were extraordinary. Yeah. Yeah.
I think it's always an interesting reminder about how how we conceptualise risk when we think about it in terms of
kind of acceptable numbers of people who are dead or even acceptable numbers of people who are chronically ill.
Right. Because I think the way that captures. Yes. That's happening. Can I ask about.
Because, of course, you mentioned at the beginning and I think it's such a fundamental way of thinking about disease,
is that diseases associated with location. And of course, this gets to the heart and why people need to travel or be 5000 feet.
So let me explain a little bit more about this longstanding view that disease is
often about climates and place rather than kind of invading a virus or bacteria.
Yes. Yes, it is. It's an idea that goes right back to the Greeks. And I did a piece on has water in places, but what happens?
And so as a practise, it's been that right through in medicine, the notion that it's good to travel.
But prior to the 19th century, really without any precision as to why or where to go.
You've got the state. The development of sport is very much in the 18th century.
But that was a specific water, whereas in the 19th century with the medical climatology, it was very,
very specific about the forms of humidity and how dry the what altitude you were at levels of sunshine.
And it was also, I think, strongly linked to the development of pollution in Britain, the sense.
And so it starts really with James CLONK,
who's a doctor in the eighteen twenties who starts to write about the need to travel and go to particular locations.
And from then on, you get the huge growth in statistics, people recording every day so that the precise rainfall, et cetera, in these resorts.
And it was thought that and I suppose rightly, that the there was a real relationship between the body and the mind and on the climate.
And if you've got that balance right, then you could not let me stay the disease.
But many people claimed you could actually cure it.
And it's too late to and you could cure.
I mean, I always find it fascinating, too, because in some ways, the 19th century in Britain in the 19th centuries is a period of intense debate.
Right over causation, over these theories of contagion, whether or not disease is located, for example,
either in urban centres, which definitely follows what people observe compared to rural areas, which seem much more healthy.
Whether it's actually kind of rooted in unsanitary locations within urban centres, but then also how you can see it on a global scale.
So in my work, when people are thinking about the British Empire and their experiences overseas,
disease again appears to be located in climates and trouble climates, of course,
which is why we inherit this notion of tropical diseases and tropical medicine.
And so this kind of interesting way in which observations might be correct in some ways,
even if the kind of underlying mechanism doesn't tie in to what we now know through bacteriology.
Yes. No, I think definitely so. But another aspect of it all was the style of life you would live there.
And again, this was such change because if you're an invalid in Britain, you cuddled and not allowed outside and lying on the sofa all day,
etc. If you went to these resorts, you were encouraged to get out there and walk along the seaside side of that up into the hills.
And then if you went to devils, you were encouraged to go tobogganing and skiing later on.
So a very outdoors life, which is obviously so much healthier for the individual.
So one of the reasons that people properly recovered more was simply that they were living such a more healthy life.
I mean, I always think this is the wonderful thing about historical record and looking back, because that.
Not only can you see a period when people had debating views and actually there was a lot of uncertainty about it,
but sometimes people were prescribing remedies that might have worked, but not for the reasons that they thought.
Which, of course, is, I always think this reminder for us today, we're in a similar period about uncertainty, not being entirely sure.
You can see how debates become very polarised the same way they did in the 19th century.
And of course, I always think as a historian, it might be that one hundred and fifty years from now,
many of the things that we assumed to work for these mechanisms,
we might discover in this kind of ultimate historical humility that actually we've misunderstood various mechanisms.
Yes, definitely. And it's quite interesting looking at what happens in the eighteen eighties when Cook,
it is discovered that the cities because people's you'd expect the patterns of behaviour will suddenly change because it was world news.
But they don't. And in devils they they start claiming it had been claimed before.
But they use this as an excuse that the air was antiseptic.
And so if this was the selling point now of devils that you could escape the bacillus and lived there 5000 feet, I think friendships.
This this is always, again, a very interesting idea for historians of medicine, the strain of disease.
Right. So do when the scientific knowledge changes, do actual human practises change?
And I thought it was really fascinating that actually these health resorts, what they do is they adapt.
Right. That in some ways they're able to to move into this new era of maintain themselves centres and maintain their popularity.
And in some ways, we'd say, you know, they're rebranding according to bacteriology.
Yes. Yes. It reminds me also, I think very often because I work on the history of disease,
people assume that I just look at a kind of bacteria or something in the past that actually fascinates me.
And I don't think it's the same for you. But what fascinates me is how disease is really inseparable from human activity.
So in the same way, when we think about the current pandemic, a lot of what we're discussing is the way human activity,
cultural practises, handshaking, the kind of everyday gestures we have are actually what's responsible for transmission patterns.
This is about human activity and cultural practises, much more than just thinking about scientific knowledge.
But it also always strikes me that humans are amazingly adaptable.
Right. When you have a new one, you have new scientific knowledge. What do people do then?
They use it to their own advantage. In some ways, they often manipulate it.
They come up with new commercial enterprises. They like the idea that they're kind of taking what they have and and profiting in various ways.
Is there any kind of parallel with what we're seeing today? Well, I think the Adopt Tatian that we're seeing today is a parallel in the sense.
But what struck me is just how extraordinarily fast it happens.
The fact that you've now automatically stepped several days, if you see anybody coming, you move it.
So these and that's happened what the space of two, three weeks, it will become absolutely accustomed to new lows.
So I think you can see that as well in the 19th century,
that you find all sorts of ways of justifying continuing your previous sort of activities, as well as somehow now fitting into the new regime.
So what happens that I mean, because I was thinking obviously we all know we've heard of Davos in various ways.
So what's the kind of that after. History, the afterlife of these health resorts, what happens to them?
So from Suvla, eighteen nineties beginning, they say they start to develop sanitoria cleansed.
So no longer do you have your wife, husband and family all living in the hotel, which was the previous mode.
It moves into a strictly controlled and sanitorium environment, so it becomes heavily medicalised and controlled.
So very, very different world. So what I'm looking at is really up until nineteen hundred.
So yeah, it's what I'm looking at I suppose is sort of medicine outside the medical framework and other other examples.
I know, for example, that you're working on something, you're finishing up a special issue that's coming up to do with sleep and stress at the moment.
And I'm because I'm just thinking that I know people will be very interested in this idea of overwork and stress.
Text. You want to talk a little bit more about that contact? Oh, yes.
So it's based on a conference I did with the sleep scientist Russell Foster
and my Disease of Modern Life team at the Royal Society on Sleep and Stress,
past and present. And we actually run from the mediaeval strain to current times and current science,
looking at how people understood sleep and the impact of stress in all the various ways it's been considered in the past.
And in my own work at peace, I'm looking at overworked professionals and the problems of sleep for them,
particularly Bloodstone who had problems sleeping when he was prime minister and was sent off by Andrew Clark to Tutone,
or rather to count to to recover. So, yes, it's quite interesting.
All sorts of things are discovered, such as the ideas of mindfulness and have to get to sleep by imagining the breath in your body.
And then all the sleeping draughts, which are exactly the same as problematic sleeping pills, naps and lots of interesting problems.
I was going to say all sorts of interesting parts. It's a really fantastic project, the view of the modern life.
I would encourage people to cheque it out. I think we now have time to start opening the floor to questions as one does an allied event and fill it.
You're able to take us through that. I am indeed. Thank you.
Thank you, Sally, for a wonderful discussion. And I certainly enjoyed this imaginative journey into the past and into different places.
And I know that people watching I've had wonderful questions as well.
So I wanted to bring together a series of questions. We've had one I'd been about class,
which you touched on a little bit about how much access was there for the working class to these kind of institutions.
But it leads to another question, which is actually one about gender and is there a difference in the way that men and women are treated,
other distinct gender differences around the kind of illnesses that are presented.
Described diagnose times and treated it?
And how much, finally, does this actually relate to the questions of leisure and lifestyle?
What is actually strictly medical questions? One.
One listener I was asking about how does this relate to things like the grand tour and questions of tourism?
So I've smooshed together sort of different questions that I think that you might be able to run with something in those.
Right. Let's start with class. So, yes, you are right.
That's I'm looking really at sort of middle class upwards.
But interestingly, the backlash against this form of travel came in the 80s,
90s when doctors in England started arguing that this is really unfair and actually you
don't need to travel abroad and you could create your own sanitarium in your back garden.
If you have a back garden and that led to the you may be seeing these sheds that people had with
revolving platforms so you could sit in even in the rain in England and actually be outside.
But then that's linked then to the development of the sanitoria, which did take working class.
And as for gender, yes, real differences said the overwork was really meant to be for the male.
You mustn't be a bank or a doctors very much believes that they've suffered from overwork and others.
For women, it was thought. Well,
there's quite a lot about the modern woman and the wonderful novel by Beatrice Harridan that
people here know of but have never read like old ships that pass in the night that set in Devils.
And that's a modern young woman who's done too much thinking and studying and attending political meetings and gets worn out.
So that's another trend of the sort of figure that could be that,
but also that the whole idea of uterine pathology and that you're worn out eating your reproductive system.
So there's Wasner in worn out young women. There's another category that you'd find.
And then so what's the final bit to say? It was about the sort of medicine and illness and a measure of the idea of, oh, yes, on the grand go.
What do you say? Not all. I think of a lovely place in the south of France.
Gorgeous trees and a very agreement I meant. But you've taken us through our medical history of it.
Yes, yes. Yes. And so the reason linked to the Gruntal.
But I think we have to be careful to differentiate some people who went on the grant or actually went with their physician because they were ill.
But mostly it was tourism and education, whereas the places I'm looking at tried absolutely to say we are not for that.
So there was a phrase they use your health seeking, not sightseeing.
But nonetheless, a lot of the the memoirs of the professional men who went there said,
you know, this is rather wonderful because it is legitimate idleness.
So I am allowed to be here by the seashore and see the olive groves and the blossoms and not work.
But it is legitimate because it is medical.
So it was that's quite interesting in the way in which medical authority is used
there to justify often for these people who can't stop themselves working.
So is the Baptist minister, Charles Spurgeon. He went to Montreal for, I think, some twelve years or more before he here every winter before he died.
But whilst he was there, he sat in Bennett's garden and dictated sermons all day long.
So a sense that it's idleness and it's beauty. But also you've got to make sure it's work as well.
Brilliant. I'm my day job is teaching Russian literature and all the 19th century novels.
I know which are about spa towns and things are actually all to do with getting married and meeting people.
And there's an interesting interaction that between. They sort of end of life exhaustion at the end,
whereas whereas a different stage that I've got a couple of other questions which are coming around sanitaria given that we've been talking about.
Someone has asked come rising from Saskatchewan, writing about Sasquatch.
That actually happened to those buildings in those institutions. Have I survived in any form or what's happened to them physically or culturally?
And someone has also asked a couple of people have asked,
what about the locals and their reaction to these as if they're coming with medical conditions, some anxiety about this.
So there's there's a whole group of questions that are coming. Yes. So the buildings.
So Saranac Lake, virtually the entire town, because there are a lot of individual cottages, has been preserved as a sanitarium.
So you can go and see them as they were. Others get repurposed as hospitals.
And there are quite a lot. The just mothballed. And this one I want to go and see in Italy, that apparently is just completely abandoned.
And so you have these eerie institutions that can be.
So, yes, a variety of things happening.
But I find that sanitaria, along with insane asylums, tend to get made into fancy apartments these days as well, quite interestingly.
But then with reference to the response of the locals, yes, it shifts around nineteen hundred.
So up until that time, they're welcoming it with open arms because this this is obviously bringing in lots of money often, which the locals.
So it's it's an interesting form of colonisation because, well, they describe themselves as English colonies.
In fact, they're probably being exploited rather than the other way around because it's the locals who are building the hotels, et cetera.
But once the idea of tuberculosis being infectious the own lives, then you get you get the worries.
Why should we be letting these people in? And I've just been looking at Shipp's Diaries for Invalid's going out to Australia and New Zealand.
And up until nineteen hundred. Yes.
Come. And then suddenly the ships attending up and the locals are saying, no, we're not going to let these ships in.
Again, a real parallel with what's happening now.
Is there anything that that resonates with things that you work on from a slightly different perspective?
Might I have to say as a little more grim? So I work very much on these drawing boards.
I tend to look at soldiers and sailors. And one of the interesting things is and even in the seventeen hundreds.
Because a lot of it is about European wars that are being fought in the colonies.
You still do see this association, which is very much confirmed through observation, that there's more disease in foreign locations.
And so you actually do get even in the seventeen hundreds. Discussion about sending usually officers back home, what they call a change of air.
Back to what they see as being a more temperate climate in the hopes that that will cure them.
But then you also see this being done for soldiers and sailors.
So there is this notion of the kind of again, like Sally was saying,
there's very longstanding tradition of disease being associated with locations in the climates,
not so much with thinking about it as a kind of what we now think of in terms of bacterial invasion and particular practises.
I think unless people said with the question of leisure, what I find very interesting is or my time period, because I'm looking at very common people,
especially when we're thinking about soldiers and sailors, just having a rest in a hospital is a kind of luxury in some ways.
And of course, that's one of the things I find very interesting when we're doing history of medicine is what I'm often looking
for on the record as an example of medicine isn't so much a kind of therapeutic in terms of vaccines or drugs,
but very often just having five days we were in a hospital.
You're not having to work, you're not having to labour, and you're also being given very plentiful diets.
That's actually quite tangible form of medical care, but it's not something that we might usually expect to be able to find in the record.
So I think in some ways, looking into Sally's points about what are these medical practises.
Right. So this notion of rests, the notion of rich foods or whatnot can actually be quite, quite a potent form of healing in the past.
Thank you. Thank you both. Now, a couple of questions have come in on a sort of religious spiritual topic.
We've had Dick Parsons with sore throats, and one of the questions was,
is there a connexion between sort of physical treatment of the body and questions of sort of moral regeneration
and moral capacity to an ideas inherent about such about character and its soulfulness or character?
And another one was given that people are travelling.
They may be travelling to different parts of the world with different religious cultures, with different religious traditions.
Is there any sense of that physical journey?
That is very much expose people to rather different spiritual ideas when they get to wherever they're going.
When they meet people in these often quite diverse communities. So what's the up with that one on the moral?
What I found quite interesting is the difference between Montel and Davos, the Spurgeon, who is this very famous preacher,
talked about the fact that say you could be closer to God if you were in monotone because you are.
Jesus went to the seaside and there was also an olive groves. Wonderful explanation.
And sections argued that you really should go there for your spiritual regeneration.
And then Spurgeon offered it very much as as as a form of spiritual regeneration as well as a sort of improvement of the body.
But then with the growth of devils,
they start to market themselves as being more moral because more manly than being effeminate, lounging around in the south.
And so there's a sense that if you were British, you really ought to be going to the cold northern climes of the Alps to strengthen your resolve.
So it's again, it's it's forms of marketing. But I think the whole moral issue is constantly there.
People trying to justify their form of life, pondering on it.
Stephensons forever wondering in this, is it right this time taking up people's time and energy and money in this way?
So a lot of soul searching and then with reference to religion, obviously, I'm just I'm just looking at Europe,
but I have been interested in the way in which I'm picking up on Erica's point about sort of going out to the tropics, et cetera.
A lot of people coming through would actually come that were serving soldiers coming back from India.
And there was quite a lot of Indian philosophy that starts to mingle in.
And this is in my sleep research as well as the there's the health resort was the research.
So it's really quite interesting.
That said that there is responding to and picking up of ideas, obviously not wholesale transformation, but some openness to new ideas.
I mean, I would just add, Sally was pointing out the word bracing comes apart and descriptions,
and I was thinking in terms of what what it means to say that a place is bracing and how it seems
to have these kind of moral or constitutional contradictions as well as the physical connotation.
But I also think I've been struck again since we're talking about this notion of marriage.
And some people keeping diaries that, of course, the very practise of keeping a diary had this Christian spiritual origin and definitely in my period.
Now, this is about a process of self-examination.
And so they always it always strikes me that even today when people are being encouraged to keep diaries,
that we're actually continuing on this kind of long Christian Western practise,
even though we don't quite recognise the roots of it in various ways, that self-examination and penitence in some form.
Yes, they did. You know, I've had a couple of questions which are a bit presentist in in nature.
And we've been definitely sort of trying to talk about the past as best as a foreign country.
But we keep coming back to parallels with the present day. One of them has been pointing out the presence in our current discussion about
relationship with the animal world and the natural world more and more generally.
And is there discussion in the text you're looking at, the periods you're looking at?
Does the discussion also take in that question or is this a purely human debate at this period?
Because, of course, we know that the debates around us covered in markets and there are all kinds of really quite I under examined
questions of how we perceive and talk about other cultures in this completely global debate where we're at the moment.
On the other question was, was the purpose of study simpler and let's not you.
One was, has there been a really? Have you come across a really good piece of advice in the travelogues or the diaries or the
writings from the past which we could employ now to help us through the present moment?
Is there something we can learn from our forebears to help us through things?
Well, with reference to animals.
Yes, that was considered 19th century, because you've got anthrax and you and you've got sort of the bovine tuberculosis.
And one of the people I've been working on, Benjamin Ward Richardson, who's behind the diseases of modern life to become.
He argued in the eighteen fifties that what they ought to be doing is keeping statistics on local and national basis.
And every week of diseases, both human and animal.
And he was told he was way ahead of his time and to come back in 50 years.
But so there was a real sense that they should be doing this work and thinking about it.
But, yes, it didn't really take off.
And I think we we're suffering from that. Now, I don't know whether you want to sensing on that one.
It's an interesting point I have. And I was thinking, I don't know. People come in about animals specifically and then study numbers so much.
Obviously, they work very closely with them, and especially when we're thinking about armies.
But I was thinking about people's views, about the relationship with what they see as being the natural world.
And obviously, the 19th century, I think you see a kind of transformation of how that's seen.
So it does strike me that the way that we talk about the animal world might be similar to
how we're also thinking about our relationship with what we see as being the natural world.
And especially, I think as a historian, you can see that there's a transformation about whether we think of disease as a kind
of natural occurrence that has a cycle to it that maybe we can't do much about,
but that we just live with, which is a slightly more common view that I see in the seventeen hundreds than to this notion that
actually we can try to transform it and that we should have an ability to contain and manage it,
or even to this notion that we're somehow responsible for these outbreaks because of our our poor relationship,
our kind of imbalance that we have with the natural world. I'm also kind of interested in how even those views are historic sized.
Right. They, too, have a history on various levels. And I suppose thinking about that, there is human.
And then there's the natural environmental. But then there's the interesting sort of blurred gap between someone who's talked about lapdogs.
And I'm thinking a kind of exotic pets in cages around the place. And the interesting way that we bring the natural world in, commodify it up.
But it's a sort of indelible trace off of a world out there.
And then periodically you mention the bovine tuberculosis and anthrax.
But there's a sort of more domestic science to my relationship with the natural world.
And I know lots of cat owners are worried about what they should be doing at the moment with that felines.
But to think about the second part of the question about these sort of advice and things,
one could learn there was a real emphasis on the beauty of the natural landscape in these places and
how one of the curative forms was actually just going out into that beauty and then responding to it.
So a sense of landscape is this space of mindfulness seemed acutely in current terms.
But another piece of advice,
that or desire that they have that I really think we should not have forgotten is the suggestion that all hospitals should have gardens,
that people should be able to be wheeled out into the gardens. And Paxton actually and Joseph Pexton, who did Crystal Palace.
He suggested that all hospitals should have a winter garden attached to them so that all patients could.
Take there and be surrounded by natural plants, which is a wonderful idea, I think.
And you actually see it. What's interesting is you see it in the British army and Navy, even in the seven hundreds died.
There is a recognition both that gardens are useful, especially because they're worried about things such as scurvy.
So they know that fresh, fresh things in general are much better.
So what I kind of find amazing is you can see even from early on that, Fred, the empire, you've you see soldiers planting gardens everywhere.
But they also they're very explicit that they also think the very activity of gardening as a kind of exercise,
a regular discipline, also leads to their health.
So I've been struck by how I and I've always been curious whether it's a kind of longstanding British tradition,
because obviously to me, there's been a lot of discussion in the current epidemic about people's gardens.
Who has access to gardens and so on and so forth.
So both of the products of these gardens, but also the very activity of gardening as being crucial to this notion of health and stability.
Yes. And in parallel with the discussion about opening up gardens and playing fields, et cetera, at the moment, again, in the late 19th century,
they they did argue rather hopelessly, I think, in the sense that that London Square should be closed off, should be opened up when the rich go away.
Only when they go away.
But also, there's a movement to window boxes for the poor in the sense that these things do really matter and impact on health.
But that's that's very resonant for where we are at the moment as we stare at the sky and see the lack of paper trails and yes,
the increased air quality or how much more. And think about our gardening.
And we can often do that unconsciously without thinking about those people who don't have access to that all the time of his careers
or jobs or my circumstances mean those are actually rather luxurious pleasures in life and the products of great privilege.
I'm just looking at the life chats to which I have access here to see whether any more questions have popped up in our last few minutes.
Some people want to sort of go back to the leisure and health question a little bit more.
And someone has asked.
When people go in the early 19th century, for instance, keeps going to Italy, France comes in, they sort of do it off their own bat.
When does this become a much more regulated to the industrialised products of official medicine?
The establishments of practises. Come on. Come with me. Come on.
Dated simply or conveniently, or is it is it more complicated than that? Well, it starts 1920s,
but really I think it's from the eighteen fifties onwards when you get all the guidebooks with the
specific statistics for each place and doctors who are specialising particularly where to go.
And also, of course, as soon as the railways come, it makes it so much easier for people to travel.
So it set up in ways that it's not really possible in early decades.
The railway is a fascinating thing because it's a great engine for mobility.
But at the same time, it's a greatly anxious place because you meet all kinds of people who come together in
a tight space before travelling together and then going off to the essence of Tropeano.
A lot of 19th century literature, all the bad things happen en route to somewhere else.
Maybe that's because I've read too much and I couldn't. But there is something. The best example.
Yes, well, Russian literature always does like. This question, which is has come up now, which I think is a really interesting one.
There's been a lot of discussion says that that's the question.
But the question about Corona virus on reactions to it as being like a war that the military rhetoric.
So it's just a question from this person is. Do you find that rhetoric in the documents you're looking at?
And I suppose I'd like to just take one answer. Like, how useful is that metaphorical use of language?
Can we ever get away from it? And Susan Sontag is crawling up my hair, as I say, thinking about illness as mental.
How do we respond to this use of language that way? We're living through at the moment.
How do you see it in a historical perspective? Yes.
Well, I think it's deeply unhelpful, actually,
because of all the apparatus that goes with thinking about war and the oppositions that normally people against people.
And you're actually seeing that now playing out in our international politics in ways that's really not helpful.
But certainly in the 19th century that they had it with cholera is seen as coming from the east, et cetera, of war.
So all these connotations. But when the tubercle bacillus was discovered, there were pictures of St George, the dragon in the killing.
And that made sense again, that we will conquer by killing the enemy.
So it's always there. But I think it's a loose usage doesn't help.
And Eric and I were just talking earlier about epidemic of sleeplessness, which has become a very common phrase.
Again, I think it's not helpful because that that form of language then creates its own responses and cultural assumptions.
I mean, one thing which I think is interesting is obviously I think especially with this this movement towards bacteriology and
this conceptual framework in which disease is something that invades you from outside instead of what I see in my period,
which is actually diseases about a kind of imbalance that's within you and needs to be you need to be rebalanced.
And so I can see how this war metaphor and this notion that it's an external threat,
that somehow you can keep separate, therefore becomes more common.
But I would also say, look, as a man, as a historian of war, what I also find interesting is, is our way of thinking about war also changes.
Right. So there's a long period, the period that I will work on in which war is seen as part of a natural process,
something that just occurs within societies. And it seems it's a terrible thing, like terrible weather.
But it's but it's natural. It's not something that actually one can control and contain.
And so I also think it's interesting that in the same way that we've kind of borrowed it,
because we also now see disease as being something not that it's a natural process,
but something that needs to be seen as external and something that we can control and manage.
It is another way of thinking about how about our assumptions about our relationship
either with war or with disease and exactly where we stand in position to them.
Well, thank you, both of you. I think our time has come to an end rather remarkably.
This is the first time I've ever done this and the time has just rushed by. There are many more questions we could have taken.
My apologies to those members of the audience out there who ask questions that we couldn't get round to tackling.
But thank you, Erica.
Thank you, Sally, for really taking us through those big ideas and for making us all welcome in this big tent at the time being so.
Thank you. Good luck with your work and helping us all to address both the past and the challenges of the present.
So tell everyone who's been watching. We look forward to seeing you again in a week's time.
Next week, we will meet at five p.m. on Thursday, the twenty third.
If I pool, that is, of course, Shakespeare's birthday.
And we'll be delighted to welcome Emma Smith in a discussion which I'm sure we'll take him Shakespeare and much else besides.
So thank you for being with us. Thank you for bearing with me as I struggle with this brave new world of social distancing.
But it's made me feel very much part of the big community out there. And good luck and keep well.
Thank you all.