The emotional impacts of a cancer diagnosis can be many and varied. In this special event for the Being Human Festival of Humanities, we explore patient experiences of cancer, past and present.

Elizabeth Toon (University of Manchester),“A conspiracy of pretence”: learning to cope with mastectomy in twentieth-century Britain

Sue Ziebland (Health Experiences Research Group, University of Oxford), Healthtalk.org as an online resource for people with cancer, and their family and friends

Healthtalk.org is a website providing information and support for a range of health issues through people’s real life experiences. Thousands of people have shared their experiences on film to help others understand what it’s really like to have a health condition such as breast cancer or arthritis.

Register your place on Eventbrite

The talk will take place in the Arts Two building (room 2.17), Mile End Campus, London E1 4NS. For directions to Mile End and a campus map, see bit.ly/QMcampusmap.

On Wednesday 14 December, Katrina O’Loughlin and Pen Woods will give a paper titled ‘An Encyclopaedia of Spaces and their Emotional Contents and Discontents through Time’.

Katrina O’Loughlin (Australian Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotion) and Penelope Woods (Lecturer in Drama, QMUL) present their project to inventory inhabited and imagined spaces and their emotional character in specific moments in history. These include, for instance: the boudoir, confession box, reliquary, tomb, carriage, nutshell, fan case, pocket, tea chest, ice house, dove cote, foyer, coffee house, battle ground, folly, asylum, agora, hermitage, tiring house, parliament, baths, piazza, class room, lying-in room, audience chamber, waiting room, balcony, bird cage, trunk.. each examined in the through the cultural and material history of its emergence at that time, in that place.

Early on in Sara Ahmed’s Cultural Politics of Emotion she refers to a common sense of ‘the feeling in the room’, qualifying this with a reflection on how the individual’s relationship to that ‘sticky object’ or site of emotion will, nevertheless, vary. In 1958 Gaston Bachelard published his influential work: La poetique de l’espace, in which he considers the contours and psychic contents of domestic spaces, wardrobes, nests, shells and corners. O’Loughlin and Woods are attempting a bold project to bring current theories of emotion, and the history of emotion, together with work in continental philosophy and cultural geography on built environments, inhabited and found spaces, to curate a detailed inventory of the emotional character and effects of specific historicised spaces. O’Loughlin and Woods propose that these spaces operate as container, lens and propagator of culturally and historically specific repertoires of emotion.

All talks are free, booking not needed. Lunch will be provided.
https://projects.history.qmul.ac.uk/emotions/news/autumn-term-events/

The talk will take place at the Mile End Campus, London E1 4NS. For directions to Mile End and a campus map, seebit.ly/QMcampusmap. The room will be confirmed soon.

On Wednesday 7 December, David Lederer will give a paper titled ‘Caduti in Acqua: Lifesaving and the Public Sphere in the 18th Century’.

The presentation addresses the formation of humane societies across eighteenth-century Europe and North America as part of a larger project on emotional welfare entitled ‘Love thy Neighbour’, conducted under the auspices of a Marie Skłodowska-Curie IOF from the European Union. Humane societies were lifesaving organisations to save ‘apparent’ victims of drowning (a euphemism for suicides). The first, the Maatschappij tot Redding van Drenkelingen, was a private society founded in Amsterdam in 1767. The humane society put wealthy physicians and clergy squarely in the public sphere and allowed for the accumulation of social capital through philanthropy without an embarrassment of riches. Through the Republic of Letters, the idea spread quickly to virtually every major city in Europe and across the Atlantic. However, structures varied; in some places, like Dresden, the Crown assumed the prerogative of intervention on behalf of its subjects, whereas in Bologna intervention fell under ecclesiastical jurisdiction. Structural variations notwithstanding, lifesaving manifested one of the earliest modern public health and safety policies in the service of the common weal.

All talks are free, booking not needed. Lunch will be provided. https://projects.history.qmul.ac.uk/emotions/news/autumn-term-events/

The talk will take place in the Arts Two building (room 2.17), Mile End Campus, London E1 4NS. For directions to Mile End and a campus map, seebit.ly/QMcampusmap.

On Wednesday 16 November Ayesha Nathoo will give a paper tiled ‘“It does need self-discipline”: Health education, expertise, and the politics of relaxation in 1970s Britain’. 

Abstract:

In the postwar decades, therapeutic relaxation techniques proliferated as a means of counteracting various maladies commonly associated with the pressures of modern Western living. By the early 1970s in Britain, instruction in neuro-muscular relaxation was widely available through the mass media, self-help books, group classes and in clinical settings. This talk will examine the pedagogy of relaxation, including its material and audio-visual culture. It will ask how practitioners negotiated and communicated their expertise, and how patients learnt and applied the techniques and determined their therapeutic value. In doing so, it will demonstrate how relaxation ideology helped to engender a socio-political shift towards promoting ‘healthy lifestyles’ and individual responsibility for health.

All talks are free, booking not needed. Lunch will be provided.
https://projects.history.qmul.ac.uk/emotions/news/autumn-term-events/

The talk will take place in the Arts Two building (room 3.20), Mile End Campus, London E1 4NS. For directions to Mile End and a campus map, see bit.ly/QMcampusmap.

On Wednesday 9 November, Hannah Newton will give a paper titled:  ‘Doleful Groans & Sad Lookes’: Witnessing Illness in Early Modern England’.

Abstract:

In early modern England, the sick were usually looked after at home, by relatives and friends. While valuable work has been undertaken on the practical roles of family members in the care and treatment of patients, the emotional and sensory experiences of these individuals have been largely overlooked. My paper seeks to fill this gap by asking what it was like to witness the illness of a loved one. Drawing on sources such as diaries and letters, I show that relatives and close friends shared the suffering of the patient, a phenomenon known as ‘fellow-feeling’ in this period. So acute was their emotional distress upon observing their loved one’s pains, family members claimed to feel something akin to the physical suffering itself. This finding supports the thesis of the scholars Jan Frans van Dijkhuizen and Joanna Bourke, who have challenged Elaine Scarry’s famous assertion that pain is an ‘unsharable experience’. Taking a new, sensory approach, I aver that it was chiefly through the ears and eyes that relatives and friends came to share the patient’s sufferings: hearing patients’ ‘doleful groans’ or seeing their ‘sad lookes’ occasioned extreme anguish. These discussions shed fresh light on the meaning of the emotion of love: the ‘signe…of true Love’, wrote the French philosopher and theologian Nicholas Coeffeteau (1574-1623), was that ‘friends rejoyce & grieve for the same things’.

All talks are free, booking not needed. Lunch will be provided.
https://projects.history.qmul.ac.uk/emotions/news/autumn-term-events/

The talk will take place in the Arts Two building (room 2.17), Mile End Campus, London E1 4NS. For directions to Mile End and a campus map, seebit.ly/QMcampusmap.