What Does Convalescent Mean - In 1991, sociologist Arthur W. Frank stated that Western scientific medicine had created what he called the "forgiveness society," a growing number of patients whose lives had been saved by medical treatment but could not be considered healed. This retreat includes people who are cancer survivors, suffer from heart disease, or live with autoimmune disorders. Such conditions, which were fatal only a century ago, can now be successfully managed for many years. But such longevity also creates a new challenge for medical professionals and patients. While much of twentieth-century medicine in his mind pursued the ideal of a complete cure (for example, the misguided attempt to find a single cure for all cancers), Frank suggested that twentieth-century medicine and one would have to come to terms with a different kind of care in which patients and doctors learn to cope with open-ended treatment regimens and uncertainty about patients' prognosis.
"A young girl recovering on a couch is visited by her dog. Engraving by H. Furmstacher after H. Bacon. By Henry Bacon. Credit: Welcome Collection.
What Does Convalescent Mean
While Frank imagined the healing society to be unique to our time, my work reveals that this emerging medical culture has much to learn from nineteenth-century survivors of illness. I explore the Victorian ideas of
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, a state of continued recovery and prolonged uncertainty after a serious illness. Frank argued that people in convalescent society remained "neither sick nor completely healthy." discover Victorian doctors, philanthropists, writers and carers have created a lasting ideology for dealing with the stress of surviving acute illness. Those who recovered faced a long process of rehabilitation as they waited to see if they would gradually get better, get better, or start over. The Victorians worked to ease the anxiety of recovery through personalized treatment methods and unique interpretive strategies designed to create meaning amid ongoing uncertainty.
Weak but not sick, the healers could no longer benefit from medical treatment. However, Victorian writers, philanthropists, and therapists devised a variety of ways to support the physical, mental, and social well-being of the recovering medical patient. Convalescent patients needed sedation, fresh air, and plentiful meals. They also needed healthy distractions, such as social visits, travel, and romance. “Even on the outside of a new and interesting book,” insisted one therapy guide, “Ash
Until permission is granted, it will have its beneficial effect."[3] As nineteenth-century scientific medicine increasingly focused on disease processes within the body, curative ideology focused on improving the larger environment of the body. Such changes were believed to have a profound effect on the course of patients' recovery and prevent possible relapse, help chronic conditions and accelerate full recovery.
Along with practical benefits such as recreation and nutrition, recovering patients needed strategies to deal with prolonged boredom, unexpected relapses, and the small benefits of prolonged rehabilitation. Writing about his recovery from a surgical leg amputation, poet W.E. Henley lamented bitterly: "On the whole, recovery is a challenging time for both nurses and patients [...] It is an uninteresting, unsympathetic and unpleasant trial." [4] An entire genre of self-help guides to recovery and religious devotion has sought to offer strategies to combat the stress and uncertainty of recovery. Most importantly, these texts advised against any attempt to predict the outcome of curative treatment. A dedicated guide advised, "[resist from predicting and dwelling on results or outcomes" [5] even positive speculation can be dangerous "so that the dangerous hopes that recovery brings are met with disappointment". [6] ] Rather than looking to the future for meaning, healers and their caregivers were supposed to track and analyze the complex social, physical, and mental factors at work in the patient's ongoing recovery.
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"A girl calls for healing, while a nurse brings medicine to the patient. Water colors by R. H. Giles.' By R. H. Giles. Credit: Welcome Collection. CC FROM
As a literary scholar, I examine the history of convalescent care in the nineteenth century in order to identify how patients and therapists recounted the experience of uncertainty. Ultimately, I use these historical narrative forms to better understand how readers might engage with the ongoing uncertainty of reading Victorian novels. My central question is this: if Victorian recoveries were to interpret their ongoing recovery without anticipating possible outcomes, what would it mean for readers of Victorian novels (especially novels featuring illness) to interpret an unfolding plot without reference to completion?
If you've read a lot of Victorian novels, you already know the recovery schedule. Readers are often prompted to spend hours reading after the prolonged recovery of Governor Esther Summerson in Charles Dickens'
. Many critics read such episodes of illness as symbols of the psychological obstacles these characters face. In contrast, my work reveals that the Victorians valued the unique opportunities for reflection afforded by slow recovery time. I therefore wish to apply the interpretive techniques of convalescent therapy to Victorian novels in order to recover the ethical value and interpretive meaning that Victorian readers were trained to find within narratives of deviance, boredom and waiting.
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But more than providing new readings of nineteenth-century texts, the history of Victorian healing culture can help guide the current practitioners and patients who are part of our modern healing society. Victorian convalescents spoke with great eloquence and insight about the frustrations and possibilities of living amid prognostic uncertainty. Thus, although Victorian healing practices have never before been described in research on the history of medicine, I hope to show how the distinctive interpretive stances of the nineteenth-century convalescent movement are increasingly relevant to our historical moment, as increasingly people live with the uncertainty of the medical prognosis.
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