Tweeting from the Grave: Sickness and Survival in the 17th Century

By Hannah Newton

My favourite thing about being a historian is reading other people’s diaries. I began to realise this at the tender age of eight, when our teacher asked us to write a series of diary entries from the perspective of someone during the Great Plague. It seems that I’ve never really grown up: over the next nine days, I will be tweeting as 17th-century mum, Alice Thornton (1626-1707), whose young daughter Nally fell dangerously sick 351 years ago.

The tweets are based on real diary entries by Alice and other 17th-century parents, which I encountered while researching for my first book, The Sick Child. Winner of the 2015 EAHMH Prize, this book shows that while illness was a source of great anguish for young patients and their families, it was also a time of tender loving care and mutual affection.

On the 7th  June my second book will be coming out, Misery to Mirth, which investigates what it was like to recover from a life-threatening illness in the 17th century. Courtesy of the Wellcome Trust, this book will be free to download.

Together, the books overturn two myths: the first is that high rates of mortality led to cold and aloof relationships between family members in the premodern period. The second myth is that before the birth of modern medicine, most illnesses left you either dead or disabled.

I will not give away what happens to Nally Thornton, but I do hope that readers come away convinced that 17th-century people were every bit as human as we are now, with deep emotions, feelings, and relationships. It’s possible that the tweets may also resonate with the experiences of patients and carers today, helping to enhance empathy for those affected by sickness both in the past and present.

Follow Alice Thornton’s ‘live’ tweet story at @17thCenturyMum from Friday 1 June.

 

Artistic Practice, Health Humanities and Collections: workshop 4 May 2018

Miranda Laurence, University of Reading Arts Development Officer

It’s quite difficult to describe the frisson that went around the room as everyone realised that, in front of them, to look at and indeed touch, were original copies of some of the most famous books in medical history.

Andreas Vesalius, De Humani Corporis Fabrica

Full of painstaking engravings illustrating the very minute details of the human body in all its layerings, the copies of Vesalius’ De humani corporis fabrica and Bidloo’s Anatomia Hvmani Corporis provided a huge source of fascination for the artists and scholars gathered for an afternoon’s workshop, jointly organised by the Health Humanities Research Network, and the Arts Development Officer as part of the University’s arts strategy activity.

We invited four artists from different disciplines, with an interest in medical humanities, to join the Director of the Health Humanities Research Network, Andrew Mangham, University Art Collections Curator, Naomi Lebens, Research Officer at the Cole Collection, Verity Burke, and Arts Development Officer, Miranda Laurence. The artists were Simon Hall, doctor, visual artist and dental trainee whose work explores art and medicine collaboration; Fiona Millward, a dancer, teacher and choreographer and Rolfing practitioner; Kelley Swain, a writer of science poetry and literature reviews, and teacher of medical humanities; and Eleanor Crook, a sculptor with a special interest in mortality, anatomy and pathology who exhibits internationally in fine art and medical and science museum contexts.

Naomi Lebens and Verity Burke began the session by introducing us to chosen items from the University Art and the Cole collection, respectively; the theme of ‘movement and stillness’ underpinned their choices. Our discussion ranged from the different visual and haptic interactions experienced when dissecting preserved body parts as opposed to conducting an operation on a live person; to how the illustrations of dissected bodies in the two anatomical text books varied from classical to grotesque, and what effect that had on the viewer; to how sketches of performing dancers related to a drawing of a woman on her death bed, and a woman mid- conversation.

Image from Govert Bidloo, Anatomia Hvmani Corporis

These eclectic conversations led us to an exploration of how each of us might unlock an unfamiliar object – whether that might be a work of art, a book, or anything else – from our different discipline perspective. Eleanor wrote: “these responses ranged from it being a kind of physical empathy, to it being a teasing out of stories, to it being a relationship to the hand and the haptic, to it being , in my case, a kind of séance.”

The different disciplines in which everyone worked might have given each person a different starting point, but as conversation flowed, the approaches described by one person drew sparks of responding imagination from another. For Fiona it was illuminating “to recognise the mutuality within our approaches of opening oneself up to the making process, but also the diversity bred of our different forms and so how the steps beyond that spiral out into different directions.”

We are hoping to be able to follow up this stimulating workshop with more opportunities for scholars and artists to exchange knowledge and processes, and indeed be collective in their un-knowing curiosity. As Kelley said, “it was a rare treat to be invited to get together to think about a collection, with artists and academics, all of whom have related points of interest.”

We feel that this is a delicious opportunity to approach the University’s amazing collections in a new and unchartered way. Naomi speaks for us all in saying that the workshop gave her “renewed belief in the power of collections as a tool for opening up dialogues between academics and creative practitioners on an equal footing; helping them to understand one another’s processes and, in turn, to incorporate new ideas and ways of thinking into their work. Fostering true interdisciplinarity.”