CfP: Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences Special Issue
In the last few
years, humanities scholars and social scientists studying medicine and
healthcare have paid increasing attention to affect theory and the
history of emotions. Indeed, emotions and affect are
key to many of the fundamental themes in the history of medicine.
Historians are attuned to the emotions of suffering patients, they have
attended to the role feelings play in the construction of pre-modern
clinical stereotypes, and they have addressed the
emotional intensity of healthcare activism and the political deployment
of public feeling. However, less attention has been paid to the
feelings of healthcare practitioners and the efforts on behalf of
governments, administrators, managers, and policymakers
to manage the emotional landscape of twentieth-century healthcare.
These
concerns are timely. Anxieties about the emotional health and
‘wellbeing’ of healthcare professionals have gained increased public
attention in both Britain and the United States
of America. Professional organizations and health policymakers have
placed new emphasis on issues such as stress, burnout, and bullying; and
research has demonstrated elevated levels of depression and suicidal
ideation amongst doctors and nurses.
This
special issue will historicize these issues, explore the changing
nature of ‘wellbeing’ as both experience and concept, and use the past
to critically appraise current policies
and practices. We seek contributions that address meaning, emotions,
and technologies of affect management in twentieth-century
Anglo-American healthcare. By maintaining an Anglo-American focus, we
hope to illustrate the similarities, differences, and interconnected
nodes between these two nations. We welcome contributions that address
issues such as national politics and practitioners ‘wellbeing’, the
emotional landscape of the NHS versus the US insurance-based systems,
and the way affect shapes healthcare cultures and
environments. Methodologically, contributions will straddle affect
theory and the history of emotions, and we seek productive theoretical
engagements that attend to these contrasting scholarly traditions. We
are interested, too, in work accessible to practitioners
and welcome articles that make links between practitioners’ emotions,
cognition, and clinical praxis. How might our historical work inform
efforts to ameliorate the working lives of the healthcare practitioners
we study?
Articles might address:
- The emotional costs of care and healthcare practitioners’ mental (ill)health. The policies and practices, institutions, organizations, and governments have implemented to shape the emotional health of healthcare practitioners.
- Collegiality, communities of feeling, and emotional interactions.
- ‘Wellbeing’ rhetoric and ‘neoliberal’ regimes of health management.
- Social democratic healthcare, labor relations, and industrial action.
- The feelings of non-clinical members of the healthcare workforce such as porters, receptionists, administrators, and laboratory technicians.
- Intersections between class, gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and emotions.
- Subjectivity and experience in the working lives of healthcare providers.
- ‘Work-life balance’, excessive temporal commitment, and boundaries between leisure and labor.
- Ideas about vocation, professionalism, and ‘labors of love.’
- Affect theory and social science approaches to the history of healthcare.
Authors whose abstracts are selected will be invited to submit an article (c.8,000 words) for consideration for publication in the special issue. Articles selected will be due in late summer 2020 and undergo peer review before publication in 2021. Please send an abstract (no more than 500 words) by February 1, 2020 to Dr. Agnes Arnold-Forster agnes.arnoldforster@