Fellow Sufferers: Disability, Emotion and Connection in Nineteenth-Century England

💡 In this keynote, Professor David Turner explores the way in which people with disabilities dealt with suffering and how they use the concept of 'fellow sufferers' to reinforce their emancipatory demands.
📜 The equation of disability with suffering has been critiqued rightly in modern disability studies as a barrier to effective engagement with disability as a societal issue, and for cementing the idea that disability is simply a problem of individual coping. The portrayal of disabled people as ‘suffering’ from ‘afflictions’ stemming from their bodily difference has been a recurrent theme in sentimental ‘charity model’ renderings of disability that rob disabled people of agency by portraying them as tragic objects of pity. However, there has been little study of how disabled people themselves used the rhetoric of suffering in the past. This paper explores the growing number of texts published in nineteenth-century England in which people with physical and sensory impairments and chronic illnesses addressed others in the same situation. While chronically sick and disabled writers came from a variety of backgrounds and wrote for a range of purposes, they commonly addressed an imagined community of ‘fellow sufferers’. In this talk, I explore ways in which the term ‘fellow sufferer’ was deployed in this period and explore its uses in developing emotional connection between people living with ill health or bodily difference at a time before the modern disability movement. Although the appeal to ‘fellow sufferers’ was most readily used in texts offering consolation and advice written by ‘invalids’, it can also be found in texts conveying pride in disabled people’s achievements, and ones expressing anger in the treatment of disabled industrial workers. However problematic we find the language of ‘suffering’ today, we need to pay close attention to the ways in which disabled people in the past constructed their experiences - and resisted culturally dominant framings of impairment - by using the language available to them.
💬 David Turner is Professor of History and Co-Director of the Centre for Heritage, Research and Training at Swansea University. His publications include Disability in Eighteenth-Century England (2012), which won the Disability History Association Outstanding Publication Prize, and Disability in the Industrial Revolution (2018), co-authored with Daniel Blackie. His work is dedicated to making disability histories publicly accessible and he was historical advisor on BBC Radio 4’s Disability: A New History (2013) and BBC TV’s Silenced: the Hidden Story of Disabled Britain (2021). He is currently writing Disability: A History of Resistance for the Bodley Head, an imprint of Penguin Random House.
📆 This video was created to the occasion of the KU Leuven conference on histories of disability and emotions (Summer 2023)
➡️ More info? ghum.kuleuven.be/LCHH/calenda...