Poverty and Sickness in Modern Europe

Narratives of the Sick Poor, 1780-1938

Andreas Gestrich, Elizabeth Hurren, Steven King

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781441159717
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

This book provides a genuinely pan-European analysis of pauper narratives, focusing on the experiences of the sick poor in England, France, Germany, Ireland, Luxembourg, Scotland, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and Wales. The contributions highlight the value of pauper narratives for exploring the agency, rhetoric and experiences of the poor and sick poor, significantly enhancing our understanding of the ways in which national and regional welfare systems operated. By foregrounding the particular experiences and strategies of the sick poor, this volume helps to establish and understand the central sentiments of the relief system and the core experiences of those under its care. What emerges is a demonstration that how a relief system treated its sick poor and how those sick poor were able to navigate the system tells us more about welfare history than analysis of any other group.

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• 1 Narratives of poverty and sickness in Europe 1780–1938: Sources, methods and experiences
• 2 Grief, sickness and emotions in the narratives of the shamefaced poor in late eighteenth-century Copenhagen
• 3 'Labouring on a bed of sickness': The material and rhetorical deployment of ill-health in male pauper letters
• 4 'I have once more taken the Leberty to say as you well know': The development of rhetoric in the letters of the English, Welsh and Scottish sick and poor 1780s–1830s
• 5 Poverty and epidemics: Perceptions of the poor at times of Cholera in Germany and Spain, 1830s–1860s
• 6 Living with insanity: Narratives of poverty, pauperism and sickness in asylum records 1840–76
• 7 Narratives of poverty in Irish suicides between the Great Famine and the First World War, 1845–1914
• 8 Stories of care and coercion: Narratives of poverty and suffering among patients with venereal disease in Sweden, 1860–1920
• 9 From unemployment to sickness and poverty: The narratives and experiences of the unemployed in Trier and surroundings, 1918–33
• 10 Narratives of ill-health in applicant letters from rural Germany, 1900–30
• 11 Asking for the privilege to work: Applications for a peddling licence (Austria in the 1920s and 1930s)
• Appendix: Narratives writ large
• Select Bibliography
• Index