Victoria Bates

“Misery Loves Company”: Sexual Trauma, Psychoanalysis and the Market for Misery’

This article examines sexual ‘misery memoirs’, focusing on author/reader and genre/market relationships in the context of models of trauma and child sexual abuse. It shows that the success of sexual ‘misery memoirs’ is inextricably bound up with the popular dissemination of a feminist-psychoanalytic model of traumatic memory that has taken place since the 1970s. It also argues that, as the ‘truth’ of recovered and traumatic memories has been fundamental to its success, anxieties about false memory and hoax ‘misery memoirs’ have posed a challenge to the genre and established a market for ‘retractor’ narratives.

Yesterday’s Doctors: The human aspects of medical education in Britain, 1957–93

In the wake of the Second World War there was a movement to counterbalance the apparently increasingly technical nature of medical education. These reforms sought a more holistic model of care and to put people – rather than diseases – back at the centre of medical practice and medical education. This article shows that students often drove the early stages of education reform. Their innovations focused on relationships between doctors and their communities, and often took the form of informal discussions about medical ethics and the social dimensions of primary care. Medical schools began to pursue ‘humanistic’ education more formally from the 1980s onwards, particularly within the context of general practice curricula and with a focus on individual doctor–patient relationships. Overall from the 1950s to the 1990s there was a broad shift in discussions of the human aspects of medical education: from interest in patient communities to individuals; from social concerns to personal characteristics; and from the relatively abstract to the measurable and instrumental. There was no clear shift from ‘less’ to ‘more’ humanistic education, but rather a shift in the perceived goals of integrating human aspects of medical education. The human aspects of medicine show the importance of student activism in driving forward community and ethical medicine, and provide an important backdrop to the rise of competencies within general undergraduate education.

InTouch Tactile Tales: Haptic Feedback and Long-Distance Storytelling

The squeeze of an arm during a tense moment in a story -- an absentminded caress on the back of the hand while listening to an engaging tale -- the physical presence and interpersonal touch of a loved one can be an important part of reading to a child. However the thrill of the tale is often lost and the intimacy diluted when separated families have to resort to the flatness of a video-call or mobile app to share a bedtime story with their loved one. This project is setting out to create a physical story portal, a magical object which uses technologies to link teller and listener through sound, light and touch to help bridge this gap when families are separated. While the development of the InTouch reading system is still in the preliminary stages, a prototype handheld device has been created to allow adults and children to share touch-based messages during story time. It has been trialled with several families in the lab, and the initial results have pointed to both guidance and design considerations that should be taken into account for such a system to be successfully deployed.

Sensing space and making place: the hospital and therapeutic landscapes in two cancer narratives

This article explores the role of senses in the construction and experience of place, focusing on patients’ experiences of hospital care. It compares two cancer narratives for their insights into the heterogeneous ways that hospital environments are made into therapeutic landscapes, arguing that they are a product of dynamic processes rather than something that is simply built. The article draws on a relational model of space and place, alongside literary analysis, to explore the making of un/healthy environments in embodied, affective and sensory terms. It indicates that sensory experiences in hospitals are made (un)therapeutic in relation to illness and recovery, as well as a range of social and human/non-human relations. These conclusions warn against making broad claims about ‘good’ or ‘bad’ hospital sensescapes, or against treating the hospital as a homogeneous space. They also offer new opportunities for medical geography and the medical humanities, by showing how illness and recovery are part of the relational making of space and place.

‘Humanizing’ healthcare environments: architecture, art and design in modern hospitals

ABSTRACT In recent decades, hospital design literature has paid increasing attention to an apparent need to ‘humanize’ hospital environments. Despite the prevalence of this design goal, the concept of ‘humanizing’ a space has rarely been defined or interrogated in depth. This article focuses on the meaning of humanization, as a necessary step towards understanding its implementation in practice. It explores the recent history of humanistic design as a goal in healthcare contexts, focusing on the UK in the late twentieth century. It shows that many features of humanistic design were not revolutionary, but that they were thought to serve a new purpose in counterbalancing high-technology, scientific and institutional medical practice. The humanistic hospital, as an ideal, operated as a symbol for wider social concerns about the loss – or decentring – of patients in modern medical practice. Overall, this article indicates a need to interrogate further the language of ‘humanization’ and its history. The term is not value free; it carries with it assumptions about the dehumanization of modern medicine, and has often been built on implicit binaries between the human and the technological.

Consent: Violence and the Vibrating Scabbard

‘No sane man can believe, that a woman of average height and strength, and not overcome by drugs, could be violated by one man’.1 These were the words of gynaecologist Lawson Tait in an 1894 article on sexual offences against females. Tait used knowledge of the ‘average’ woman’s body to justify the expectation that she could, and should, fight off an attempted offence. His work suggests that he was more cynical than most of his peers, as he published widely about the prevalence of false claims in rape trials, but was not alone in believing in a normal woman’s capacity to resist. The Medical Press had published similar comments in July 1890: ‘[g]enerally speaking, few medical men of experience believe much in rape in the case of a moderately healthy and vigorous woman’.2 Such claims were grounded in the belief that a man could not achieve penetration of a woman who resisted to her utmost, as articulated through the rape myth that it was ‘impossible to sheath a sword into a vibrating scabbard’.3 As late as 1913 the US Police Surgeon Gurney Williams pointed out in International Clinics, published in London and Philadelphia, that mere ‘crossing of the knees’ would prevent rape.4

Offenders: Lust and Labels

The ‘paedophile’ emerged as a named object of concern in the late-nine-teenth century as a result of sexologists’ interest in the categorisation of sexual deviance. However, the label was rarely used in mainstream medicine. As Stephen Angelides notes, ‘of principle concern to sexologists were sexual deviations with respect to the aim or gender of object choice, not the age of object choice’.1 Only in the late-twentieth century was there an ‘explosion of social panic’ around paedophilia.2 The belief in a specific type of offender prone to abusing children existed in the late-nineteenth century, but it gained little traction until a century later. In the absence of any clear-cut notion of ‘paedophilia’, or even of ‘child sexual abuse’ as a single type of crime, Victorian and Edwardian medical practitioners had no coherent idea of what motivated perpetrators of sexual offences against the very young.3

Innocence: Chastity and Character

The violated body was a medical, legal and social text: medical men needed to read the body and its signs in order to give them meaning. As part of this process, medical witnesses considered and eliminated a range of different explanations for physical signs and symptoms. One such explanation was the complainant’s sexual history, a subject that was considered to be irrelevant in law but was a necessary part of the diagnostic process. As with bodily signs in general, medical testimony about chastity and sexual character differed according to the age of complainants, but showed no clear division between ‘children’ and ‘adults’. Medical witnesses focused on the subjects of masturbation and genital ‘play’ in relation to the youngest complainants, and only contemplated unchastity as an explanation for genital signs once girls neared or passed the age of puberty. Examining the age, class and gender dimensions of medical testimony on masturbation and unchastity — and courts’ reactions to such evidence — shows that forensics provided a scientific justification for dismissing cases that did not fit age-based and gendered stereotypes of innocent victimhood.

Conclusions: Medicine, Morality and the Law

The nineteenth century was a period of important change in medical knowledge and practice. Forensic medicine developed as a profession in the Victorian period and established an increasingly coherent body of knowledge, which included the legal aspects of sexual crime. Science carried some weight on the witness stand, where practitioners of sexual forensics testified on the legal implications of a complainant’s physical and mental signs in the aftermath of an alleged sexual crime. Medical witnesses needed to consider all possible meanings of a sign in order to identify whether it held legal relevance. Sexual forensics therefore dealt with subjects that were outside the remit of most witness testimony, ranging from a complainant’s general physical maturity to her (and sometimes his) chastity.

Introduction: Sex, Sexuality and Sexual Forensics

One summer’s evening in 1894, a young girl named Rose Buckland went to St George Park in Bristol for the purposes of listening to a live band and socialising with her friends. This enjoyable day out turned rapidly into a nightmare for the girl when, she claimed, two youths began ‘pulling her about’ and lifting up her clothes.1 Buckland complained to her mother and a case was brought before a magistrate in October of the same year, but was dismissed before trial. The dismissal of this case at first seems surprising. It had a number of direct witnesses, with testimony that supported Buckland’s claims to distress and her efforts to escape from the accused boys. However, witnesses also raised questions about the girl’s status as a victim. The law on sexual consent assumed Buckland — as a girl aged 12 — to be sexually immature, both in behaviour and body, but witness testimony indicated that she had been flirtatious with boys in the park. One friend of the prisoners stated that Buckland was only ‘pretending to cry’ and that she had previously encouraged him ‘to go and lie on her’.2 This testimony destabilised Buckland’s status as an innocent victim at the hands of two older boys.