Harriet Martineau and the sociology of health: England and her soldiers

Abstract

Harriet Martineau analyzed the structural characteristics associated with health, sickness, medicine, occupations, and the bureaucratic administration of health care in her later writings. I concentrate here on two major examples of this type of work: England and Her Soldiers (1859a) and Health, Husbandry, and Handicraft (London: Bradbury and Evans, 1861). In this type of study, in contrast to her early non-fiction, her own illnesses and bodily difficulties are invisible. Her sympathy with the sick and ill, nonetheless, helped her maintain her interest in the topic and her sense of mission to document and discuss it.

Martineau was aided in this work through a close alliance with Florence Nightingale and together they created a public sociology with a major social impact on health, war, and occupations delivering health care. Their intellectual and personal alliance is one of the first examples of female sociologists successfully co-ordinating their work for the common good, a model also applicable to their female successors at Hull-House and the University of Chicago.

Citation

Jo Deegan, M. (2008), "Harriet Martineau and the sociology of health: England and her soldiers", Texler Segal, M. and Demos, V. (Ed.) Advancing Gender Research from the Nineteenth to the Twenty-First Centuries (Advances in Gender Research, Vol. 12), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 43-61. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1529-2126(08)12004-5