Social policy first hand: an international introduction to participatory social welfare

Abstract

View related articles View Crossmark data the other novels examined by Tankard either challenge consumptive stereotypes or expose the material hardships and isolation that disable people with chronic illness, Ships that Pass goes further in exploring the possibilities for more fulfilling roles for people with tuberculosis. At the novel's centre is a romantic friendship between an emancipated 'New Woman' and a disabled man, whichalthough ultimately thwarted by the tragic death of the female protagonist in a road accident-'imagines a new comradeship between disabled and non-disabled people based on mutual care and respect' (167). The novel's disability politics is informed by the demand for new non-exploitative relationships between the sexes during the 1890s, which supplies a tool for critiquing the uneven power relationships in the sentimental sickroom, and a model for more equal, interdependent, relations. Tuberculosis and Disabled Identity in Nineteenth-Century Literature: Invalid Lives is a fascinating book that provides new insights into disability representation in Victorian fiction. Of particular interest is Tankard's argument that the emergent biomedical model of disease provided a way for writers to undermine stereotypes of disabled characterisation, rather than 'standing as an institutionalised, oppressing hegemony' (111). This book is a reminder for disability scholars that the medical model did not emerge fully formed and all-powerful; rather, biomedical discourses of disease and disability evolved in the nineteenth century alongside and in competition with religious, sentimental and other models. In time, this would changethe introduction in 1912 of the need to notify of all cases of tuberculosis, and the spread of institutional care in the early twentieth century, would increase the power of the medical establishment over patients' lives, halting the development of inclusive communities like those imagined by Harraden. Alex Tankard's illuminating study shows how biomedicine enabled writers to confront the difficult realities of living with chronic illness and, in the case of Ships that Pass in the Night, to acknowledge these without 'dismissing the identities so formed as hopelessly spoiled and illegitimate' (194).