Chlorosis and chronic disease in nineteenth-century Britain: the social constitution of somatic illness in a capitalist society.

Abstract

The sociologists have delineated social “roles” which characterize the public features of illness, and professional roles which define the socially sanctioned behavior of physicians. The source of the contradiction between the data and the interpretation may lie in a socially structured perception of illness which excluded occupation as an exciting cause. The illness of working-class girls was interpreted in terms inappropriate to their working conditions. Chronic illness was becoming endemic, and its potential for exposing the sick-making conditions inseparable from the labor process itself was high. Constitution was an individual character, a product of the uniqueness in health and illness of the person as an integrated totality. Constitution as the central presupposition in medical thinking carried the implicit personal responsibility for illness into the hard core of medical theory. Feminist historians have associated the use of medical ideas about the nature of women with conservative middle-class reactions to specific demands for an equal place for women in a man’s world.