Emotional pathologies and holidays as therapy

Abstract

Abstract This chapter outlines the role medical discourse played in the emotional economy of holidaymaking in Britain between 1870 and 1918. Physicians were crucial in the effort to make emotions into objects that could be pathologized and managed, and they helped forge a link between nature and health and between workers and holidaymaking. The analysis of medical texts reveals that holidays in nature, ‘taking the waters’, and embracing sea air and sunshine, continued to be viewed as therapeutic throughout the period. However, as the pathology to be healed was increasingly framed in emotional terms, the cure was correspondingly articulated as the provision of ‘positive’ emotional experiences. The chapter examines how emotions were gradually pathologized in the context of modernity and urban labour from the 1860s onwards. Outlining the emotional history of neurasthenia and overwork, which played a central role in the development of psychology as an independent discipline, the chapter shows that ‘the worker’ was increasingly conceptualized by the medical profession as a vulnerable emotional subject irrespective of gender and occupation. The chapter then explores how scientists thought overwork could be cured, demonstrating that the theorization of ‘change’ as a means to manage emotions undergirded the new take on holidaymaking as an efficient way to help people manipulate their emotional state and avoid the negative effects of work. By positioning themselves as the experts on the management of emotions, physicians became closely involved in reframing the goals of leisure and the strategies of the holiday industry.