Painful bodies and brutal women: remedial massage, gender relations and cultural agency in military hospitals, 1914-18

Abstract

Military culture in the First World War was predicated upon the Victorian dichotomy of active male and passive female in social roles and physiological status. A soldier's ability to fight and wield armaments framed his embodied citizenship. Once wounded, however, military medicine took a different view of the soldier's body, mapping onto his broken flesh notions of passivity that implied femininity and infantilization. The presence of female therapists in military hospitals reversed the gendered and class dimensions of nineteenth-century allied medicine. Women now had power over the wounded body. They inflicted pain upon patients to a degree that was, at times, scandalous, and ignited institutional struggles amongst medical authorities. Whilst the process of physical rehabilitation was treated as a re-gendering process, and pain endurance built, controversially, into the practice of remedial massage, new social relations were created between men and women. This generated a significant body of cultural work that reveals the complexity of class and gender dynamics in military medicine and hospital life during wartime.