Carole Reeves and Ann Shaw, The Children of Craig-y-nos

Craig-y-nos (Rock of the Night)—a hill on the edge of the Brecon Beacons—gave its name to the adjacent country house, originally built in 1840 but substantially enlarged by celebrity opera singer Adelina Patti. On her death the entire 48 acres estate was sold to the Welsh National Memorial Association (WNMA), which, from 1921, uniquely for the UK, coordinated local authority tuberculosis provision across Wales. The ‘castle’ remained a sanatorium, mainly for children and young people, from 1922 to 1959. This incredibly rich collection of oral and written testimonies and photographs from patients, relatives, and staff is, the authors argue, ‘a community oral history project and not a work of academic research’ (p. 6). And yet, in answering Roy Porter's still largely neglected call for patient-centred history, this collection reaches parts that academic histories, even now, rarely reach. Shaw and Reeves' intellectual sensitivity is, perhaps, partly prompted by the lack of rigorous contextualisation of the testimonies, although in the absence of all hospital records, they employ WNMA records, school inspector's reports, and Welsh Office, Welsh National Hospital Board and nursing inspector's records to great effect. There are also, of course, methodological questions surrounding the status of some testimonies: for example, Shaw found that reminiscences posted on her blog were updated after patient reunions: much of the negativity and pain was ‘defused by the process of working through shared memories’ (p. 8). However, one senses that their wariness about a work which gives such unique access to the actual experience of being in this looming building for years at a time, isolated from all normal life, society, education and play, speaks volumes about how little we have grasped the historiographical implications of Porter's challenge. The problem of how to write a ‘Romantic History’ without abandoning rigorous methods is similar to the challenges faced today by medicine itself from the bio-psycho-social model of health and illness. Just what do we do with patient narratives? They are an amorphous and elusive chimera, made from blended fragments of hybridised sociological meta-narratives, and yet they seem to offer the promise of things that we cannot get anywhere else: a historiographically revolutionary democratic social history, and a sense of shared humanity that holds out the teasing promise of an empathy with the sick-world

Archaeology · Clan · Estate · Genealogy · Oral history · Political science · Sociology · Welsh · Anthropology · Historical Psychiatry and Medical Practices · History of Medicine Studies · Medicine · Medicine and Dermatology Studies History · History · Law