Writing about Health and Sickness: An Analysis of Contemporary Autobiographical Writing from the British Mass-Observation Archive

Abstract

In this paper, I explore some of the writing about health and sickness undertaken by volunteers writing for a British social history archive. The Mass-Observation Archive's commissioning of diaries and other forms of self- reportage has made it a prominent part of the landscape of sociology in Britain (Calder, 1985). Initiated during the 1930s, the Mass-Observation Archive's early work included the well-known worktown project. The early project was wound up in 1950, but interest in the archives eventually prompted a new project, initiated in 1981. The ‘new project’ is essentially a collection of writing on a range of issues by a panel of volunteers recruited through the media and other informal means. This paper represents a cycling through of ideas about the relationships between health, sickness, and work, via my reading of some of the writing held at the Archive. The writings with which this paper is centrally concerned are the responses to an invitation issued in the autumn of 1998 for writing about ‘Staying well and everyday life’. In addition, writings on ‘The pace of life’ and on working life were consulted. Unlike much of the data about sickness in relation to work - which relies on documentation of sickness absence- these accounts show actions which are not taken. Some of them point to a phenomenon which I have termed ‘shadow sickness, that is illness which exists without there being a mechanism to translate that experience into recognised sickness. Overall though it is the moral context of illness and of ideas about staying well which are prominent in many of these accounts and which are discussed in this paper.