In August 2024, the PI (Claire Jones), specialist nurses from Bladder and Bowel UK (Karen Irwin and Davina Richardson) and CEO of ERIC (Juliette Rayner) met at Bladder and Bowel UK headquarters in Manchester to kick off the partnership.
During this initial meeting, the partners discussed a series of historical accounts from nineteenth and twentieth medical professionals, companies and individuals who had experienced incontinence. Perhaps the most moving account was from Johann Karl Ernst Dieffenbach (1811–1855), a German physician dating from 1836, who recounted the shame and physical distress women with incontinence felt:
“A sadder situation can hardly exist than that of a woman afflicted with vesicovaginal fistula. A source of disgust, even to herself, the woman beloved by her husband becomes, in his condition, the object of bodily revulsion to him; and filled with repugnance, everyone else likewise turns his back, repulsed by the intolerable, foul, uriniferous odor.”
The historical accounts provided many interesting and important insights but perhaps the most significant was the continuity between past and present conceptions, treatments and problems for urine incontinence. Such continuities will form the basis of forthcoming project outputs.
Watch this space for more on our next meeting!