Hello readers!
My name is Kate and I was recently appointed as the Research Associate to the ‘Buzzers for Bedwetters’ project at the University of Kent. Over the next year, I’ll therefore be working alongside Dr Claire L. Jones (the Principal Investigator) to explore the history of incontinence and the urinary body in modern Britain, and in particular, its stigmatisation. While one week you might find me flicking through old medical textbooks or handling incontinence devices which have been preserved in an archive, the next I could be joining Claire to meet with our project partners (Bladder & Bowel UK and ERIC), helping to plan or run our events or preparing written outputs, such as journal articles. Amongst all of this, I will also be keeping you updated on the progress of the Buzzers for Bedwetters project via this blog, by sharing insights to the material we are finding and how our understanding of urine incontinence in the past is developing. In addition, I’ll be reflecting on what this history offers in terms of challenging the stigmatisation of urine incontinence today.
As things wind down for Christmas, it feels like a good time to look back on what I’ve been up to during my first month in post, some of which has involved gathering historical, or ‘primary source’, material on urine incontinence through visits to various archives. These include archives located at the Wellcome Library, the British Library and the Royal College of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, all of which are based in London, as well as the Thackray Museum in Leeds and Sheffield City Archives. Already, I’ve started to appreciate that whilst urinary incontinence (or as it has also been known in the past, ‘bedwetting’, ‘enuresis’) has not received a lot of attention from historians, references to this condition and ‘leaky’ urinary bodies can be found all over the archive; in institutional reports (often produced by hospitals or health officials) or adverts published in newspapers, in general medical textbooks and in short case notes written by physicians or psychiatrists. It is very much clear, then, that urine incontinence was a common problem faced by people living across British society in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
During my visits to the archive, I’ve also begun to see how medical theories of incontinence evolved, as this condition became identified in children or the elderly, in men or women. According to some historians, bedwetting in a child was first seen as a ‘bad behavioural habit’ yet by the mid-twentieth century, had become linked to ‘deeper psychological problems’, in turn leading to a shift away from habit training or punishment towards an interrogation of the inner psyche (Miller, 2019). The sources I have analysed are perhaps starting to reveal a more complicated picture. For example, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, some physicians recognised that bedwetting might be caused by disease, and thus should be treated as a medical condition. Equally, the idea that incontinence was a behavioural problem which if not always punished, often made people the subject of disapproval or shame, arguably lasted throughout the twentieth century.
Though incontinence and the urinary body was clearly understood in many different ways across different contexts, time periods and places, my work so far has also revealed the shame which followed people living with this condition and their families, and left them feeling ‘concerned with how one is seen and judged by others’ (Dolezal, 2015). When analysing sources that I have found in the archive, I have therefore begun to not only reflect on what this shame was, but also where it came from. During my visit to the Wellcome Collection, for example, I viewed an advert produced by the De Groot Electrical Company in the late nineteenth century to sell their ‘Electro-Magnetic Sexual Spiral’: a device designed for men to cure leakiness resulting from ‘impotency, spermatorrhoea, physical decay, enlarged prostate gland and inflammation of the bladder’. The language used in the advert illustrates how shame was central to the marketing of this device, with promises made that users could cure their leakiness ‘without trouble or attention’, but also maintain their anonymity as their letters would be destroyed ‘as soon as they were received’. In this context, playing on feelings of shame arguably allowed the De Groot Electrical Company to underline the value and utility of their device.
Shame was a feature of early twentieth century maternal advice manuals. Instilling the view that ‘a dirty child is the mother’s disgrace’, these manuals laid out the practical steps and actions which a mother (or the woman who was nursing her child) should take to ensure that the child did not wet the bed. Shame was again central here, but in this instance was a way to influence certain kinds of behaviour on the part of the mother/female carer. Shame is also a common theme in Amanda Gavin’s work on bedwetting in Scottish foster homes. Analysing a range of sources which include testimony from former residents, Gavin argues that they both experienced shame but also saw it as a ‘weapon’ used by their caregivers against them. In these sources, shame can therefore be seen as a feeling and an experience, but also as a tool, and I plan to think of it as such in my research going forward.
My first month as a Research Associate has (somewhat unsurprisingly) left me with more questions and uncertainties than I began with. Our initial discussions with ERIC and Bladder & Bowel UK, as well as the stories from people of all ages and their parents shared on their websites, have however shown me that whilst medical ideas of and approaches to urine incontinence have changed somewhat unevenly since the late nineteenth century, there are striking continuities in how this condition was, and still is, felt and experienced. My hope is that my work within this project will help to show why history is crucial in helping us to understand such continuities, but also to make connections with the past that foster mutual care, support and solidarity in the present.