The honor of being your nurse, though I am myself laid low’: Harriet Martineau and Health

Abstract

One of Harriet Martineau’s most enduring interests is health—personal and communal, national and global. This discussion considers the theme of health from three perspectives: personal—Martineau’s self-writing about health and illness in her memoir, Life in the Sickroom; sociocultural—her periodicals writing addressing communal and national health; and global—her promotion of military sanitary reforms as a matter of imperial consequence to both colonized and colonizers. Collectively, this writing exhibits how thoroughly health matters permeated Martineau’s worldview.