Dr Sarah Chaney

Profile

I am a part-time researcher on the “Living With Feeling” project in the Centre for the History of the Emotions, exploring compassion and nursing.  I completed my PhD at UCL in 2013, focusing on self-injury in late Victorian asylums. My background is in public engagement, and I also work as exhibitions and events manager at the Royal College of Nursing.

Research

Research Interests:

I am currently researching the idea of compassion in British nursing: from models of charity, idealised motherhood and duty in the late nineteenth century to modern political debates around the NHS and nursing education. My previous research focused on the history of psychiatry and self-inflicted injury, and my monograph 'Psyche on the Skin’ was published in February 2017.

My research focuses on nineteenth and twentieth-century Britain and the USA, to include:
• The history of nursing and healthcare
• The history of self-inflicted injury and suicidal behaviour
• The social history of asylum psychiatry in Britain since 1800
• Patient narratives in mental health care and survivor history
• The history of normativity
• The history of emotions and emotional health

Publications

• Chaney, S. “Before Compassion: Sympathy, Tact and the History of the Ideal Nurse”, BMJ Medical Humanities (online first, July 2020)
• “Sarah Elizabeth Wardroper (1813-92)” and “Louisa Victoria Haughton (1867-1954)” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2020).
• Chaney, S. “‘Purifying the Profession’: Good Character and the General Nursing Council Disciplinary Committee in the Inter-war Period”, Women’s History, 2:13 (2019)
• Chaney, S. and Walke, J. “Mansions in the Orchard: architecture, asylum and community in twentieth-century mental health care” in Solveig Jülich and Sven Widmalm, eds. Communicating the History of Medicine: Perspectives on audiences and impact (Manchester University Press, 2019)  
• Chaney, S. and Frampton, S. “Mind-Boggling Medical History: Creating a medical history game for new audiences” in Science Museum Group Journal, 11 (2019)
• Chaney, S. “Am I a researcher or a self-harmer? Mental Health, Objectivity and Identity Politics in History” in Social Theory and Health (2019), 
• “The Action of the Imagination: Daniel Hack Tuke and late Victorian psycho-therapeutics”, History of the Human Sciences, 30: 2 (2017): 17-33
• Psyche on the Skin: A History of Self-Harm, (2017, London: Reaktion Books)
• “‘No “Sane” Person Would Have Any Idea’: Patients’ Involvement in Late Nineteenth-century British Asylum Psychiatry”, Medical History, 60:1 (2016): 37-53.
• “Useful members of society or motiveless malingerers? Occupation and malingering in British asylum psychiatry, 1870 – 1914” in Waltraud Ernst, ed. (2016) Work Therapy, Psychiatry and Society, c. 1750 – 2010, (Manchester: Manchester University Press).
• “Anaesthetic Bodies and the Absence of Feeling: Pain and Self-Mutilation in Later Nineteenth-Century Psychiatry” 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 15 (2012)
• “Curious Appetites: Surgery and the Foreign Body” The Lancet, 380 (9847), 22 Sept 2012: 1050-1051
• “ ‘A hideous torture on himself’: Madness and Self-mutilation in Victorian Literature” Journal of Medical Humanities 32:4 (2011): 279-89
• “Self-Control, Selfishness and Mutilation: How 'Medical' is Self-Injury Anyway?” Medical History, 55:3 (2011): 375-83

Public Engagement

Who Cares? A History of Emotions in Nursing. Project lead on exhibition at the Royal College of Nursing launched in January 2020.

I appeared on several radio programmes and newspaper pieces discussing the history of self-harm in 2017.

• Woman’s Hour, BBC Radio 4 interview, Monday 6 February 2017
• “5 things people still don’t understand about self-harm”, The Metro, 27 February 2017
• “Perceptions of self-harm”, Royal College of Nursing Bulletin, 348, February 2017
• “The Victorians are to blame for assumptions that self-harm is just attention-seeking”, The Conversation, 6 March 2017
• “The secret history of self-harm”, All in the Mind, ABC interview, 23 April 2017
• “A History of self-harm”, Lancet Psychiatry podcast, 26 April 2017
• Psychology Today Blog, 15 August 2017

Membership of professional associations or societies:

• Royal Historical Society
• Museums Association