Title page from "Life in the Sick-Room." Click the image to go directly to the book!
For several years in the mid-nineteenth century starting in 1839, English social activist Harriet Martineau was a housebound invalid, suffering from the pain of a tumor. Before this period, she was an extremely active writer and traveller, moving around the United Kingdom and the United States to examine living conditions and current affairs in both countries.
Her Life in the Sick-Room was originally published anonymously, but according to 1844 introduction by E.L. Follen, “…every line of it so proclaimed its author, that the effort to be lost in her subject was in vain.” (12) Prior to publishing this volume, Martineau was already relatively well-known for Society in America and Illustrations of Political Economy.
Sick-Room is a long philosophical treatise on the difficulties and rewards of invalidism and such topics of interest as the importance of “[selecting] a proper place of abode.” (59) Martineau herself chose to endure her period of illness at a house in Tynemouth near Newcastle in north-east England. Martineau projects the period of invalid life as a time to reflect and, we might say today, “work on yourself.”
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