“An Environmental History of Railway Spine: Chronic Pain, Human Bodies, and Industrializing Spaces in Nineteenth-Century America”

• In Event: The Measure of an Organ: Epistemologies of Quantification and Bodily Visibility across Time and Space

Abstract

This paper will consider the phenomenon of “railway spine” as an environmental and social problem. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, railway accident cases in Europe and the United States prompted public debate over the link between organic injury and psychological well-being. Historians of medicine have located the origins of post-traumatic stress disorders in “railway spine,” a cluster of chronic pain conditions that afflicted train passengers, typically but not exclusively in the wake of a railway accident. The scholarship has not considered how the social relations and built environments of industrial capitalism shaped debates over pain. Nineteenth-century physicians, managers, engineers, and passengers experienced and explained chronic pain in the context of emergent technologies that surpassed the limits of human physiology. Critical to this discussion will be the disproportionate diagnosis of women as victims of railway spine and the implicit gendering of public, urban transport. Using medical, literary, and visual representations of pain in the nineteenth-century United States, this paper will explore histories of gender, pain and the future of human bodies in a machine age.

Author

• Tamara Venit-Shelton, Claremont McKenna College