Ill Feelings

Alice Hattrick

• Publisher: Amethyst Editions
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781558614130
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

An intrepid, galvanizing meditation on illness, disability, feminism, and what it means to be alive.

In 1995 Alice’s mother collapsed with pneumonia. She never fully recovered and was eventually diagnosed with ME, or Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Then Alice got ill. Their symptoms mirrored their mother’s and appeared to have no physical cause; they received the same diagnosis a few years later.  Ill Feelings  blends memoir, medical history, biography and literary nonfiction to uncover both of their case histories, and branches out into the records of ill health that women have written about in diaries and letters. Their cast of characters includes Virginia Woolf and Alice James, the poets Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Emily Dickinson, John Ruskin’s lost love Rose la Touche, the artist Louise Bourgeois and the nurse Florence Nightingale. Suffused with a generative, transcendent rage, Alice Hattrick’s genre-bending debut is a moving and defiant exploration of life with a medically unexplained illness.

Sources

3	‘illness is the great confessional’; ‘things said, truths blurted out, which the cautious respectability of health conceals’; ‘let a sufferer describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry’: Virginia Woolf, ‘On Being Ill’, Selected Essays ed. David Bradshaw (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 104, 102.
3	‘Did anyone ever suffer as I did?’: Virginia Woolf, letter to Vanessa Bell, 18 June 1919, The Letters of Virginia Woolf, 1912–1922 ed. Nigel Nicolson (Harcourt Trade Publishers, 1975), 369.
3	‘the pain not be wasted’: Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals (London: Penguin, 2020), 9.
7–8	‘a case of genuine hysteria for which no cause as yet can be discovered’: Mary James quoted in Ruth Bernard Yeazell, The Death and Letters of Alice James: Selected Correspondence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 12.
8	‘my nerves are his nerves and my stomach his stomach’: Alice James (25 March 1890), The Diary of Alice James ed. Leon Edel (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1999), 104.
8	‘taking up of household duties that her mother laid down’: Catherine Walsh [Aunt Kate] quoted in Jean Strouse, Alice James: A Biography (New York City: New York Review Books, 2011), 202.
9	‘… experience the pain, without distraction’: Alice James (18 July 1890), The Diary of Alice James, ed. Leon Edel (New York City: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1964), 129. Also: ‘How well one has to be, to be ill!’
11	‘tender and affectionate to Virginia Woolf in her illness …’: Hermione Lee, ‘Introduction to On Being Ill’, ‘On Being Ill’ (Ashfield: Paris Press, 2002), xv.
11	In 2009, six years after the SARS virus infected around 8,000 people …: Marco Ho-Bun Lam et al., ‘Mental Morbidities and Chronic Fatigue in Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Survivors: Long-term Follow-up.’ Archives of Internal Medicine, (December 2009) 169(22): 2142–2147.
11	Funding had been syphoned off to other diseases in the US, and patients felt abandoned: ‘The current developments are part of a chain of events that began in 1998, when William Reeves, director of the CDC’s viral exanthems and herpesvirus branch, reported that funding earmarked by Congress for studies on CFS had been diverted to unrelated CDC projects. A subsequent congressional inquiry revealed that a total of $12.9 million—as much as half of the funds appropriated for the CFS—had been redirected or improperly accounted for. Reeves has also filed a complaint with the US Office of Special Counsel alleging that his supervisor, Brian Mahy, reprimanded him, reduced his staff and downgraded his performance appraisals after Reeves reported the irregularities.’ Alan Dove, ‘GAO reports on CFS funding controversy’, Nature Medicine (August 2000) 6: 846.
12	One study in Japan suggested people with a diagnosis of ME/CFS had smaller hearts …: [The papers I came across at this time were written by Kunihisa Miwa and include this one] ‘Cardiac dysfunction and orthostatic intolerance in patients with myalgic encephalomyelitis and a small left ventricle’, Heart Vessels (July 2015) 30(4): 484–489. [Miwa is one of the authors of the 2011 International Consensus Criteria for myalgic encephalomyelitis.]
16	‘The subject of pain is the business I am in …’: Louise Bourgeois quoted in Rainer Crone, The Secret of the Cells (Munich: Prestel, 1998), 81.
18	During a symposium at the Royal Society of Medicine in 1978 …: M.J. Dillon, ‘“Epidemic neuromyasthenia” at the Hospital for Sick Children, Great Ormond Street, London’ in ‘“Epidemic neuromyasthenia” 1934–1977: current approaches’, A symposium held by the courtesy of the Council of the Royal Society of Medicine at 1 Wimpole Street, London, W.1, on 7 April 1978’, ed W. H. Lyle And R. N. Chamberlain, Postgraduate Medical Journal (November 1978), 54.
23	‘never to rest, interminably, from sea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise for Ill Feelings
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Epigraph
• Dredge
• Basically furious
• Unknown aetiology
• Longing
• Child-life
• Such a crisis
• Storm coming
• Never-ending
• Every other day
• No one likes blue
• Blamed
• The worst thing
• Fresh and gorgeous
• Danger signals
• Examine me
• Intolerable bursting
• Off label
• Three good teeth
• Back to zero
• Wandering nerve
• Case definition
• Thumb-screw
• The same thing
• Too toxic
• In my body
• All the eating
• Housekeeping
• Little paws
• Not for everyone
• More harm than good
• The more you uncover
• Drained
• Combing through
• No
• Unrecovery
• Sources
• About the Author
• Also Available from the Feminist Press
• About the Feminist Press