Echoes of Emotions: History through Memories at the End of Life

On a trip home from university, my mother showed me some documents she had found when clearing out my nan's house. Amongst a sea of birth certificates and football magazines was a pouch containing an old doctor's note. This was the letter that my great grandmother received from the hospital when my Nan had diphtheria in 1937. It read:

“The medical superintendent desires me to express his great regret at having to inform you that the above-named patient is dangerously ill”

My nan hadn't been expected to live much longer. It was a family story I knew already. But what affected me the most was not the words on the letter, but the tears that had stained them. These tear stains bring to life a long-forgotten moment in history. A mother, brought up to have a stiff upper lip, has her world shatter reading this letter, believing her daughter would die before her fourth birthday. 

This document highlights how important it is for historians to go beyond the written word. It’s in these tear stains, not in the words, which give us evidence of my great grandmother’s feelings. The fact she preserved them, and they now survive nearly 100 years on suggests a particular emotional significance and attachment to this memory.

Through the emotional attachments people have to their past, people’s memories are altered. Events are remembered according to how they made a person feel.

Consequently, the factual events do not necessary become a part of someone’s memories. Instead, what they remember does, which creates a distinction between the historical factual truth, and the emotional remembered truth.[1] This results in people having an internalised interpretation of what the past is to them, rooted in a relationship between their memories and emotions.

Oral history has the greatest potential for historians to reckon with the complexity of people’s memories and emotions. Its ability to access people’s feelings, tones, languages, and dialects lets historians understand not a chronological history, but a complex, remembered and emotionally driven history.[2] As part of the University of Sheffield's SURE Scheme, I listened to an oral history archive of terminally ill patients, kept at the University Library’s Special Collections and Archives. This provided me with a history driven by emotions, where people told the stories of their lives, or rather what they had remembered and felt from them. Reflecting on their lives not only gave these patients a source of therapy but allowed them to ensure their interpretation of their past was recorded.

Historians have largely been reluctant to embrace oral history due to its reliance on such emotional memories. Historians are trained to adhere to the facts, but these interviews, being entirely mediated by memories, do not consider the facts. To a trained historian, it appears unreliable. But research has highlighted how we must not dismiss memories, true or false. For people in palliative care, false memories have a purpose in showing how they have interpreted their life at the very end, no matter how far it’s driven by nostalgia.[3] The ‘falsehoods’ give us a sense of who they are as people.

Nostalgia is not without its problems; one only needs to look at how the far-right has weaponised imperial nostalgia in a so-called culture war.[4] But it is important to consider because of the significance memories have in our lives. Historical events or processes – from personal achievements to colonial atrocities – should not be relegated to the past as a distant memory, but they should be accepted as influential in our lives today.[5] It is imperative historians consider this remembered history – whether glorified or not – to understand ordinary people’s interpretations of history in a particularly divisive world.

Due to the nature of these interviews being to leave a legacy through their life story, their content aligns with what they feel is emotionally significant. This led to certain trends between groups in interviews, particularly in men and women. One such case of this can be seen in comparing the lives of two male and female interviewees. They have contrasting memories of the treatment of people with additional needs during their time working in Middlewood Hospital, a psychiatric hospital.

The male interviewee had dyslexia, leading him to take an “interest in people who had difficulty in academia”.[6] Consequently, he ended up working as a senior nurse at Middlewood. He has a proud tone discussing how he helped to “get rid of the institutionalised ideas and practices… from a bullying sort of oppressive regime to a care regime, where patients were treated as people”.[7] He then defends the previous “regime” as one where nurses “were doing our very best with the technologies we had at the time, we weren’t cruel people”.[8] At the end of his life, he wants to make sure the record displays his, and the hospital’s, altruistic values.

This contrasts with the female interviewee, who was positioned at Middlewood as a psychiatry student. She described the treatment of patients as “grim” and akin to “incarceration”.[9] She talks candidly about women who were admitted into the hospital for their “moral safety” because they had children before marriage. She remembered staff taking patients' suits, treats, and cigarettes. She remembered being called “bloody stupid” for thinking this was wrong. She did not remember the treatment ever getting better, even when she visited Middlewood later in her life.[10]

Later in the interview, the woman reveals she had been a single mother. Only later do we understand why her time in Middlewood was so emotionally significant to her life – “it did give me extra empathy… only two decades before I could have met similar attitudes that I needed care and attention”.[11] She’s in tears recalling these events. “I’ll never forget them”, she says about the patients.[12]

For the man, telling his life story is a way he makes his own legacy. But for the woman, it is also a way to remember the lives of those that are forgotten. They only live on through her memories. The interviews don’t just give us a sense of people’s legacies, values, emotions, and memories. Nor do they just show the differing emotions people have. They give us a history of those forgotten.

These accounts show how people can have totally different opinions on a historical issue. Not only that, but their contrasting feelings are on full display despite talking about two very similar experiences. The man focuses on his work; the woman focuses on her feelings. Their personal interpretations of the past differ due to their differing roles at Middlewood, and the level of empathy their gender allows them to have, or not have, for some patients.

There is a massive potential for oral history to bring to life these personal interpretations of the past. Historians should be more aware of this as a method.

Likewise, we should strive to increase the accessibility of people to record their oral history. A huge issue with my research was the archive’s lack of racial and sexual diversity. Taking the archive at face value suggests that the history of the twentieth century is one of straight and white, despite the fight for the rights of minorities being a constant throughout. This raises questions about oral history as a practice. Do minority groups choose not to share their stories, or are they unable to? How far can we record the oral histories of those that don’t speak our native language? What does it say about the world today if our archives only record certain people?

My six weeks of research could not answer this. But what it showed is that history is not just the words on the page. It’s the way people remember events, it’s how they say their words, it’s the tears that stain documents. Only a history that considers people’s memories and legacies can fully encompass a history of ordinary people.

Thomas Hounsell is a third year History undergraduate student in the School of History, Philosophy, and Digital Humanities. Thank you to Dr James Shaw for supervising the project. Thank you to the University of Sheffield Library Special Collections and Archives for providing their Palliative Care Oral Histories Archive. Thank you to Dr Michelle Winslow, Dr Fiona Wilson, Sam Smith, and Fran Horner for their help in the research. Thank you also to Dr Anwesha Roy for her suggestions and additions to this article.

References

[1] Paul Thompson and Joanna Bornat, The Voice of the Past: Oral History, 4 th ed., (Oxford, 2017) p.289

[2] Graham Dawson, Jack Crangle, Liam Harte, Barry Hezley and Fearghus Roulston, “Travelling memories, the afterlife of feelings, and associative diffraction in oral histories of Northern Irish migrants to Britain during the Troubles”, Contemporary British History 38.3 (2024), p. 472.

[3] Oddgeir Synnes, “Narratives of nostalgia in the face of death: The importance of lighter stories of the past in palliative care”, Journal of Ageing Studies 34 (2015), p. 8

[4] Flossie Caerwynt, Amy Sanders, Michaels Woods, and Rhys Dafydd Jones “Divisive Nostalgia: How do Dialogues of National Nostalgia Impact on Civil Society’s Relationship with Populism?”, Journal of Dialogue Studies 12 (2024).

[5] Urvashi Butalia, The other side of silence: voices from the Partition of India (Durham, 2018), p. 5.

[6] Patient 462/30, interview provided as Courtesy of The University of Sheffield Library, Special Collections and Archives (4 November 2010).

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Patient 462/14, interview provided as Courtesy of The University of Sheffield Library, Special Collections and Archives (29 September – 12 October 2011).

[10] Ibid.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid.

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