ABSTRACT
In this chapter we use personal testimony and other source material to reconstruct what it was like to live with chronic respiratory illness, examining how individuals, families and the mining community were affected by and responded to widespread breathing impairment and progressively encroaching disability. This public health catastrophe is contextualised against a backdrop of fundamental economic transformation as Britain experienced rapid de-industrialisation and employment in underground coal mining sharply contracted, indeed virtually disappeared. We concentrate here on the lived experience of occupational diseases, including the personal lifestyle transitions caused by occupational disability. In this respect, our work is influenced by and contributes to a growing stream of experiential-based (including oral history) research on health and well-being that places the focus on the material experience and discourses of the person and/or community directly affected – the disabled, the sick and injured. 1
