‘You must study mankind as well as medicine, and also bear in mind, when acting upon diseased bodies, that they are possessed with hearts and minds that have strong passions, warm sentiments and vivid imaginations, which sway them powerfully both in health and disease.’[i] In its opening pages, Jukes de Styrap’s The Young Practitioner (1890) – an…
This post reviews E.S. Thomson’s Dark Asylum (2017), the latest novel in the Jem Flockhart murder mystery series. For a review of its predecessor, Beloved Poison, click here. Dark Asylum – the second novel in the Jem Flockhart series – hit bookstores earlier this month. I was privileged to be sent a copy by its publishers (Little, Brown) ahead…
This week saw the release of Dark Asylum, the second novel in E.S. Thomson’s Jem Flockhart series. To celebrate its launch, this post reviews the prequel, Beloved Poison. I was scouring the shelves of Waterstones when I first came across E.S. Thomson’s Beloved Poison. Initially struck by its sensational title and gorgeous cover art, my interest was well and…
Originally posted on Diseases of Modern Life:
MIND-READING 2017: MENTAL HEALTH AND THE WRITTEN WORD Venue: Studio Theatre, dlr LexIcon, Dublin 10 March 2017 Conference Organisers: Dr. Elizabeth Barrett (UCD) and Dr. Melissa Dickson (Oxford). Keynote Speakers: Prof. James V. Lucey (TCD), Prof. Fergus Shanahan (UCC) and Prof. Sally Shuttleworth (Oxford). This one-day programme of talks and…
Last month I was in York for a mini-break and had an opportunity to visit the city’s beautiful art gallery, including its phenomenal new exhibition “Flesh: Skin and Surface”. With a weekend in the city ahead of me, I’d decided to shell out on a York Museums Trust annual pass and wanted to make the…
Last week saw Season Two of BBC’s showpiece Sunday-night drama Poldark come to a close. After a (relatively) upbeat Season One, this had been a much darker affair, with Francis Poldark tragically drowning in Wheal Grace (all the more painful after he’d hallucinated being saved); the same mine collapsing inwards, killing several of its diligent workers;…
I am currently co-organising a symposium on global and historical perspectives on the doctor-patient relationship with DPhil candidate Sarah Jones (Oxford). You can find the call for papers below and our full conference website available here. “Two distinct and separate parties interact with one another – not one mind (the physician’s), not one body (the…
Charlotte Spencer and Colin Morgan as the Applebys (Robert Viglasky/BBC) WARNING: Contains spoilers! Last night the BBC’s original six-part series, The Living and the Dead, reached its grand finale. Dubbed “Thomas Hardy with ghosts” by its creator, Ashley Pharaoh, the show – set in 1894 – saw a seemingly sleepy village in rural Somerset haunted…
Originally posted on Constructing Scientific Communities:
Dental health publicity, Bermondsey. Credit: Mirrorpix/ Southwark Local History Library and Archive/ Wellcome Images Registration has now opened for our one-day public symposium investigating public participation in medicine and healthcare from the nineteenth century to the present. The symposium, held at the Royal College of Surgeons of England (RCS), will bring together historical…
Anthony Trollope, Napoleon Sarony (New York Public Library) Last night Julian Fellowes’s adaptation of Doctor Thorne bowed out on ITV. When I first heard the Downton Abbey creator was intending to transport Anthony Trollope’s novel to the small screen, my response was one of anticipation and trepidation. I was excited because the novel features fairly…
Illustration of the Police Museum (1883) Museum of London Murder mysteries have always been my guilty pleasure. As an awkward pre-teen I was a rapacious reader of the Nancy Drew series (more interested in her amateur detection than her fledging romance with Ned Nickerson), and over the last decade or so I’ve nursed a not-so-secret love…
In academia, summer means several things: lugging impossibly large books in your holiday suitcase (Thomas Hardy = perfect poolside reading, yes?); finally turning your mind to those forgotten projects you ‘put to one side’ in term time, and – one of my personal favourites – conference season. Last month, less than twenty-four hours after returning…
“Lady-Physicians”, Punch, 23 December 1865. Engraving by George du Maurier. Wellcome Images. For the last few months I’ve been trawling nineteenth-century medical journals to find evidence of male doctors’ views on women entering the profession. While I’ve discovered a huge spectrum of opinion – from the progressive to the vehement – when it comes to…
It’s tempting to characterise the host of doctors in Victorian fiction as a gallery of rogues and romantic heroes. But how do medical practitioners really feature in nineteenth-century narratives? In ‘Doctors Dissected’, a series of blog posts, I’ll be reappraising the roles they play in canonical and lesser-known novels… Anthony Trollope, Napoleon Sarony (New York Public Library)…
It’s tempting to characterise the host of doctors in Victorian fiction as a gallery of rogues and romantic heroes. But how do medical practitioners really feature in nineteenth-century narratives? In ‘Doctors Dissected’, a new series of blog posts, I’ll be reappraising the roles they play in canonical and lesser-known novels… “Charlotte Brontë”, George Richmond (1850), National Portrait…
The Victorian Clinic 