Themes > medicine

This is a guest post written by Wan Ting Yew, a first year in pre-clinical medicine at University College Dublin.

Dr Melissa Dickson's piece on the history of the stethoscope has been published on the Medium channel at The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities.

One frequently made observation about the nineteenth century is that it was marked by a number of breakthroughs in medicine and the sciences which revealed forces that shape humanity.

CfP for Medicine and Modernity in the Long Nineteenth Century at St Anne’s College, Oxford 10th – 11th September 2016

The release of The Man Who Invented Christmas (2017) – a film which tells the story of how Charles Dickens penned A Christmas Carol in 1843 – has reignited the popular myth that the Victorians ‘created’ the festive season.

Regular readers of this blog might recall that I have a file in my desk that is the repository of all the half-baked pseudo-scientific crackpot ideas that I have come across in the course of my research and filed under 'C'.

On 10th September 2016, the Diseases of Modern Life project was featured in the Dutch national newspaper Trouw.

This is a guest post by Dr. Jennifer S. Kain, a Junior Research Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London, and author of ‘The Ne-er-do-well: Representing the Dysfunctional Migrant Mind, New Zealand 1850-1920’.

Writing in 1991, sociologist Arthur W. Frank declared that Western scientific medicine had created what he called “the remission society,” a growing number of patients whose lives were saved by medical treatment but who could not be considered cured.

This is a guest post by Alice Tsay, a PhD candidate in English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

Researchers from the ERC-funded "Diseases of Modern Life" project at the University of Oxford join experts from a range of fields to discuss some of the major questions surrounding scientific, technological and medical developments.

On 17 September 2015, in the course of a research trip to Japan, I had the pleasure of joining Prof Akihito Suzuki and a number of early career researchers at Keio University.

We didn’t invent the ‘diseases of modern life’; people in Victorian England worried about anxiety and overwork, too.

Reading the work of nineteenth-century doctors, it is striking that many tried their hand at fiction as well as penning medical articles and books.

If the project of medical science may be described as the exploration of the human body, then surely its final, vastest, most mysterious frontier is the brain.

We are big on peace and quiet in Oxford. For eight hours a day, the most that is likely to disturb me from my research is the faint lowing of cattle in the fields behind the college, or the movement of papers around me in the Bodleian.

The Australian television series, The Weekly, recently ran an exposé on the putative benefits of the profusion of whey protein powders currently being marketed as bodybuilding aids.

This is a guest post by Dr Josephine Hoegaerts, a Research Fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies and the author of Masculinity and Nationhood, 1830-1910. Constructions of Identity and Citizenship in Belgium.