"Ourselves" Last weekend provided us with an exciting opportunity to introduce our research projects to a slightly different audience than the one we usually interact with: the ladies and gentlemen who participated in Meeting Minds. 24 Sep 2014
(Fashionable) Diseases of Modern Life On 8 May three quarters of the Diseases of Modern Life team - Melissa Dickson, Sally Shuttleworth, and Jennifer Wallis - visited Newcastle University to meet with the Fashionable Diseases team and take part in a workshop. 18 May 2015
A Very Trump of Doom: How the Simple Stethoscope Transformed Medial Diagnosis 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. 22 Jul 2016
Be Still My Beating Heart 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. 6 Aug 2015
Call for Papers: Medicine and Modernity in the Long Nineteenth Century, 10-11 September 2016 at St Anne's College CfP for Medicine and Modernity in the Long Nineteenth Century at St Anne’s College, Oxford 10th – 11th September 2016 12 Oct 2015
Confessions of an English Green Tea Drinker: Sheridan Le Fanu and the Medical and Metaphysical Dangers of Green Tea 23 Feb 2017
Crackpot File Revisited 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'. 6 Oct 2015
Diseases in the News: The Heavy Burden of a Modern Age On 10th September 2016, the Diseases of Modern Life project was featured in the Dutch national newspaper Trouw. 29 Sep 2016
ERC 10th Anniversary Week The Diseases of Modern Life project was featured on the Humanities Division website as part of the ERC's 10th anniversary week celebrations and events in March. 4 Apr 2017
File It Under C... There is a folder in my desk-drawer at the moment, one of several containing the fruits of months of research into various aspects of nineteenth-century science and disease. 3 Sep 2014
Keynotes from Mind Reading: Mental Health and the Written Word Both literature and clinical medicine deal with issues such as subjective identity, selfhood, and the social and cultural determinants of health and well-being. 6 May 2017
Requiem for a Cliché One of the hallmarks of the sci-fi horror genre is its tendency to generate instant clichés. 1 Dec 2015
Something in the Air: Dr Carter Moffat’s Ammoniaphone and the Victorian Science of Singing Dr Melissa Dickson's article, Something in the Air: Dr Carter Moffat's Ammoniaphone and the Victorian Science of Singing, has been published in the Spring 2017 edition of the Science Museum Group Journal. 28 Apr 2017
Something in the Air? I have never been able to help but scoff at the success of bottled water as a concept. 29 May 2016
Songs, Cakes, and Games: Thoughts on Performing, Baking, and Playing Our Research at Oxford's Curiosity Carnival On 29th September 2017, Oxford hosted the Curiosity Carnival – a city-wide public engagement event as part of European Researcher’s night. 3 Oct 2017
Sonic Wonders and the Wonder of Sound On Tuesday evening, I found myself listening to the sounds of burping sand dunes in the Mojave Desert. 13 Jul 2014
The Bane of Modern Technology The tragedy of comedy, for those who work at creating it, at least, is that jokes will go off. 5 Aug 2014
The Brain Child of Mariano Luigi Patrizi 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. 13 Dec 2014
The Dogs' Bach Making the news last week was the amusing story of the zoo in Belgium that recently captured a video of a family of elephants appearing to sway in unison to a performance of live classical music. 21 Oct 2014
The Living and the Dead captures Victorian anxieties about science and the supernatural From telegraphs to television sets, new technologies have often been imagined as strange or magical in the popular consciousness. 22 Jun 2016
The Nausea of Noise 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. 3 Jul 2014
The Psychic Pianist There is a well-known anecdote about an appearance Peter Sellers made on Parkinson many years ago. 19 Mar 2015
The Victorians had the Same Concerns about Technology as We Do We live, we are so often told, in an information age. It is an era obsessed with space, time and speed. 21 Jun 2016
This is Your Brain on Speed 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. 24 Mar 2016
Videos from Mind Reading 2019: Adolescence, Literature, and Mental Health See the videos from our conference, Mind Reading: Adolescence, Literature and Mental Health 3 Jun 2019
Who Let the Dogs Out? The phrase "black dog", when it doesn’t bring to mind Led Zeppelin IV, is usually associated with Winston Churchill, whose favoured term it was to refer to his depression. 2 Feb 2016
21 Mar Conference - Mind Reading: The Role of Narrative in Mental Health This two-day programme of talks and workshops is a collaboration between the University of Birmingham, UCD Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, and the Diseases of Modern Life and Constructing Scientific Communities Projects at St Anne’s College, Oxford.
22 Aug Inside and Outside Bodies at the University of Glasgow Dr Melissa Dickson and Dr Jennifer Wallis will be speaking about two moments of Victorian social and cultural anxiety in a panel entitled ‘Inside and Outside Bodies: the Science of Micro and Macrocosms’ University of Glasgow
17 May Mind Reading 2019: Adolescence, Literature, and Mental Health Can literature and narrative improve the lives of young people?
10 Mar Mind Reading: Mental Health and the Written Word This one-day programme of talks and workshops seeks to explore productive interactions between literature and mental health both historically and in the present day. Studio Theatre, dlr LexIcon, Dublin
18 Jul Objects of Research: The Material Turn in Nineteenth-Century Literary Studies The Victorians’ fascination with objects and things has proved equally fascinating to the field of Victorian Studies. The Woburn Room, Senate House Library, London
13 Sep Oxford Open Doors The Constructing Scientific Communities: Citizen Science in the 19th and 21st Centuries and Diseases of Modern Life: 19th Century Perspectives Projects will be taking part in Oxford Open Doors 2015 organised by the Oxford Preservation Trust. St. Anne's College
19 Nov Project Launch Event at St Anne's College On November 6, Professor Sally Shuttleworth’s two research projects, ‘Diseases of Modern Life: Nineteenth-Century Perspectives’ and ‘Constructing Scientific Communities: Citizen Science in the 19th and 21st Centuries’ were launched at St Anne’s College.
7 Dec Sleep and Stress, Past and Present Announcement A one-day interdisciplinary symposium in the Kohn Centre at the Royal Society, Sleep and Stress, Past and Present brings together expert scientists, medical practitioners, historians and literary critics to discuss intersections between sleep and stress. Kohn Centre, the Royal Society
3 Nov Sound Talking - A One Day Event at the London Science Museum Sound Talking is a one-day event at the London Science Museum that seeks to explore the complex relationships between language and sound, both historically and in the present day.
9 Jun Workshop Report: Working with 19th-Century Medical and Health Periodicals 'Working with 19th-Century Medical and Health Periodicals' was held on 30 May 2015 and co-organized by the ERC-funded ‘Diseases of Modern Life’ Project and the AHRC-funded ‘Constructing Scientific Communities’ Project, both based at St Anne’s College. St. Anne's College