Diseases of Modern Life

Nineteenth Century Perspectives

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Air bath from thomson Ben Rhydding The Asclepiad

"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.

(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.

Laennec stethoscope

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.

Laennec stethoscope

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.

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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

A man lies dead or unconscious in his chair, his last glass of drink fallen from his hand. Lithograph by Lamy, c. 1860, after Villain. Wellcome Library, London.

Confessions of an English Green Tea Drinker: Sheridan Le Fanu and the Medical and Metaphysical Dangers of Green Tea

Joseph Babinski

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'.

Screenshot of article from Dutch newspaper (2/2)

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.

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.

Picture of proposed katzenclavier

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.

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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.

20000 leagues under sea

Requiem for a Cliché

One of the hallmarks of the sci-fi horror genre is its tendency to generate instant clichés.

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Sleep and Stress: Recordings from the Day

Please see the audio files below.

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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.

Something in the Air?

I have never been able to help but scoff at the success of bottled water as a concept.

Photograph of Emilie Taylor-Brown swing dancing

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.

Illustrated geometric figures of Chladni

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.

Cartoon from Punch, 'Forecasts for 1907'

The Bane of Modern Technology

The tragedy of comedy, for those who work at creating it, at least, is that jokes will go off.

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.

Illustration of the elephants Hans and Maguerite

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.

Frame from the Living and the Dead

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.

A street scene with people and carriages deep in mud, street traders and musicians and hot-air balloons in the distance. Coloured etching by Paul Pry, 1828

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.

Journal cover featuring the headline 'Psychic Pianist'

The Psychic Pianist

There is a well-known anecdote about an appearance Peter Sellers made on Parkinson many years ago.

image 20160609 7069 y51w83

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.

Photograph of 19thc nerve tonics

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.

Edited photograph of Santiago Ramón y Cajal’s image of a nerve cell. Originally taken by Irene Tobón and posted on Flickr commons. Some rights reserved.

Videos from Mind Reading 2019: Adolescence, Literature, and Mental Health

See the videos from our conference, Mind Reading: Adolescence, Literature and Mental Health

Anatomical drawing of an ear

Videos from the Conference 'Sound Talking'

See the videos from the day below

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.

Events

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.

The supposed effect of storms on the minds and bodies of asylum patients was one question considered by Thomas Crallan at Sussex Asylum.

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

Edited photograph of Santiago Ramón y Cajal’s image of a nerve cell. Originally taken by Irene Tobón and posted on Flickr commons. Some rights reserved.

Mind Reading 2019: Adolescence, Literature, and Mental Health

Can literature and narrative improve the lives of young people?

Books open on a table

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

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

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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

Principal Investigator Sally Shuttleworth presenting her projects

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.

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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

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.

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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