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Abstracts and Biographies Keynote SpeakersChristopher Hamlin What is your Complaint? ?Health as Moral Economy in the Long Nineteenth Century.Christopher Hamlin is Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame, specialising in environmental history, the history of public health, the history of science, medicine and technology, and Modern Europe. His publications include A Science of Impurity: Water Analysis in Nineteenth-Century Britain (1990); Cholera: The Biography (2009); Public Health and Social Justice in the Age of Chadwick: Britain, 1800-1854 (2010); More Than Hot: A Short History of Fever (2014). Laura Otis What’s at Stake in Judging the Health and Pathology of Emotions?Laura Otis is a historian of science and Professor of English at Emory College of Arts and Sciences. Her research interests are on the ways that literature and science intersect, and she teaches on literature, neuroscience, cognitive science and medicine. Her publications include Organic Memory: History and the Body in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (1994); Membranes: Metaphors of Invasion in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Science, and Politics (2000); Literature and Science in the Nineteenth Century: An Anthology (2009); Networking: Communicating with Bodies and Machines in the Nineteenth Century (2011); Rethinking Thought: Inside the Minds of Creative Scientists and Artists (2015). *****Saturday 10 September, 11.30 – 1.00.Session A: The Making of Psychological Identities Mikko MyllykangasSuicide as a Sign of Modernity and its Criticism in Finnish Suicide Discourse in the 19th CenturyNot long after the birth of so-called “moral statistics” suicide became identified by the European suicide researchers as an unfortunate but natural by-product of modernisation and progress. Writers such as Enrico Morselli, who applied the Darwinian theory of evolution in his analysis, contended that the rising suicide rates were caused by the increasing struggle for existence. Many of the like-minded suicide researchers also saw the higher suicide rates in the Western countries as a proof of racial superiority of the people of European origin. Suicide had become a disease but also a sign and proof of modernity. However, this rather wide spread conception was not shared by all who studied the suicide phenomenon in the European countries. Towards the end of the century, suicide began increasingly to be seen as a symptom of degeneration, and not as a sign of increasing mental or cultural sophistication. The second line of criticism towards the concept of “suicide as a sign of modernity” was expressed by a Finnish suicide researcher, F. W. Westerlund. In his study of Finnish suicide, published in 1900, he pointed out that suicide was far from being unheard of among non-Western cultures. Furthermore, he sensed a hint of self-gratification among the researchers who claimed rather unfoundedly that suicide was simply caused by the advancements of modernity. In a sense “a heroic suicide” of antiquity had been replaced by “a civilized suicide” by the writers who aimed at accentuating the cultural differences between the modernised Western nations and other cultures. In this representation I will discuss the conflicting interpretations given by the 19th century suicide researcher as they were faced with the increasing numbers of suicides in the societies going through different stages of modernisation.Mikko Myllykangas is currently a university lecturer in History of Science and Ideas at the University of Oulu, Finland. In 2014, he defended his doctoral thesis on “the history of medical suicide research in Finland from the 1860s until the 1980s.” Since then he has published journal articles on the critical/antipsychiatry and suicide research in Finland in the 1960s and on the child suicide and the concept of psychopathy in Finland from the 1930s to the 1970s. His postdoctoral research focuses on the history of social psychiatry in Finland and also on the history of suicide prevention in Finland and other Nordic countries during the era of welfare states. Bernhard LeitnerThe Mirror Stage of Pathology: Trajectories of Psychiatric Concepts in the Making of Modern Japan This presentation introduces research on the transnational history of psychiatry in Japan and Europe. First I will demonstrate how German and Austrian psychiatric concepts were embedded into the emerging scientific discourse in Japan throughout the 19th and early 20th century. I am going to show that psychiatric discourse not only aided the young modern Japanese state in dealing with issues of modernity on a national scale, but how this scientific transfer contributed to the repositioning of Japan in the rank of the “civilised” world. Concepts of diseases played a key role in the formation of a national identity in the critical transition from a premodern feudal society to a modern nation state. Traditional concepts of prevalent phenomena like demonic possession had to be renegotiated within the framework of Western sciences. At the same time completely new diseases like neurasthenia linked to the process of modernisation itself began to spread rapidly, even becoming a trend among the emerging bourgeois populace. I argue that this psychiatric knowledge transfer assisted Japan to enter a mirror stage of identity construction vis-à-vis pathological conceptions that were common in Western civilisations. But with nothing less than the uniqueness of Japan at stake, original Japanese strands within the continuum of a Western historical narrative had to be emphasised as well. Focusing on marginalised fragments of European and Japanese medical texts, I reveal their constitutive character for the establishment of psychiatry in Japan. Through deploying techniques of historical narratives to invent a body of premodern “psychiatric” practices, comparative evaluation of disorders via the binary opposition of the self and the other, and effective terminological transformations, medical discourse succeeded in becoming a social agent in the process of nation building.Bernhard Leitner is a PhD candidate and uni:docs fellow at the Department of East Asian Studies at University of Vienna. He studied Japanese Studies and Philosophy at the University of Vienna and Tokyo Metropolitan University. He holds a BA and MA with honours in Japanese Studies from the University of Vienna. His fields of interest include history of medicine, science and technology studies as well as history and philosophy of science. His current research focuses on the transfer of neurological and psychiatric knowledge between Austria and Japan from the late 19th to the early 20th century.Katariina ParhiDangerous Age of Nervousness: Modernity, Crime, and Legal Responsibility Besides causing overload and stress, modernity seemed to cause dangerous problems. In 1885, Theodor Saelan, the physician-in-chief of the Lapinlahti state mental hospital, Finland’s foremost psychiatric establishment, published a detailed description of a 17-year old young man M, whom he diagnosed with moral insanity. In 1878, Count Nikolay Adlerberg , the Governor General of Finland, had received a letter in which an assassination plan was revealed. M, the writer of the letter, was sent to a mental state examination, and seven years later the results were published. The reason to publish the results of the examination was highly political. The physician-in-chief was convinced that political and social changes in “the age of nervousness” affected the mentally disturbed in particular. For Saelan, political murders and attempted assassinations were a special proof of this.Saelan linked M’s case to other worrying examples, such as the case of H?del, who shot at German Emperor William I, and Moncasi, who shot at Alfonso XII of Spain. Of special importance was the case of Guiteau, the assassinator (1881) of James Garfield, the President of the United States. The essential question raised in the Guiteau debate was the legal responsibility of the offender. The question of legal responsibility became central in assessing such dramatic consequences of the age of nervousness. This paper takes the dangerous phenomenon of modernity-induced crime and legal responsibility under special scrutiny. It analyses the medical arguments regarding insanity and legal responsibility before and after the Finnish Criminal Code (1889) was enacted and discusses the ways in which modernity was seen as the cause for crimes. The paper also comments on the ways in which these perspectives have affected the legal responsibility of those with a personality disorder in the twentieth century.Katariina Parhi is a doctoral student of history of science and ideas at the University of Oulu, Finland. Her thesis deals with the history of the diagnosis of psychopathy in Finland. Besides working on her PhD, she is writing a biography on the biologically oriented chief physician and professor of psychiatry Konrad von Bagh. Session B: Medical MarketingAlice TsayPills for Our Ills: Patent Medicine Marketing and the Formation of Global Modernity This paper examines alternative narratives of modernity made available through the global history of Dr. Williams' Pink Pills for Pale People, a patent medicine invented in 1866 and advertised in 80 countries around the world by the early twentieth century. In England and North America, Dr. Williams’ Pink Pills quickly took on a reputation as an archetypal example of quackery, with commentators identifying the pills’ continued ubiquity as a sign of the public’s refusal to recognize scientific and medical progress. Those who encountered the brand abroad were inclined to extrapolate the domestic critiques linking these patent medicines with ignorance and backwardness. After visiting Asia in 1910, for instance, travel writer Clarence Hamilton Poe excoriated the company for “coining the poor Chinaman’s substantial shekels” after finding its products “discredited at home by the growing intelligence of our people.” While the brand’s motives and ingredients were undoubtedly suspect, the foreign advertisements for Dr. Williams’ Pink Pills also offered a space in which modernity could be configured and disseminated in site-specific ways. Here, I focus on promotional spreads for the product that appeared in Shanghai’s English- and Chinese-language newspapers from approximately 1900 through 1940. Rather than simply translating their Anglo-American counterparts, these Shanghai advertisements come to articulate a distinctly Chinese vision of twentieth-century society in their depiction of new gender roles, absorption of traditional medical discourse, and use of baihua, the emerging vernacular. This forgotten afterlife of a derided patent pill thus offers a version of global modernity that works from the ground up, acknowledging hybrid cultural pathways and reframing the role of the West in the international developments of the period. Alice Tsay is a PhD candidate in English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. She holds an undergraduate degree in English from Harris Manchester College, University of Oxford and as well as a graduate certificate in Museum Studies from the University of Michigan. Her dissertation, “Matters of Taste: Digesting Difference in Victorian and Edwardian Culture” examines the rhetorical functions of food and ingestion within discourses of difference during the long nineteenth century. Lesley SteinitzSwallowing Modernity: Advertising a Nerve-Strengthening Food This paper addresses the popular presentation and understanding of neurasthenia and other health consequences of modernity by examining the advertising for “Sanatogen.” This food-tonic for strong nerves sat on the fuzzy border between food and medicine. Although this protein powder is still on the market today (albeit with a different formulation), this paper will focus on the verbal and visual presentation of the effects of this thoroughly modern product in the context of the diseases of modernity in the first and second decades of the twentieth century, primarily in Britain. Sanatogen was manufactured from the abundant skimmed milk waste from butter manufacture in mechanised dairies. Essentially, it represented nature’s bounty reduced by modern man’s skilful application of nineteenth-century German chemical know-how into a pure chemical compound which was simultaneously a food with no flavour, no odour and no substance. Unlike the patent medicines that its advertisements might have called to mind, it was a respectable medicinal product whose advocates included almost a dozen members of parliament (of all political persuasions), noted writers and performers, bishops and the physicians to most of Europe’s royalty. By using the testimonials of these elite and respected people, and words and images which represented salvation in both modern and classical contexts, the company presented nerve and brain weakness as an inevitable rite of passage for busy brain-workers; Sanatogen was the panacea. Despite the availability of near-identical alternative brands, Sanatogen’s acceptance was such that in 1915 the Board of Trade listed Sanatogen as one of nine patented German medicines (alongside heroin, aspirin and salvarsan) whose continued availability during the Great War was a matter of public interest. Sanatogen had become an essential in a busy world of nervous stress.Lesley Steinitz is working on a PhD entitled “Industrial health foods and culture during Britain’s Decadent Era (1880-1920)” at the University of Cambridge. During 2016 she will be a participant in the multidisciplinary “Pasts, Presents and Futures of Medical Regeneration” project at the University of Leeds. Her papers, ‘Making muscular machines with nitrogenous nutrition: Bovril, Plasmon and Cadbury’s Cocoa appeared in Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2013 (2014), and ‘The language of advertising: fashioning health food consumers at the fin-de-siècle’ will appear in an edited volume, Food, Drink and the Written Word in Britain, 1820-1954, in 2016. Prior to starting her research, Lesley worked in the technology industry, supplying high-end text and image archival software to major newspaper and magazine publishing groups. Her research allows her to delve in many areas that she is curious about – food and its relationship with health and gender, the history of science and medicine, the practices and effects of the publishing industry, innovation, digital humanities and material culture.Sophie Ratcliffe“Eugenio has got some splendid pills!” Daisy Miller and the ‘Virus of Suggestion’Near the end of Henry James’s 1878 novella, Daisy Miller praises the ‘splendid pills’ that her courier, Giovanni, keeps in his supply kit. The pills’ composition remain vague, but given Daisy’s misplaced confidence in their healing powers, it has been presumed that they treat malaria, and that they contain quinine (see Marsh, Auchard and Houghton). Scholarship on the question of illness in Daisy Miller has, to date, taken a broadly epidemiological or symbolic perspective. Houghton considers the ways in which malaria may indicate the characters’ ‘psycho-physical’ states, while Marsh examines how the idea of disease allows James to explore a variety of issues including class, sexuality, and national boundaries. This paper, in contrast, thinks about the story from the perspective of the patient and consumer. James was a regular pill-taker; like Daisy, his travels gave him a cosmopolitan experience of the medical market. Such actual encounters would have been augmented by the mass of pharmaceutical literature circulating in the nineteenth century, ranging from medical trade-cards to the advertisements surrounding his texts in their periodical form. My paper will examine some of these peripheral materials in relation to James’s writing. Daisy sees conventional artistic artefacts and items of medical culture as almost interchangeable. Both, she notes, are ‘splendid’. In the light of her blurring of the beginnings of big pharma and high culture, I will explore how James considers, and critiques, the ways in which art may be seen as therapy, as well as the way in which medicine might be seen as an art. The fault with both Daisy and Winterbourne, James suggests, is their desire for ‘splendid’, curative narratives. True art, James writes in his ‘Preface’ to the 1910 New York Edition, is as contingent and unstable as the body, forever ghosted by the ‘virus of suggestion’.Sophie Ratcliffe is an Associate Professor in Nineteenth-Century Literature at the University of Oxford and Fellow and Tutor in English at Lady Margaret Hall. Her first book, On Sympathy, considered questions of empathy and sympathy in nineteenth and twentieth-century writing, with a focus on Browning. She is now working on a project about the relationship between reading and medicine in nineteenth-century America, and a project about attention in nineteenth-century literature and culture. She has published articles on Beckett, Geoffrey Hill, cognitive philosophy and affect theory, and edited the letters of P. G. Wodehouse. An essay on Trollope and editing will be published in Victorian Studies in Autumn 2016, and she also has a chapter about Dickens and material culture in press. She holds workshops about literature and medicine for those working in the Health Service. Session C: Disseminating Scientific KnowledgeAndrew ManghamWilliam Gaskell, Sanitary Reform and the Diseases of Modern ManchesterIn 1840 William Wordsworth wrote to the Reverend William Gaskell, ‘I have read your Temperance Rhymes with much pleasure’, which is more than can be stated by modern readers. Gaskell’s Temperance Rhymes (1839) was written during the height of the Reverend’s activities in sanitary reform. After the 1832 outbreak of cholera in Manchester in 1832, James Kay, Samuel and William Rathbone Greg, and Benjamin Heywood established the Manchester Statistical Society, which, as Jenny Uglow has demonstrated, had close links with Cross Street Chapel, the star around which the Gaskells’ world orbited. The Gaskells would meet Edwin Chadwick and Thomas Southwood Smith through their connections with the Statistical Society. William Gaskell would go on to lecture at both the Manchester New College and the Manchester’s Mechanics’ Institute in Copper Street, and would campaign for the rights of the working classes to a free education.Temperance Rhymes has seen no modern reprints and is virtually forgotten by modern scholars and yet my paper argues that, in the work of William Gaskell, we see not only the preacher’s profound influence on the better-known writings of his wife (William’s ‘Manchester Song’ was included in Mary Barton, for instance), but also how his works illustrate the interdisciplinary ways in which the ‘problem’ of modern industrialisation was conceptualised. William’s poetry and lectures cover a range of scientific issues, ranging from addiction and infection, to entomology to physiology; it will be on the sciences of sanitation and disease that my talk will be focused. I will claim that situating social problem writing like Gaskell’s poetry within its historical context sheds new light on the complex intersections between literature and the sciences of modern life.Andrew Mangham is Associate Professor in English Literature at the University of Reading. He is author of Violent Women and?Sensation Fiction (2007) and Dickens’s Forensic Realism?(2016). He is editor of Wilkie Collins: Interdisciplinary Essays (2007), The Cambridge Companion to Sensation Fiction (2013), and co-editor of The Female Body in Medicine in Medicine and Literature (2011). He is currently working on a project entitled Victorian Literature and the Anatomy of Starvation, and will co-edit the two-volume Literature and the History of Medicine.?Jeffrey ZalarStrain: Catholic Reactions to Science in Germany, 1840–1914Research on Wissenschaftspopularisierung in 19th-century Germany demonstrates that Catholics were keenly interested in science. They studied science in schools at all levels, followed scientific achievements in their popular readers, discussed science among themselves in parish settings, and exchanged science books, microscopes, atlases, taxidermy, and other scientific paraphernalia as gifts at Christmas and Name Day celebrations. Despite the general enthusiasm, however, strain characterized Catholic mentalities whenever faith and scientific reason appeared to clash. For example, believers howled at physicians’ interpretation of “demonic possession” as psychological distress. Catholic journalists’ jokes about popular gullibility for hoaxes like the existence of tailed humans in Africa only thinly disguised fears about the status of Christian creation accounts. Parents argued with children at home over shifting standards of validity in rows so intense they became the stuff of local gossip. In a tragic aspect of parish life, many priests, overcome by the demands of keeping up with developments in science, and anxious that their social standing as local Studierten was thereby in jeopardy, succumbed to alcohol abuse. Hospital nuns groaned with disappointment when the demands of professionalization disqualified their attempts to evangelize patients. These and other examples indicate that the Catholic encounter with modern science was not just intellectual/theological but emotional/psychic. My paper explores this largely undocumented history, elaborating upon the personal and communal tensions provoked as metaphysical claims about the phenomenal world came under the inexorable pressure of materialist naturalism. Its value to the conference is not only in sparking comparisons with Victorian Britain but in suggesting an interpretive framework for comprehending the human impact of science in a still profoundly religious age.Jeffrey Zalar is an Assistant Professor of Modern German and European History and the inaugural holder of the Ruth J. & Robert A. Conway Endowed Chair in Catholic Studies at the University of Cincinnati, USA. His research addresses 19th century Catholic intellectual life and work on the present topic figures in a book project examining natural science in Catholic Germany, 1848-1914.Jens Lohfert J?rgensenBacteriological ModernismThis paper discusses how bacteriology, understood as a new interpretation of the relationship between the individual and the surrounding world, problematized existing notions about the human around 1900 and contributed to the formation of new notions. While the rise of bacteriology partook in the scientific development of medicine, it at the same time challenged the commonsensical experience that the causes of disease are directly perceptible via the senses. The parasensory nature of bacteria created a marked anxiety in the public, and medicine contributed to this ?microbomania’ through hygienic campaigns that depicted bacteria as more destructive than anything ever known. Bacteriology challenged the notion of somatic self-control, in the sense that the awareness of the omnipresence of invisible organisms, possessing the ability to penetrate and inhabit the body, caused a general perceptual distrust by blurring the differentiation between the body’s interiority and exteriority. However, this awareness also contributed to the cracking of the anthropocentric world view that had been dominant since the Enlightenment; a world view that positioned the human and its culture in the centre of the world and the non-human and nature in the periphery, on an ontologically distinct level. Bacteriology demonstrated that this is not the case; that we exist in symbiosis with a seething multitude of non-human organisms. In continuation of the work of, amongst others, Laura Otis and Martin Willis, I?discuss the interplay between microbomania and post-anthropocentrism in modernist novels by Joris-Karl Huysmans, Joseph Conrad and Thomas Mann. Drawing on new materialist theories, I focus on the corporeal-phenomenological experience of this interplay, produced by the novels in the shape of penetrability, infection, dissemination and immunity. And I discuss the artistic forms generated by the works in relation to these notions – from the ideal of aesthetic purity to the embracement of influence as a necessary condition.Jens Lohfert J?rgensen is a Lecturer at the Department of Culture and Global Studies at the University of Aalborg, Denmark. He has published articles on literature and medicine, the 19th century novel, and historiography in Nordic and international journals including Literature and Medicine and Critical Survey. Furthermore, he is the president of The Nordic Network for Studies in Narrativity and Medicine. His first book, Signs of Disease, on the Danish author Jens Peter Jacobsen and the history of tuberculosis, was published by University Press of Southern Denmark in 2014.Saturday 10 September, 2.00 – 3.30Session A: Illness and Politics (Seminar Room 7) Laurens SchlichtThe Revolutionary Shock: The French Revolution and the Medical Construction of the Modern Subject (France, 1800–1830s)In the aftermath of the French Revolution, several physicians published medical histories of some patients, who supposedly have gone mad, because they were “shocked” by the French Revolution. Johann Christian Reil claimed in his Rhapsodiien (1803), that Philippe Pinel's work in the field of mental illness had received a strong boost, because many people had gone mad during the Revolution. Also, the disciple of Pinel, Jean ?tienne Esquirol, acted on the assumption that the shock of the Revolution denaturalized the harmony of the “inner self.” After the French Revolution the idea of shocking patients intentionally became a common practice among several psychiatrists, philosophers or educators. This practice was directed towards a new entity called the “moi”, the self, that came to be a defining feature of the modern subject. In addition, this development also stimulated a new way to look at mentally ill persons, who were sometimes unable to deal with the rapid social and political transformations of their times, and it lead some physicians to research new experimental techniques. Thus, there is some connection between the perception of the vicissitudes of the Revolution, the idea of intentionally shocking mentally ill persons in order to cure them and the construction of a modern subject, that was theowner of a vulnerable, unstable and invisible area of the “self”. Based on the research on the French medical and psychiatric sciences within the time-span investigated I want to offer an epistemological reflection about the role of human research objects within concrete situations of observation. Thereby, as I intend to demonstrate, one can investigate the links between practices of research and the changes of political configurations. Different layers of the large epistemic configuration that already contemporaries called “modern” will hereby become visible.Laurens Schlicht started to study philosophy and musicology at Magdeburg, but then changed the subject and finished to study philosophy and history at Frankfurt. After a doctoral scholarship at Jena and longer research periods at Paris he defended his Ph.D. only this year at Frankfurt University. In his dissertation he analysed the activities of the short-lived 'Society of the Observers of Man' - which existed around 1800 -? from the perspective of historical epistemology. He was particularly interested in how one could understand the attempts to institutionalize working epistemologies of empirical observation of the human mind in the framework of the development of the republican social sciences and the sciences of man. At the moment he is part of the research project 'Mind Reading as a Cultural Technique' at Humboldt-University Berlin, which will analyse different criminological attempts to construct research techniques that aimed at producing knowledge about the feelings, thoughts and intentions of human beings from 1880-1933. Alex Chase-LevensonSanitation and Civilization: The Eastern Question and the PlagueIn this paper, I investigate nineteenth-century British evaluations of the Ottoman Empire in terms of their relationship to the plague. The lingering presence of plague in the Middle East—and that region’s status as the preeminent zone outside Western Europe’s cordon sanitaire—meant that the disease and the apparent efforts (or lack of efforts) by the Ottoman Government to deal with it preoccupied travelers, merchants, political agents, and others who considered the prospects of the Ottoman state. To many, to be stuck with the plague was a sign that the Sublime Porte was stuck in the past. The traveler Alexander Kinglake found its presence “well befitting” the “dreary monuments of past power and splendour” that dominated the cityscape of Istanbul. Its gradual decline, suggested others, was, perhaps, a sign that the government in general was improving. “Hygeia,” considered the Levant Company merchant Thomas Thornton, “is the handmaiden of liberty.” Certainly, the Ottoman government considered its promulgation of a quarantine edict in 1839 as part of an attempt at administrative reform designed to show the world it could function as a modern state. As the Eastern Question increasingly came to preoccupy British politicians and strategists, I argue, the confluence between sanitary and political evaluations of the Ottomans became stronger. Plague, and the response to it, was a civilizational metric that seemed broadly indicative.Alex Chase-Levenson is an assistant professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania. His current book project investigates Britain’s engagement with the Mediterranean quarantine system in the early and mid-nineteenth centuries. He completed his PhD at Princeton University in May 2015. Daphne RozenblattPolitical Origins of the Modern PsychopathPsychopath is the term de jour for the cold-hearted and criminally violent. Originating in the nineteenth century with the rise of disciplinary psychiatry, psychopath is usually understood as an apolitical description. However, the apolitical is always political. Although histories of psychopathy trace its origins back to early nineteenth century descriptions of moral insanity or mania without delirium, the personality type of the psychopath was galvanized in the late nineteenth century when political violence had increased dramatically and threatened the fragile political orders of modern European nations. The trials of political criminals whose acts of terrorism and assassinations plagued Europe increased their notoriety and medicalized their actions. Psychiatric expert witnesses assessed the defendant’s soundness of mind and criminal motive for the court and the public.While in some instances, the politics of psychiatry is transparent—such as in the case of ‘political insanity,’ ‘anarchist insanity,’ ‘democratic insanity,’ but also ‘drapetomania’ and war-induced trauma—in other cases, the politics shaping diagnoses are masked in the language of disorder and emotion. As diagnoses such as political insanity lost credibility, new terms utilized the same descriptions. This paper argues that in the case of the psychopath, descriptions such as ‘antisocial,’ ‘aggressive,’ and ‘apathetic’ do not simply pertain to a diagnosis popularized in the twentieth century; they evolved from the confrontation between psychiatry and the political novelties of the nineteenth century. This new term was more limber in its application, masking the diagnostic description’s original political impetus.This paper examines how political etiologies from nineteenth-century Europe came to shape the modern notion of the psychopath. It examines the scientific and journalistic writings of psychiatrists, expert psychiatric testimony, and public debates in which the descriptive terms of the psychopath developed in relation to political insanity in the nineteenth century and how these terms were depoliticized in its wake. Daphne Rozenblatt completed her Ph.D. in history at the University of California, Los Angeles in 2014. Her dissertation explored the social and cultural history of psychiatry in modern Italy through the career of Enrico Morselli. She is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the Center for the History of Emotions at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, where she researches the role of scientific expertise and emotional motives in trials of political crime. Currently, she currently focuses on the trials of politically motivated assassins in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe and examines how the emotions of the defendant were engaged by legal and scientific professionals, the relationship of political crime to portraiture of emotional deviance, and the media coverage, sensationalism, and legislation that such trials provoked.Session B: Maintaining Health Abroad (Seminar Room 8) Jennifer Kain ‘Few can benefit more than the over-taxed and over-worried brain worker’: 19th-Century Voyages for HealthBy the late nineteenth century shipping companies such as the Peninsular & Oriental Steam Navigation Company and the Orient Line promoted their eastward routes as so-called voyages for health. This paper will display how these commercial claims were, in reality, beset with paradoxes. Not only did the shipping companies face the consequences of their passengers being disallowed from disembarking at colonial ports, if deemed too physically or mentally unfit, they needed to judge, as one shipping guide put it, ‘when a patient’s illness is too far advanced for him to benefit by a voyage’. This fine line was particularly problematic in relation to modern diseases believed to be caused by overwork. In 1890 an experienced medical officer for the Orient Line reflected on the ‘ailments specially influenced by the voyage.’ He warned that although the ‘over-taxed and over-worried brain worker’ would benefit greatly, if the passenger was prone to melancholia, they were more likely to throw themselves into the sea. This paper examines these types of challenges faced by the commercial shipping operators by drawing on the medical theories reflected in passenger shipping manuals. It seeks to show how the promotion of travel for health purposes had to evolve in response to both medical ideas and international border control provisions. As such, it provides a practical viewpoint of how the mobility of stressed professionals in the nineteenth century was both promoted and curtailed.Jennifer Kain has recently been awarded a PhD from Northumbria University for her thesis entitled ‘Preventing ‘Unsound Minds’ from Populating the British World: Australasian Immigration Control and Mental Illness, 1830s-1920s’. In 2016, she will be teaching on the History BA courses at the Universities of Northumbria and Newcastle. Her research interests include medical, migration and colonial history over the long nineteenth century.Daniel SimpsonPoison Arrows and Unsound Minds: Medical Encounters in the Victorian South PacificRecent research has highlighted a Victorian fascination with the relationship between disordered minds and diseased bodies; according to some strands of enlightenment reasoning, rational thought was directly constitutive of physical wellbeing. In this paper, I explore how psychopathological theory became fundamental to an unusual medical specialism which emerged onboard British naval vessels in the South Pacific, in the late nineteenth-century. The death of the naval captain JamesGraham Goodenough under a hail of poisonous arrows on the Santa Cruz Islands, in 1875, stimulated a race among naval surgeons to collect, analyse and vaccinate against the exotic poisons of the South Sea Islanders. ‘Modern voyagers’, wrote one authority, lacked knowledge of the native toxins which had been so familiar ‘to the old Spanish navigators who visited these islands 300 years ago’. Until such medical knowledge progressed, the argument went, the Pacific itself could not be modernised. Contemporary medical treatises on poisonous arrows in fact displayed numerous peculiarities of Victorian formulations of the ‘modern’. I discuss in particular a report written by Goodenough’s surgeon, Adam Brunton Messer, who blamed an endemic neurosis among sailors in the South Pacific for the increasing prevalence of tetanus in the wounds of those struck by ostensibly poisonous arrows. Goodenough had died of ‘traumatic tetanus’, but many were believed to be victims instead of the disease’s ‘nervous and hysterical’ form, precipitated by a popular fear of ultimately imagined poisons; the suffering of many naval servicemen, argued Messer, was in fact symptomatic of the mental stress associated with working in the Pacific during a period of increasingly violent encounter. In its manner of prescribing new scientific understanding as a means to cure hysteria in ‘uneducated’ naval and indigenous communities, I conclude, Messer’s report reshapes our understanding of the modern history of poison, idiopathic tetanus and psychopathological disease. Daniel Simpson has recently begun the second year of his PhD research. His thesis is titled ‘The Royal Navy and Colonial Collecting in Australia, c.1800-1855’, and is an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award project operating between The British Museum and Royal Holloway, University of London. Prior to this, he was awarded an MPhil in the History, Philosophy and Sociology of Science, Technology and Medicine from the University of Cambridge, and a BA in History from the University of ExeterSession C: Masculinity, Modernity, and Mental Health (Seminar Room 9) Amy Milne-Smith“I have Overworked my Brain”: Men’s Relationship to Work in Modern BritainReginald B. seemed destined for success. After a brilliant university career, taking two firsts at Cambridge, he went into government work before being personally offered a post in South Africa at the beginning of the Boer War. But there was trouble beneath the surface; imperial life put a strain on the young man and a combination of malaria, stress, and privation destroyed his physical and mental health. By the time he reached a private asylum in England he was delusional, haunted by images of a scarlet woman, black devils, and corpses piling up on his bed. Reginald’s story was hardly exceptional. This married father of two was clever, ambitious, and well connected; exactly the sort of man Britain needed to succeed at home and abroad. And yet such men could be found scattered across the hydros, nursing homes and asylums of Victorian Britain, broken by their ambition and success. The mental collapse of prominent and gifted British men at the height of their careers troubled a society obsessed with fears of degeneration and national decline. Doctors were well aware of the pressures of modern life and recommended moderation and rest; yet such a lifestyle stood in stark opposition to the masculine ideals of the time. Men were seemingly trapped between the desire to protect their manhood and the need to protect their minds.In this paper I will explore how individual men experienced and interpreted the stresses and breakdowns of modern life. Using memoirs, personal papers, and asylum records this paper will take a look inside men’s struggles. I will tease out how men balanced the desire for success against the fear of breaking down. Amy Milne-Smith is Associate Professor of History at Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada. She is the author of London Clubland: A Cultural History of Gender and Class in Late-Victorian Britain (2011) and several articles on the history of elite masculinity. Her current research focuses on representations of men’s mental illness and her article “Shattered Minds: Madmen on the Railways, 1860-1880,” was published in the Journal of Victorian Culture in January 2016.Philippa LewisAn Outdated Emotion? Feeling Shy in fin-de-siècle FranceCurrent psychological research suggests that shyness is on the rise in western societies. This trend is frequently linked to the technological advances and societal reconfigurations of the modern age (see work by e.g. Ray Crozier, Lynne Henderson, and Philip Zimbardo). This paper will probe this narrative in the context of fin-de-siècle France. Shyness was gaining prominence in the medical imagination in this period, but to what extent was it considered a specifically modern experience? Focusing on the psychiatrist Paul Hartenberg’s Les Timides et la timidité (1901), but referring to a range of medical, moral, and literary texts, the paper will argue that, at the turn of the twentieth century, shyness occupied a critical position between past and present, tradition and modernity. As Hartenberg outlined in his monograph, timidity had been discussed as a moral fault in the fields of French philosophy and theology since at least the seventeenth century. But, in his work of affirmatively ‘positive and modern psychology’ (p. v) - far removed from the ‘metaphysical clouds’ (p. v) of the past - medicine appropriated shyness as a disease. And by medicalising shyness, Hartenberg simultaneously updated and outdated it. Instead of suggesting that modern life caused shyness, he framed shyness as a condition which was increasingly incompatible with modernity: the shy individual lacked the ambition and willpower necessary to thrive in France’s new, cut-throat environment, and thus required medical treatment. However, as the paper will conclude, it was the shy male who was most frequently pathologised. Timidity was normalised for women: part of their essential ‘femininity’. Yet it could become problematic, Hartenberg admitted, for the independent and – we might add – modern woman: ‘Several women leading, it is true, an independent existence, have told me that their timidity has, on many occasions, made them cry with rage’ (p. 130). Philippa Lewis is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Bristol where she is researching the cultural and literary history of shyness in modern France. She holds a PhD in nineteenth-century French literature from the University of Cambridge. She has previously held a teaching post at St. John’s College, Cambridge, and has published articles on Baudelaire, Flaubert, and nineteenth-century French art criticism. Matthew KlugmanFootball Fever – A Disease of Modern Life?In 1906 James Crichton Browne drew attention to the ‘unprecedented, phenomenal, and somewhat disquieting’ popularity that football held in England. ‘Has any mere game’, he asked ‘ever before infected huge masses of people with a feverish enthusiasm which makes them give up their whole leisure to its study and contemplation?’ The ‘inordinate addiction to football watching becomes a kind of psychical intoxication’ he warned, with the result that ‘football may become almost a monomania.’ Crichton Browne was not alone in these concerns. Indeed, references to ‘football fever’, ‘football mania’ and ‘football madness’ in newspapers and periodicals had become a regular occurrence in the latter decades of the nineteenth century as concern grew over the emerging spectator culture that was developing around Association football. Yet although these pathological descriptions and metaphors have been noted in passing, they are yet to be studied in any detail.This paper will explore how a game that was supposed to be one of the healthy forms of modern ‘rational recreation’ for boys and men became a site of fears regarding excessive enthusiasm, the misplaced valuing of certain games above all else, and national physical degeneration. At issue are generally lay diagnoses of fever and mania that raise questions as to the popular use of pathological metaphors in the late nineteenth century for new embodied cultures of pleasure and suffering, and provide insights into the complex interrelationship of the normal and the pathological in popular, religious and medical thought. An underlying interest here concerns the way cultural institutions that have been seen as emblematic of modernity could also foster experiences and sentiments that seemed to some people to be dangerously antithetical to the project of modernity.Matthew Klugman is a cultural historian with research interests in both medicine and sport. He currently holds an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellowship at Victoria University where he is the Deputy Leader of the Sport in Society Research Program at the Institute of Sport, Exercise and Active Living. His most recent book – Black and Proud: The Story of an Iconic AFL Photo (NewSouth), co-authored with Dr Gary Osmond – received a 2015 New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award. Saturday 10 September, 4.00 – 5.30Session A: Sick Landscapes (Seminar Room 7) Manon MathiasExcrement and Infectious Disease in the Late 19th-Century French NovelThis paper will analyse attitudes towards human excrement in late nineteenth-century French novels as a means of understanding perceptions of disease and hygiene in the early period of bacteriology. Although the establishment of public hygiene has been read as an essential element in the emergence of the modern Western subject, few studies focus on the substance which pervaded discussions of hygiene throughout the century: bodily waste. France was at the forefront of the new medical specialism of public health, and waste management was debated exhaustively by French politicians, scientists and hygienists. The deliberations developed a new urgency in 1880 with ‘les odeurs de Paris’ (or Great Stink), at the same moment as pathogenic microbes were being discovered by Pasteur and his colleagues. Whereas the political response to such developments is well examined, the role of the novel in understanding our relationship with excrement and its role in spreading disease has remained unexplored. In this paper, two literary visions of infection-free worlds will be investigated: Jules Verne’s model city in Cinq cents millions de la Bégum (1880), inspired by Benjamin Richardson’s Hygeia (1876), and Camille Flammarion’s utopian astrological cities in Uranie (1889). It will be argued that, whilst these writings reflect contemporary anxieties towards germs and disease, their portrayals of anodyne, eerie existences also suggest the unsettling implications of eradicating bodily dirt and infirmity. Through a comparison with William Morris’s ecological utopia, News from Nowhere (1890), I will posit that Verne and Flammarion’s rational, sterile, faeces-free cities offer both a zealous response to the hygienist movement and a covert warning against the potential consequences of the increasing obsession with hygiene. Manon Mathias is Lecturer in French at the University of Aberdeen. She was awarded a doctorate from the University of Oxford in 2011 and the thesis won the George Sand Association Memorial Prize in 2013. She has published several book chapters and journal articles on Sand, and her monograph, Vision in the Novels of George Sand, was published by Oxford University Press in December 2015. She has recently turned to the relations between the novel and science, and her journal article on Sand and Flaubert’s readings of Georges Cuvier’s geohistory will be published in French Studies in 2016. She is now embarking on a new project examining literary representations of bodily waste, and is completing an article on the agricultural recycling of excrement in Flaubert, Sand, Hugo and Zola. For this conference, she will look at attitudes towards faecal matter in the late nineteenth-century novel as a means of understanding the increasing preoccupation with hygiene in the early days of bacteriology. Keir WaddingtonDrought, Disease, and Modernity in Rural Wales, c.1880–1914From 1884 onwards, Britain experienced a series of major droughts, which reached their peak in the ‘Long Drought’ of 1890 to 1909. Despite being imagined as a wet part of the world, rural Wales was in particular hard hit by these droughts as many communities did not have access to reliable water supplies or the technology of piped supplies felt to characterise the modern urban environment. As newspapers talked about water famines in rural Wales, alarm focused on questions of purity and disease as drought was presented as a serious health risk, particularly from cholera and typhoid. Such fears about drought and disease were mainly articulated in the context of where rural communities were getting their water from as local supplies dried up. As the Western Mail worried, because of drought ‘there will naturally be a great temptation to farmers and cottages to resort to disused wells, or, for certain domestic purposes, to what is left of even usually stagnant pools’. This paper explores these fears and how through them the rural was presented as backward. It examines how ideas and languages of modernity were used to frame rural communities as lacking in sanitary knowledge, and how their behaviour during times of drought was believed to make them likely to succumb to epidemic disease. In exploring these ideas and how rural droughts were framed, the paper addresses how urban commentators viewed the habits of those living in rural communities as anti-modern and how rural communities could be presented as a risk to those living in urban communities.Keir Waddington is Professor of History at Cardiff University and co-director of the Collaborative Interdisciplinary Study of Science, Medicine and Imagination. After completing his PhD at UCL, his key books have explored the history of Bethlem, medical education at St Bartholomew’s, diseased meat and public health, and a survey of the social history of medicine in Europe since 1500. After some research on sausages, his current work focuses on rural public health in Victorian and Edwardian Wales, and on the Gothic and medicine.Session B: Health, Disease, and Technology (Seminar Room 8) David TrotterA Media Theory Approach to Representations of ‘Nervous Illness’ in the Long Nineteenth CenturyDaniel Paul Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, canonised as a result of the attention paid to it by Freud, Lacan, Deleuze and Guattari, and many others, became the twentieth century’s idea of nineteenth-century psychosis. By 1990, however, a significant shift of emphasis had occurred. The Memoirs, once the exclusive preserve of historians of psychiatry, began to attract the interest of media theorists, prominent among them the highly influential Friedrich Kittler. This paper will ask what light developments in media theory since Kittler might throw on the representation of delusional disorder in memoirs and literary texts published towards the end of the long nineteenth century. Too much mediation often feels like a kind of madness. Might madness have been understood to consist of too much mediation? David Trotter is King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at the University of Cambridge. His research interests are literature and cinema in Britain between the world wars and naturalism in literature and cinema. Relevant books include Paranoid Modernism: Literary Experiment, Psychosis, and the Professionalization of English Society (2001); Cinema and Modernism (2007); The Uses of Phobia: Essays on Literature and Film (2010); Literature in the First Media Age: Britain Between the Wars (2013). Projit MukharjiMetaphoric Modernity: Railways, Telegraphs and the New Ayurvedic Body in Victorian Bengal‘Western’ (later ‘bio-’) medicine was not the only medical tradition that had to contend with Victorian modernity. In many parts of the British World so-called ‘traditional’ medicines were also forced to confront modernity in all its diversity. Throughout most of Africa and Asia this confrontation led to the emergence of what Laurent Pordie calls ‘neotraditional’ forms of medicine. One of the most prominent neotraditional forms of medicine to have emerged through this tryst with Victorian modernity was modern Ayurveda. Today modern Ayurveda is a prominent global medical tradition. But the current form it has taken has its roots in the radical transformation it underwent in the 19th century.Whilst the institutional aspects of Ayurveda’s modernization have been well-studied, its therapeutic and theoretical transformations have largely been neglected. On attending to the therapeutic transformations we are immediately struck by the profound impact of modern material culture in general and the railways and telegraphy in particular upon new Ayurvedic thinking in the 19th century. Ayurvedic physicians repeatedly used the steam engine and electric telegraphy as the metaphors through which they sought to reimagine Ayurvedic theories about the body. Railways and telegraphs, for these physicians, were not simply new material realities but also a rich ideational resource that encouraged and inspired them to think in new ways. Metaphors, as Laura Otis points out, are not after all about producing ‘objective knowledge’ but about ‘creating productive thought’.Modern Ayurveda is, I will argue, an Ayurveda populated by new metaphors of the body: metaphors instigated by and engendered in the steam engine and electric telegraphy. To make this argument I will draw widely on Bengali Ayurvedic books and journals from the second half of the 19th century. Prohit Mukharji is Martin Meyerson Assistant Professor in Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He has a PhD from the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, an MPhil and MA from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and a BA from Presidency College Calcutta. His research interests are postcolonial technoscience, colonial medicine, indigenous medical traditions, subaltern science, everyday technologies and race science. His monograph, Nationalizing the Body: The Medical Market, Print and Daktari Medicine was published in 2012 and Doctoring Traditions: Ayurveda, Small Technologies, and Braided Sciences is forthcoming with the University of Chicago Press.Galina KichiginaElectrical Therapy for the Heart: German Scientific Medicine and British Physiology. The Cases of Hugo von Ziemssen and John MacWilliamIn the 1880s, the German clinician Hugo von Ziemssen (1829–1902) and the British physiologist John MacWilliam (1857 – 1937) independently from each other demonstrated a unique possibility to control irregular heart rate by electricity in the clinical and experimental settings. The paper examines the emergence of cardiac electrotherapy in Germany and the parallel developments in British electrophysiology in the intellectual, technological and cultural contexts. The paper argues that Ziemssen’s 'scientific' electrotherapy had intellectual roots in the German naturwissenschaftliche Medizin of Rudolf Virchow and Robert Remak. At the same time, German physiology of Carl Ludwig and Hugo Kronecker exerted the most decisive influence upon MacWilliam and the emerging cardiac electrophysiology in Britain. Application of electrical methods to treat arrhythmias established a radically new sub-field of electrotherapy, since electricity had been used almost exclusively to treat nervous and muscular diseases. The paper emphasizes the significance of the translation of basic concepts and methods of nerve-muscle physiology to cardiac electrotherapy for defining a new type of heart diseases, arrhythmias, before the invention of electrocardiography. Although there was little belief in the possibility of treating heart diseases by electricity, electrotherapy was associated with science, specialized knowledge and invention of the new instruments that had powerful attraction for the public and came to be seen as an emblem of medical modernity. The ideas and techniques of Ziemssen and MacWilliam would be appreciated and fully developed in the mid-twentieth century with the introduction of electrical cardioversion as a therapeutic modality. Galina Kichigina is a historian of medicine and a medical scientist. She has a PhD in History of Medicine, an MSc in Cardiovascular Science from the University of Toronto, and an MD from Russia. She is currently a Research Associate at the University Hospital Research Institute in Toronto. Prior to joining cardiovascular and basic science research laboratory, she taught history of medicine and science at the University of Toronto. Her research interests in medical history are varied. Of particular interest are the laboratory revolution in nineteenth-century European and Russian medicine, international medical relations and transfer of knowledge in cultural and political contexts. Her book The Imperial Laboratory: Experimental Physiology and Clinical Medicine in Post-Crimean Russia has connected the themes of discipline formation, institutional history and interdisciplinary research in physiology and medicine in international perspective. She is currently working on two book projects, the first one entitled, Establishing the Trends: Nineteenth-century Cardiovascular Studies: the Role of the Paris Academy of Science and its Montyon Prize in Medicine. The second one is – The Avant-garde Physiology: Cardiac Electrophysiology in the Early 20th Century: Leiden, Cambridge, and Moscow. Session C: Fatigue (Seminar Room 9) Laura MainwaringDeficiency of the Vital Forces: The Rhetoric of Overwork in the 19th-Century Medical Marketplace Nervous disorders and degeneration as a result of overwork and industrialised urban living were embedded in nineteenth century medical discourses. Countless tonics, food, patent medicines, medicinal concoctions and beverages were advertised to the populace under the guise of preventive remedies for these illnesses associated with the pressures of nineteenth century living. The increased medicalisation of illness has been widely discussed by scholars with particular regards to patent and quack advertising, but there has been limited academic study addressing the significance of the regulation in the pharmaceutical industry and how this influenced healthism rhetoric in the advertising and branding of medicinal items.My paper illustrates the use of an over-worked and degenerative society narrative as a marketing tool in the nineteenth century and explores medical perspectives found in the periodical and trade press surrounding the wider rhetoric of strength, gender and empire. It explores how pharmaceutical firms, through the mechanism of advertising and branding, acted as a health authority within nineteenth century consumer culture. I will show how this influenced a gendered rhetoric of health and played a role in constructing a popular understanding of disease prevention. This paper will also explore the role of food and drink as preventive agents and how they were sold to consumers as part of the rhetoric of empire and mental overstrain to legitimise their place amongst the health advertisements of the day. This paper aims to investigate the influence of regulation on marketing in shaping perceptions of health in a visual and textual consumer culture. Given today’s discussions surrounding the ‘burnt out generation,’ a more nuanced understanding of how the ‘dangers’ of modern living was taken up as a dominant sales technique will further understanding of the economic context of the drugs trade and its impact on medical care.Laura Mainwaring is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Medical Humanities at the University of Leicester. Her studentship is funded by the AHRC as part of a collaborative doctoral award that supports three students involved in researching the development of marketing and drug consumption from 1815 to the present day.?Laura graduated from Imperial College, London in 2011 with an MSc in the History of Science, Technology and Medicine. Susan Matt and Luke FernandezFocus and Fatigue: Cerebral Hyperaemia and the Perils of Specialized Knowledge in 19th-Century AmericaIn late nineteenth century America, many believed the universe of knowledge had dramatically expanded. Enhanced communications, linked markets, and faster transportation made the world more complex. Consequently, individuals needed to develop new intellectual capacities. Some suggested the answer was to focus one’s mental energies. In an essay in The Popular Science Monthly, French physiologist Charles Richet discussed the “mental strain” the interconnected world imposed on individuals, noting, “A well-informed man to-day must know some three times as much as he would have had to know two hundred years ago.” The way to navigate the torrent of information was to narrow one’s focus, for “there is a limit to our mental capacity. . . . Instead of being encyclopedists, we shall have to be specialists . . . .”Yet focus brought its own problems. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, physicians, educators, and psychologists in England and America documented the physical ravages caused by what they variously termed “mental strain,” “cerebral hyperaemia,” or “mental fatigue.” Individuals who focused their minds too intensively faced dire consequences, including sterility and death. However, the risk was not evenly distributed across the population. Women’s smaller brains left them in greater danger than men. In turn, male mental workers faced greater peril than specialized manual laborers. This presentation explores the rise and fall of “mental fatigue” in the trans-Atlantic world, with a particular focus on the U.S. It examines why the condition emerged, how it reflected larger anxieties about modernity, and how its effects varied across the population. It also probes why the condition eventually disappeared, and the strategies succeeding generations developed to cope with the superabundance of knowledge. This presentation grows out of our forthcoming book on Americans’ emotional engagement with technology, from the telegraph to Twitter.Susan Matt is Presidential Distinguished Professor and Chair of the History Department at Weber State University. She received her B.A. with honours from University of Chicago and her M.A. and Ph.D. in history, from Cornell University. She is author of Homesickness: An American History (Oxford University Press, 2011) and Keeping Up with the Joneses: Envy in American Consumer Society, 1890-1930 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003). She co-edited Doing Emotions History (University of Illinois Press, 2013). She is co-authoring a book with Luke Fernandez on American’s emotional experience of technology from the telegraph to Twitter.Luke Fernandez is a political philosopher and software developer whose work focuses on the politics of technology. He received his B.A. magna cum laude from Amherst College and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Cornell University in political theory. He is Visiting Professor in the School of Computing at Weber State University. His writing has appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education, the Digital Humanities Quarterly, and Educause, among other publications. His research was recognized by the National Endowment for the Humanities with a Digital Humanities fellowship in 2011.Steffan Blayney‘Drooping with the century’: Fatigue and the fin-de-siècle Fatigue, the literary critic George Steiner has suggested, was as much an element of late nineteenth-century British culture as were the ideals of positivism and progress. ‘For every text of Benthamite confidence, of proud meliorism,’ he writes, ‘we can find a counter-statement of nervous fatigue.’ This paper examines the idea of fatigue in Britain at the end of the nineteenth century, as scientific object and as cultural metaphor, and its dialectical relationship to notions of progress and modernity. Barely mentioned in scientific or medical textbooks before the late 1860s, the closing decades of the nineteenth century saw a proliferation of attempts to define, describe, measure and control physical and mental fatigue. Fatigue appeared as the bodily manifestation of the second law of thermodynamics, expressing the inevitable dissipation of energy that accompanied the performance of work.The question of the limits to the body’s powers was widely discussed by commentators as a key problem of the modern age. In the 1890s, as one physician put it, there was a general impression that the British population were ‘drooping with the century.’ New medical labels proliferated to designate the exhausting effects of modern life, and physiologists and psychologists conducted research into how the productive energies of the body could best be conserved and put to use.Paradoxically, an epidemic of fatigue appeared both as the main obstacle to the progressive development of industrial civilisation, and at the same time as its unavoidable result. Fatigue took its uneasy place alongside such other familiar and equivocal fin-de-siècle signifiers as decline, decadence, and degeneration. The problem that preoccupied medical and scientific writers was the following one: how could social progress be reconciled with individual efficiency? Did bodily fatigue represent the limit of modernity, or an obstacle which it was possible to overcome?Steffan Blayney is a Wellcome Trust-sponsored PhD candidate in History at Birkbeck, University of London, supervised by Professor Joanna Bourke. His project looks at fatigue, the science of work, and the productive body in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century Britain. Sunday 11 September, 9.30 – 11.00Session A: Children’s Health and Disease Mallory CohnModern Complaints: Victorian Precocity and the Regulation of the Child While scholars of cognitive disability have generally focused on intellectual impairment and developmental “delay,” Victorian thinkers and authors conceived of premature intellectual acuity in children as itself disabling—a dangerous speed and unlovable acuity; a sign of the modern over-cultivation of “hot-house” children from their natural development; a pathology that caused early deaths from “water on the brain.” While the danger posed to and by modern prodigies was neutralized in the twentieth century, I use their example to theorize a cross-temporal genre of childhood, defined by a “misfitting” with societally received and treasured investments in the idea of childhood, that generates a relation between adults and children defined by overt affects of worry and concern about cultural change that mask covert irritations or desires to punish, regulate, and correct. By understanding various “modern” ailments—including nineteenth-century precocity, but also contemporary autism (and its spurious link to chemical intervention, through vaccination, with “natural” child embodiment), “teen brain,” and the “zombie effect” of touchscreens on toddlers—as part of a linked discourse that designates its locus of anxiety in the figure of the child, the historical pathologizations of our forebears can help to recontextualize the policed cognition of young people today. In juxtaposing Victorian censure of the independent, competent, hyperacute child with contemporary jeremiads against “hothouse children” and the forcing regimes enacted on those who demonstrate neurodiversity, my goal is to expand the genre of exceptional childhood, both archivally and qualitatively: that is, to make its expectations and endings more generous, malleable, and liveable for the new inheritors of nineteenth-century childhood and its attendant roles and rules. Mallory Cohn is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at Indiana University and a former managing editor of the journal?Victorian Studies. Her dissertation, "Precocious: A Cultural History," examines Victorian precocity and prodigiousness as both an aesthetic fascination and a threatening pathology across religious, medical, pedagogic, and eugenic disciplines.?Steven TaylorImperfect Bodies: The Waifs and Strays Society, Childhood Disability, and ImprovementThe institutionalisation of the poor, sick, crippled, criminal, elderly, and infirm was a feature of life in nineteenth-century England and has received detailed attention from scholars. What we understand less is the private relief mechanisms that emerged at the margins of state welfare towards the latter decades of the century. This paper explores how children suffering from some form of physical impairment or deformity were administered and treated by the Church of England sponsored Waifs and Strays Society from 1881. In particular, it focuses on the nascent discourse of eugenics and how it intertwined with ideas of childhood to provide a unique response to childhood poverty and disability. The casefiles of individuals, now held by the Children’s Society, will be examined to tease out the narratives of admission, the impairments that poor children lived with, the attitudes of philanthropists towards the ‘imperfect’ or ‘defective’ child, and the relief options that the Society provided. From this analysis rich and textured case-studies will be drawn out to demonstrate that concepts of ability, rather than disability, were central to the Societies methods of attempting to improve the lives of these children. Steven Taylor is a Research Assistant at the University of Huddersfield and an Honorary Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Medical Humanities at the University of Leicester. He completed his PhD ‘Dealing with Insane Children: A Comparative Study of Child Insanity in England, 1845-1907’at the University of Leicester in 2015. His research interests span the period from the eighteenth to twentieth century and cover topics as varied as mental illness and childhood through to regional development and conceptual notions of perfection/imperfection. In particular his work has focused on reactions to childhood poverty and sickness. He is currently working on two projects that are at differing stages of development. The first, ‘“Perfect” and “Imperfect” Bodies: a History of Childhood Health and Improvement’, explores the changing perception of children in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries and how parents, philanthropists, teachers, and doctors sought to improve children deemed to be physically or mentally ‘imperfect’. The conceptual premise for this work has recently been acknowledged by the award of a substantial Research Bursary from the Wellcome Trust. The second project is a reconstruction of individual narratives from children sent as migrants to Canada in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries tentatively entitled ‘Fractured Childhoods’. The project has received a Scouloudi Historical Award and a small grant from the Foundation for Canadian Studies in the UK. These prizes have been used to conduct archival research at various British archives, the Archives of Ontario, and the University of Toronto. His monograph, Beyond the Asylum: Child Insanity in England, 1845-1907, is forthcoming with Palgrave Macmillan. Jutta AhlbeckThe Nervous Child and the Disease of Modernity Modernity did not only represent ‘progress and ‘development’, it also denoted ‘restlessness’ and ‘angst’. Victorian medical experts saw how European cities were filled with pale, nervous and troubled individuals, who were consumed by mentally draining work. Hence, mental and physical disorders became increasingly associated with problems of modernity. Particularly neurasthenia, nervous exhaustion, embodied the disease of modern life: “the disease of today in this age of steam and electricity”, as the Finnish physician Konrad Relander wrote in 1890. Even rural Finland was affected by this treacherous disease as it spread like a plague from the European and American urban middle classes to the agrarian workers of the North, from educated men to common housewives. Perhaps the scariest feature of neurasthenia was that anyone could fall ill, even infants. In fact, children were especially vulnerable to the disease as they were still growing, and their minds were fragile and impressionable. The paper examines how ‘the nervous child’ became a recurrent figure in Finnish medical writings at the turn of the century, and argues that this child figure was constructed as the ultimate proof of modern mental decay. According to doctors, Finnish children were becoming increasingly weaker, both emotionally and physically. Although nervousness could be detected already in small infants, school-aged children were mostly regarded as being at risk. The school was a precarious place, a health hazard, particularly for girls and children from the ‘uncultured’ classes. By analyzing health journals of the late nineteenth century, the paper looks at how ‘the nervous’ child was both gendered and classed, and intimately linked with discourses on heredity and morality. It argues that children’s neurasthenia was not only a question of health versus ill-health, but more importantly a matter of education, parenting and child rearing. Children functioned as important tools in the medico-moral fight against the ails of modernity.Jutta Ahlbeck is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Turku, Finland and is currently working at the History Programme at the Faculty of Arts, Psychology and Theology, ?bo Akademi University. She is a sociologist, specialized in interdisciplinary approaches to health and illness, the body and sexualities. She has been focusing mainly on mental health issues and diagnostics, particularly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but also explored contemporary contexts. She has published on topics such as women’s madness, the history of psychiatry, power, poverty, social class, epistemic communities, and academic organizations, in addition to methodological articles. She has worked with a multitude of methods, such as textual/discursive, archival, and ethnographic methods. One of her interests has been to develop methodological connections between feminist theory, discourse analysis and microhistory. Session B: Illness, Identity, and Migration Brad CampbellNeurasthenia and the New Negro: The 19th-Century Psychiatric Origins of a Modern American Type The paper posits a previously unimagined dialogue between nineteenth century psychiatric discourse and the work of African-American writers. I take as my starting point the work of George Beard, an American neurologist who, in 1881, published a treatise that heralded one of the most important and celebrated psychiatric consequences of modernity. He called this condition “neurasthenia,” and, while he did not coin the term, he did work tirelessly to promote and popularize it. Indeed, more than any other medical practitioner of his time, Beard laboured to make neurasthenia a matter of national concern and, perhaps more curiously, a point of national pride—a move that may help to explain why he succeeded so impressively in thrusting a relatively esoteric neurological concept into the centre of national consciousness.For in books like American Nervousness (1881), Beard was not just presenting to Americans a new nosological entity, but offering them a powerful new way to theorize American national identity. In fact, Beard so carefully and successfully delineated neurasthenia in nationalistic terms that it came to be known the world over as “the American disease”— even though it was emphatically not descriptive of or available to all Americans. On the contrary, the experience of neurasthenia and the “Americanness” it signified was reserved only for those who satisfied a narrow, if familiar set of criteria: exclusively white, suitably refined, and, most important, highly susceptible to the peculiar “strains” and “stresses” of modern life. On one point, Beard was especially adamant: whatever else a neurasthenic might be, he or she could never, ever be imagined as black.What, then, are we to make of African-American writers who, observing in the early twentiethcentury the emergence of a “New Negro,” describe this figure in patently neurasthenic terms? As I will argue, the representations of the New Negro we find in works like Pauline Hopkins’s Of One Blood, W.E.B. DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folk, and, of course, Alain Locke’s “The New Negro,” are not only saturated with the language of nineteenth-century neurasthenic discourse, but also constitute an important intervention in psychiatric constructions of racial and national identity—one which sees these writers proposing alternative etiological paradigms for understanding the diseases of modernity and laying important groundwork for the forms of social psychiatry that would emerge much later in the century.Brad Campbell is Associate Professor of English at Cal Poly (San Luis Obispo, California) where he teaches courses on American literature, African-American literature, and environmental literature. His research focuses on the intersections between literature and the history of psychiatry, and his work has appeared in venues such as NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, African- American Review, Journal of Social History, and History of Psychiatry.Jessica HowellEnervated India: Tropical Neurasthenia and the Fictions of EmpireDr Charles Woodruff’s 1905 book The Effects of Tropical Light on White Men ushered the term ‘tropical neurasthenia’ into the ‘medical lexicon’ as a ‘clinical diagnosis’ (Kennedy 1990: 123). Woodruff theorised that the ‘intense actinic radiation,’ in the tropics, or the photochemical effect of ultraviolet light, particularly undermined the health of pale-skinned Aryans, who lacked sufficient pigmentation to protect their “nerve protoplasm”’ (Kennedy 1990: 121). Though the term neurasthenia predates Woodruff’s analysis, having been introduced by American neurologist George M. Beard in the 1870s, Woodruff consolidated under one term a set of syndromes previously labeled ‘tropical inertia, tropical amnesia, Punjab head, and Burmah head’ (Kennedy 1990: 123).As indicated by the foregoing list, due to its longstanding status as an area subject to British colonisation, white sensitivity to the heat of India was central to theorizing this disease. This paper will examine tropical neurasthenia within fiction set in India between 1900 and 1910, including Rudyard Kipling’s novel Kim (1901). Specifically, it will contrast enervated white characters, whose bodies have not acclimatized to the Indian environment, with those characters who demonstrate greater resilience. Such resilient characters, such as Kim himself, show physiological markers of adaptation to heat that also contribute to our contemporary critical reading of them as racially hybrid, such as changing skin colour and ‘native’ modes of dress. This paper analyses why empire fiction of the early twentieth century continues to mobilise tropes of tropical neurasthenia, rather than taking refuge in emerging definitions of medical modernity that depended on the diagnosis and cure of contagious disease. It draws upon contemporaneous journalism and medical guidebooks in order to better understand how tropical neurasthenia was incorporated into discourses of imperial progress and the health of nation.Jessica Howell is an Assistant Professor of Transatlantic Nineteenth Century Studies at Texas A&M University. She was previously a Wellcome Research Fellow at the Centre for the Humanities and Health, King’s College London, where she studied the life writing of colonial nurses (2010-2014). Her work has appeared in such journals as Literature and Medicine, Victorian Literature and Culture, Studies in Travel Writing, and the Journal of Commonwealth Literature. Her first book, Exploring Victorian Travel Literature: Disease, Race, and Climate, was published by Edinburgh University Press in 2014. Her current project is focused on malaria in Victorian fictions of empire.Session C: The Body and Modernity Agnes Arnold-Forster Pathology of Progress: Cancer in 19th-Century Britain Although cancer is widely recognised today as a problem of modernity, it is strangely absent from histories of this phenomenon. My research rectifies this deficiency by exploring the construction of cancer as a ‘disease of civilisation’ in nineteenth-century Britain. The collection of vital statistics from the 1840s onwards suggested to anxious observers that the incidence of cancer was increasing exponentially. I will outline the ways in which this perceived “cancer epidemic” captured the medical and lay imagination, and promoted fierce debate in the pages of medical journals, general-interest periodicals, and in parliament. This paper will reveal the two opposing ways cancer was constructed as a ‘disease of modern life’ as well as investigating the constituencies involved in that construction.Towards the end of the nineteenth century colonial doctors, and those that reflected on medicine in non-European contexts, became particularly engaged in constructing cancer as a problem of progress. They created global distributions of incidence - conceptualising certain races as more or less prone to the disease, and in doing so inserted cancer into broader debates over racial hierarchy. In contrast, commentators on the domestic “cancer epidemic” revealed a different set of concerns. Cancer was increasingly perceived as an unintended consequence of public health successes: lower infant mortality, increasing hospitalisation, and sanitary reform. My analysis of these parallel but conflicting constructions of cancer as a pathology of progress will reveal how different constituents made use of cancer in their divergent understandings of civilisation. My paper will reflect on the ways in which cancer was constructed as manifesting national decline, while simultaneously - and somewhat paradoxically – being manufactured as a disease of health. The latter finding suggests that the medical profession’s ability to maintain and improve the health, wealth, and wellbeing of nation and empire generated a late-Victorian faith in progress that ran alongside its much-documented preoccupation with the degeneration and decline of British civilisation.Agnes Arnold-Forster is an AHRC funded PhD candidate at King’s College London, working on the history of cancer in nineteenth-century Britain. She completed her undergraduate degree in Modern History at the University of Oxford, before doing an MSc in the History of Science, Technology and Medicine at Imperial College/UCL. Her work looks at the social, cultural, political and medical history of cancer between 1794 and 1914, and builds on her MSc research into constructions of the nineteenth-century in post-war medical historiography.Helen GoodmanSymptoms of Stress and the Modern Man of Science A number of Victorian intellectuals who suffered from symptoms of nervous strain and anxiety made attempts at self-diagnosis and home remedies by way of self-medication. Extending even beyond the use of opiates, diets, exercise regimen, hot or cold baths and steam rooms, these methods could be highly developed. This paper explores the evolution of medical approaches to intellectual strain and nervous exhaustion in the long nineteenth century. It begins by considering the pioneering work of Dr Cheyne, whose eighteenth-century clients included Pope and Richardson. Within this medical and literary context, the paper explores the employment and relative success or failure of various experimental self-treatments pursued by men of science who remained determined to pursue highly demanding research and writing schedules in spite of nervous exhaustion and mental collapse. Based upon the early research findings of a postdoctoral project on connections between stress and the scientific or academic ‘genius’ in the long nineteenth-century, this paper explores various literary and historical approaches to self-diagnosis and self-medication taken by modern men of science who suffered from nervous breakdowns, including Charles Darwin and his half-cousin, Francis Galton. It brings to light a range of literature including medical records, letters, diaries, fiction and medical journalism. Attempting to alleviate a plethora of alarming ailments including nervous shaking, palpitations, boils and acute abdominal pain (believed to be caused or exacerbated by stress), Darwin educated himself about various new treatments. Whilst expending great physical and mental energy during periods of intense writing he went to considerable, perhaps obsessive, lengths to engineer structures for hydrotherapy. The frequent co-existence, or even apparent co-dependence of severe mental strain and genius was often remarked upon by modern thinkers across the scientific and literary world, such as George Eliot. Galton considered the subject in publications such as Hereditary Genius (1869).Helen Goodman is a Visiting Lecturer in the Department of English at Royal Holloway, University of London, where she completed her doctorate (entitled ‘Mad Men: Borderlines of Insanity, Masculinity and Emotion in Victorian Literature and Culture’) in 2015. Her primary research interests lie in nineteenth-century literature and the medical humanities, particularly psychology and mental health, the body, gender and sexuality, disability, and the history of medicine. Helen has published on subjects including lunatic asylums, male monomania, marital rape and domestic abuse in the long nineteenth century, and imperial masculinities in adventure fiction. Floyd Thurston The (Re-) Discovery of Noise-Induced Hearing Loss in the 19th CenturyMillions of people around the world experience hearing loss caused by heredity or disease, but there are others with hearing loss caused by exposure to loud noise in their workplaces. Being unable to hear well enough to engage in casual conversation with others or to be aware of danger warnings can be a significant cause of stress in a person. People have been exposed to environmental sounds from natural sources throughout the ages, but the sounds emitted by the machines of the Industrial Revolution introduced a new risk into the work environment. Ironically, in the late nineteenth century the microscopic examination of the inner ear of a deaf boilermaker, killed by a train he could not hear approaching, helped advance the understanding of noise-induced hearing loss. Although some people in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries recognized that loud sound exposure could damage hearing, they could not mount a concerted effort to reduce industrial noise levels, or limit workers' exposure. Reasons for the delay in reducing noise exposure in industry include cultural norms and expectations, a lack of effective technical methods to control or measure noise, a lack of understanding of the mechanism of noise-induced hearing loss, and no standard means of measuring the amount of loss. Although hearing loss was discussed in both popular and scientific writings in the nineteenth century, there was little consensus about the role loud sound exposure played in hearing loss, its impact upon society, or how to deal with it. A sexual bias may explain a diagnosis of "hysteria," which delayed recognition of an occupational disease, in some early female telephone operators who complained of hearing loss. This paper will briefly explore the early recognition of noise-induced hearing loss, and discuss the various cultural, technical, and social impediments that delayed implementation of effective control measures.Floyd Thurston, M.D. is an Occupational Medicine Consultant in Bloomington, U.S.A., and a former Adjunct Assistant Professor in the School of Public and Environmental Affairs of Indiana University, with a life-long interest in exploring the history and philosophy of science and medicine. He has presented papers at national and local meetings of various science and health societies, and published articles in peer-reviewed journals, including Isis, American Journal of Industrial Medicine, and Seminars in Hearing among others. His recent semi-retirement allows him more time to pursue these activities, and to meet colleagues with similar interests from around the world.Sunday 11 September, 11.30 – 1.00Session A: Physical Culture and the Regulation of the Body Joan Jacobs BrumbergAnorexia Nervosa: Modernity and Appetite My focus as a social historian is on the connections between culture and behaviour. This paper explores the relationship between appetite and social stress in bourgeois Victorian anorectics, the first age and gender group to use the appetite as a voice since medieval women saints. Expanding on my 1988 book Fasting Girls: The Emergence of Anorexia Nervosa as a Modern Disease, I also trace important developments in the elaboration of a disease that now appears worldwide.In contrast to the fasting of medieval women that was rooted in religious fervour, Victorian physicians identified food refusal in adolescence as a psychopathology. They proposed that this kind of anorexia (lack of appetite) was voluntary, rooted in psychological causes—hence, the "nervosa." They did little investigation, however, into why adolescent anorectics refused food, or why appetite might be a voice for them. In the absence of information about motivation in published medical reports and records, or diaries and letters by anorectics, Victorian fiction provides the best template for understanding how these girls thought about food. Eating was fraught with difficulty in families that had more than enough to eat and intense childhood scrutiny. By the late 20th century, manipulations of appetite became even more commonplace and “eating disorders” emerged as a larger, more complex disease category. The symptomatology in anorexia nervosa also changed to incorporate bulimia. Some clinicians now add to the mix orthorexia, a high anxiety about righteous eating, related to the bountiful nature of our food supply and choices. Social contagion is a powerful causative factor among adolescents, transforming what was considered a psychiatric syndrome into a “communicable” disease. A critical backdrop for these changes is a transformation in the historical relationship of young women to physicians as well as the recent development of a wide spectrum of mental health professionals. Today, as never before, there is vast opportunity for the appetite to be manipulated, heard, and understood as a troubled voice, amenable to medical treatment with costly therapy and psychotropic drugs. A behaviour that emerged from burgeoning middle-class affluence in the 19th century has shown impressive staying power.Joan Jacobs Brumberg is Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow and Professor Emerita at Cornell University where she had a unique interdisciplinary appointment in history, human development and women studies. In almost three decades of teaching at Cornell, she taught courses on the history of childhood, history of female adolescence, the history of American women and the history of medicine.She is known for her research and writing about the history of American girls, including Fasting Girls: The Emergence of Anorexia Nervosa As a Modern Disease (Harvard University Press, 1988) which won four different disciplinary prizes: the John Hope Franklin Prize, Berkshire Prize, Watson Davis Prize and the Basker Memorial Prize. Her 1997 book The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls has become a classic in Women’s Studies on college campuses and has been turned into a play. In 2004, she published Kansas Charley: The Boy Murderer, a true story of adolescent boys and violence in l9th century America that was used in the campaign against the juvenile death penalty. She wrote the introduction for photographer Lauren Greenfield’s Girl Culture as well as Greenfield’s film Thin and in December 2006 contributed a social history of the “cutting” epidemic to The Chronicle of Higher Education. She has also published articles on women’s history in a variety of different scholarly journals as well as op-ed pieces for the New York Times, The Nation, Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post. In addition to being elected to the Society of American Historians, she has received awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Rockefeller Foundation and The MacDowell Colony. She received her B.A. in history from the University of Rochester in 1965 and a Ph.D. in U.S. social and intellectual history from The University of Virginia in 1978. Alexander PyrgesCorpulence as an Affliction of the Modern World. Medical and Popular Views in 19th-Century GermanyThroughout the last decades the obesity epidemic has not only been portrayed as a quintessential threat to human health and longevity but also as inseparably linked to the living conditions in our contemporary world. The association of corpulence with contemporaneous living conditions, however, is by no means original to our present day. The paper will explore how both the medical pathologizing and the popular devaluation of oversize bodies in nineteenth-century Germany were accompanied, if not supported, by the notion that corporeal growth constituted an affliction of the modern age. First, modern living conditions, it was commonly argued, caused the rise of corpulence. Among these conditions were material affluence and the access to abundant amounts of nutrition but also the mental challenges of thriving in industrializing and urbanizing societies. Often, corpulence was associated with Britain as the most advanced among nations. Second, the modern world provided the means to identify corpulence as a threat to individuals and society alike. Every medico-scientific discipline furnished their respective version of its causes and effects, from physiology to psychiatry and from endocrinology to nutrition science. The will and the nerves, the food and the hormones were in turn regarded as responsible for corporeal growth. Those refusing to submit bodily drives to modern reasoning were denounced as stupid or, in the case of colonial people, whose fat love countless Europeans documented, as uncivilized and backwards. Third, the modern world provided the instruments to maintain desired and fight undesired body shapes. New strategies were marketed as building on scientific discovery and technological innovation and included specially processed food, electrotherapy, and pharmaceuticals as well as counting calories and self-weighting. Of course, some contemporaries instead recommended to return to a more natural type of body, one that might be characterized by some premodern healthy variety of plumpness.Alexander Pyrges is a research fellow at the Institute for the History of Medicine at the University of Würzburg, Germany. He holds a Ph.D. in history from the University of Trier, Germany and has contributed to several collections on early modern religious and transatlantic history. In his recently published monographic study, Das Kolonialprojekt EbenEzer. Formen und Mechanismen protestantischer Expansion in der atlantischen Welt des 18. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart: Steiner 2015), he examines the transatlantic networks of English and German Protestant church reformers during the eighteenth century. His current research focuses on the history of corpulence, more particularly on the concepts, metaphors, and images surrounding excessive girth in medical and popular texts between 1500 and 1900.Kristine Swenson, Missouri University of Science and TechnologyPhrenology as Neurodiversity: The Fowlers and Modern Brain Disorders“That everything as it now is, is all wrong,” wrote Orson Fowler in 1850, “is fully evinced by the hard times, the bad health…and the premature death of all classes.” Those living in modern times must follow phrenological principles or “take the consequences” Fowler warned (Practical Phrenology). The brand of phrenology the Fowlers made popular in the second half of the 19th century in the US and Britain responded to the ills of industrialized capitalism by touting progressive self-improvement. Striking parallels exist between Victorian phrenology and the current neurodiversity movement, which is responding to an epidemic rise in neurological disorder diagnoses. In particular, persistent claims of environmental causes for autism and of therapies that have improved or even “cured” autistic behaviours, call into question the standard medical and psychological model of the autistic brain as “hard wired.” Like the Fowler’s phrenology, the neurodiversity movement advocates a holistic, even ecological view of the organism, with the brain working within the context of the whole body, and particularly the stomach. Phrenologists accepted that individuals possess relative strengths and weaknesses across a spectrum of mental traits. Similarly, neurodiversity advocates argue for greater acceptance of neurological difference, that human brains exist along “continuums of competence,” and for an anthropological view of neurological “competence” as culturally determined (Armstrong 2010). Significantly, both phrenology and neurodiversity assume a degree of neuroplasticity by which individuals might change their brains through therapies, learned strategies, or assistive technologies. This connection between the pseudoscientific phrenology and neurodiversity is not meant to discredit the latter. Rather, both suggest the importance of longitudinal and holistic observation in developing medical models. Moreover, the Fowlers’ prescriptions were largely positive just as neurodiversity, by insisting upon neuroplasticity, early interventions, and accommodations of difference, has begun to change not only individual lives but cultural assumptions surrounding neurological conditions such as autism. Kristine Swenson is Professor of English and Department Chair of English and Technical Communication at the Missouri University of Science and Technology. Her publications include Medical Women and Victorian Fiction (2005); “Mindblindness: Metaphor and Neuroaesthetics in the Works of Silas Weir Mitchell and Simon Baron-Cohen.” In Anne Stiles, Stanley Finger, Fran?ois Boller, editors: Literature, Neurology and Neuroscience: Historical and Literary Connections. Progress in Brain Research, Vol. 205 (Elsevier, 2013): 295-318; and “Scholarship in Victorian Women and Medicine: A Critical Overview,” Literature Compass, 10.5 (May 2013): 461-472. Session B: Nervousness Sonsoles Hernández BarbosaDiversification or Sensory Unification? Ideas around the Evolution of the Senses in fin-de-siècle Culture Reflection on the human senses aroused an enormous amount of interest during the fin de siècle, as shown by the proliferation of multisensory devices such as dioramas and panoramas, the phenomenon of synaesthesia – both in its scientific and its aesthetic aspects – and Aestheticism. This fascination for the senses also materialised in the emergence of discourses on their evolution which, from a Darwinist approach, questioned the specific position of the fin de siècle in history. The analysis of these discourses reveals the existence of two contradictory positions. On the one hand are authors such as Ray Lankester and Max Nordau, who were aware of coeval physiological discoveries and who stressed the value of the progressive diversification and specialisation of the senses as evidence of human evolution. On the other hand were those authors sensitive to the neuropsychological phenomenon of synaesthesia, for example Victor Segalen and Ernest Renan, who regarded the sensory regrouping or integration of different senses that this phenomenon involves as the true symptom of evolution. The latter argument appeals not only to biological, but also to cultural notions, because it assumed the involvement of a learned factor in synaesthesia – explaining the different associations made by different individuals – which could be profitably exploited in the creative field. This paper aims at setting both positions face to face, examining their arguments in detail: what were the underlying philosophical substrata? How did these discourses tally with medical knowledge? How did these ideas, which assumed a factor of progressive evolution in the senses, confront the time’s widely spread notion of decadence?Graduated both in Art History and Musicology, Sonsoles Hernández Barbosa obtained her PhD at the Université de Paris-Sorbonne and Universidad Complutense de Madrid (PhD Extraordinary Prize). She has specialized in the study of fin de siècle interartistic relationships. She has published the monographs Sinestesias. Arte, literatura y música en el París fin de siglo, 1880-1900 (Madrid: Abada editores, 2013) and Un martes en casa de Mallarmé. Redon, Debussy y Mallarmé encontrados (Madrid: Editorial Complutense, 2010). Currently, her research is focused on the status held by the senses in fin de siècle culture from an epistemological, aesthetic and social perspective. She has published in journals such as The Senses & Society, Acta musicologica, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos (Washington University in St. Louis) and French Cultural Studies. She is a lecturer in the department of Historical Sciences and Art Theory at the Universidad de las Islas Baleares.Michael GuidaSonic Therapy: Harmony for Disordered NervesFor many, urban noise typified modern life in Victorian Britain. Its attack on the nerves and mind pathologised modernity itself. While the problems and politics of noise have been investigated by scholars, the cultural and medical connections between soundscape and recovery have received little attention. Through two personalities, this paper will look at ideas of quietude and musical harmony as methods and milieu for healing soldiers and civilians with nervous disorders. Florence Nightingale insisted on a regime of female silence for male healing on her large wards in the Crimean War. I will draw upon her Notes on Nursing (1860) – in which she denounced nurses for whispering, moving slowly, even walking on tiptoe – in order to assess the contexts for the formalisation of this long-lived nursing ideal. Canon Frederick Harford’s group of ‘musician healers’, called the Guild of St Cecilia, were made up of violinists, a harpist and female singers. During the 1890s, Harford made his musicians available to London hospitals to play ‘soft and low’ or ‘exhilarating’ music, but always out-of-sight of patients so that the ‘mission of music’ could do its work freely. His scheme was supported by Nightingale, although the British Medical Journal and the musical press, which I analyse, were circumspect. These initiatives illustrate a concern for the use and control of sound to promote astate in which healing could proceed, when noise was often seen as a health hazard and a threat to social order. The moral, spiritual and political dimensions of managing sound on behalf of the sick will be discussed.Michael Guida is a PhD researcher in Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Sussex. He is investigating the place of nature’s soundscape in restoring minds during the first half of the twentieth century in Britain. In particular, he is looking at how birdsong was heard and quietude was used in times of stress, trauma and recovery especially during and after war. His background is in the history of science, technology and medicine in nineteenth and twentieth century Britain.David FreisPreventing Mental Illness in One’s Sleep: Nervousness, Psychiatric Prophylaxis and the Invention of Mental Hygiene in fin-de-siècle Germany In late-nineteenth-century Germany wide-spread concerns about the discontents of modern life quickly found their way into medical debates. Psychiatry in particular provided concepts that allowed for a conflation of cultural criticism and medical diagnosis. George M. Beard's concept of 'American nervousness' or 'neurasthenia' was eagerly adopted by German psychiatrists and educated lay-people alike, and became the signature diagnosis of a nation experiencing a rapid modernisation of every aspect of political, social, and cultural life. While many studies have dealt with the cultural, political and medical implications of the German obsession with the mental strains of modernity, one important aspect has gone unnoticed: The debate about the detrimental effects of modernity on the mental health of the population brought forth a new understanding of the possibilities of mental prophylaxis. I will use the works of Robert Sommer (1864-1937), chair of psychiatry at the University of Giessen, to explore this link between modernity and mental prophylaxis. Around the turn of the century, Sommer became one of the first and most active proponents of a systematic approach to the prophylaxis of mental disorders. From the beginning, he proposed a two-pronged strategy, arguing that new insights in the causation of mental disorders would allow to tackle both ‘exogenous’ and ‘endogenous’ – e.g. environmental and hereditary – factors. All aspects of Sommer’s prophylactic ideas were closely connected to the mental threats posed by urban modernity; from his plans to build public resting halls in every major city to mitigate the effects of noise and exhaustion, to his proposal to replace the disintegrating social hierarchies with a ‘natural nobility’ legitimised by a new ethos derived from eugenics and hereditary research. As early as 1902, Sommer introduced the notion of ‘mental hygiene’ to describe his plans; in the mid-1920s, he became the founder and leader of the German committee in the international movement of the same name. His attempts to mitigate the mental effects of modernity emerged in the specific historical context of fin de siècle Germany, but they also introduced perspectives that still influence present-day concepts of mental health.David Freis writes about the history of modern medicine, and is currently a post-doc at the Institute for the Ethics, History, and Theory of Medicine at the University of Münster. He has studied history, political sciences, and gender studies in Bochum, Vienna, and at the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence. His PhD thesis on the psycho-political ideas of German-speaking psychiatrists in the inter-war period will be defended at the Department of History and Civilization of the EUI on 11 December 2015. He has published various articles and book chapters on the history of psychiatry and psychotherapy in the first half of the twentieth century.Session C: Medical Practitioners Torsten RiotteScience, Technology and Individual Responsibility: The Professional, Judicial and Public Debate about Medical Negligence during the 19th CenturyThis study deals with the medical professions in Germany and Austria during the nineteenth century. Doctors in the two states experienced an unprecedented professionalization. Part of this transformation was the scientific progress, the increasing technical expertise and, not least, the national organization of doctors. These factors ensured that, at the start of the twentieth century, doctors gained an exclusive social status within society and exceptional remuneration for their work. The amount of medical training necessary to qualify, and the expertise gained during the training were key aspects of the professional authority of doctors and gained medical experts a form of responsibility that could only be judged by trained professionals. This explains why legal medicine, courts of honour, and the relationship between doctors and the state gained a specific form during the period. At the same time, most professions developed means of insuring individuals against accidents at the work place. Originating in the debate about health and safety in industrial occupations, employers offered financial compensation to avoid legal disputes with their employees. The concept of ‘misconduct’ was replaced by the concept of ‘accident’ (Etienne Fran?ois). Court cases against doctors and medical staff for medical negligence started as early as 1810. However, it proved highly difficult to integrate a doctor’s responsibility with rapidly changing medical sciences and a transforming medical profession. So far, historiography has discussed these aspects in the light of medical ethics and the relationship between doctors and the state. The focus of my work is on how individual responsibility is negotiated between scientific expertise, competing forms of curing diseases and the public’s view of the medical profession. Given the dynamic in medical research and the amount of technical innovation – including forms of therapy that failed – it seems beyond doubt that the relationships between doctors and patients changed in more than one direction.Torsten Riotte is a specialist in Modern European History who has been working in British and German academia for more than ten years. He was awarded his PhD in History in December 2003, at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, and continued to stay in Britain until 2007. Since returning to Germany, he has worked as both a Reader in History at Goethe University, Frankfort, and Acting Professor at the University of Bonn. His research has a focus on European history during the long nineteenth century. He recently started a research project on medical negligence from the early nineteenth to the early twentieth century. The study is intended as part of a larger research project on individual responsibility and professional authority in the wake of modernity.Carol-Ann FarkasThe Woman Doctor as Medical and Moral Authority: Nervous Disorders, Purity Campaigns, and Gender Relations in Helen Brent, MD In the late nineteenth century, opponents of women’s rights exploited popular biological theory to argue that study and work disrupted the natural arrangement of the female “organism,” over-taxing the nervous system, causing hysteria and physical collapse. In response, supporters of women’s advancement, especially in medicine, accepted the link between traditional gender roles and nervous disorders, with this twist: mental and physical idleness were directly productive of shattered nerves and impaired moral judgement. Rather than causing illness, academic and professional work were the antidote to conventional femininity’s unwholesome side-effects.As I will explain in this presentation, medical women, as historical figures and fictional symbols deployed throughout professional and popular discourses, seemed ideally situated to promote this new approach to physical and moral health. At a moment when nervous disorders, social reform, and gender roles were unstable, evolving phenomena, authors could conflate them into one biopsychosocial problem for which women’s increased professional and moral authority provided a holistic therapy.As one example, the eponymous protagonist of Annie Nathan Meyer’s 1892 novel, Helen Brent MD: A Social Study, combines medical and moral authority to treat the nerves of one young woman, bullied by her mother into too many parties and idleness. Dr. Brent’s prescription: study, exercise (gymnasium and bicycle), and purposeful work. Dr. Brent saves this patient, but cannot save others—women whose nervous and moral fibres are attenuated by the demands of conventional femininity, and whose health is ruined by sexual promiscuity and venereal disease. Meyer draws directly from contemporaneous discourse of women’s rights, purity campaigns, and beliefs about the interplay of body, mind, and nerves, arguing that “old fashioned” gender roles render women susceptible to physical and moral corruption, and in turn leverages that argument to underscore the need for progressive education and work for women.Carol-Ann Farkas is an associate professor of English and director of writing programs at MCPHS University in Boston. She teaches first year composition, 19th century British literature, and literature and medicine. Her research interests include representations of the woman doctor in late nineteenth-century American and British fiction, and health in contemporary popular culture. Her most recent publications have been on the ?subjects of psychosomatic illness, and the pathologization of neurodiversity on television. Sunday 11 September, 2.00 – 3.30Session A: Rhythmic and Non-Rhythmic Bodies Laura MarcusRhythm and Adaptation in the Machine AgeBeginning with a short discussion of the omnipresence of the term ‘rhythm’ in the late 19th and early 20th centuries,?this paper?moves on to discuss parallels drawn in these terms between humans and machines, by Oliver Wendell Holmes and others.? It explores?endeavours?to reconcile the human and the mechanical, either by the adaptation of the human to the machine or by attempts, as?in the work of philosophers and social theorists?Karl Bücher in 1896 and Ludwig Klages in the early 1920s, to reclaim or retain human or natural measures in the face of the coming of the machine and the speed of technological development. Laura Marcus is Goldsmiths' Professor of English Literature and Fellow of New College at the University of Oxford. She was previously Regius Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. Her research and teaching interests are predominantly in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and culture, including life-writing, modernism, Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury culture, contemporary fiction, and literature and film. Her book publications include Auto/biographical Discourses: Theory, Criticism, Practice (1994), Virginia Woolf: Writers and their Work (1997/2004), The Tenth Muse: Writing about Cinema in the Modernist Period (2007; awarded the 2008 James Russell Lowell Prize of the Modern Language Association), Dreams of Modernity:?Psychoanalysis, Literature, Cinema (2014)?and, as co-editor, The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English Literature (2004). She is on the editorial boards of a number of journals and is one of the editors of the journal Women: a Cultural Review. Her current research projects include scholarly editions of the work of modernist writers Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf, and a study of the concept of ’rhythm’ in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in a range of disciplinary contexts. Karen ChaseWynken, Blynken, and Nod This paper will consider manifestations of stress as they appear through the semi-reflexive behaviours of winking, blinking, and nodding. Eugene Field’s poem (1889) projected the triumvirate onto three sleepy children, and since then these functions are conventionally associated with a blissful transition to sleep. Perhaps. But frequently they are instead markers for agitation. I will look at the science and art of these behaviours as they are discussed in scientific literature, represented visually, and in literary narratives. The argument I pursue, however, is not simply to show how they trouble calm and undercut harmony. Rather, I will argue that alone, and in conjunction with one another, they are employed for constructive purposes as well. At times, they indicate the resilience and flexibility necessary to endure or confront moments of crisis, oppression, or constriction. Once we view these tics as attempts to adapt rather than to withdraw from community, we can appreciate the complexity required to perform in new ways and through new routes so that communication with others remains intact. The systemic psychological portrait that emerges counters a phrenological model of the mind, which associates particular places with specific attributes. Today, we speak of neuroplasticity, and neuron re-use. Instead of thinking of the mind as a map of fixed and unchangeable identities, we know that neurons in the brain can and do function in different ways, and that they often do so by connecting to other neurons, often far away. These “coalitions” (Michael Anderson, After Phrenology: Neural Reuse and the Interactive Brain, 2014) may be temporary or long lasting, but they are effective ways to adapt brain circuitry to behavioural needs and challenging circumstances. This systemic approach to personal psychology and character construction illuminates the sensibility of Charles Dickens, upon whose works I will focus.Karen Chase is Linden Kent Memorial Professor of English at the University of Virginia. She is author of Eros & Psyche: The Representation of Personality in the Works of Charlotte Bront?, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot; George Eliot’s Middlemarch; The Spectacle of Intimacy: A Public Life for the Victorian Family (co-author, Michael Levenson); Middlemarch in the Twenty-First Century (ed); and The Victorians and Old Age.Josephine HoegaertsVictims of Civilization: Recording, Counting and Curing Stammerers in 19th-Century Western Europe In 1900, William Ketley published the “Beasley Method”, a lengthy description of the stammering cure devised by his father-in-law, Benjamin Beasley. The book was not so much a method to be applied – although self-help cures were very much en vogue - but rather an advertisement for the therapeutic institute Ketley ran with his wife. It included pictures of the grounds and the rather attractive lecture room (complete with exotic plants and gramophone) of Tarrangower, where the institute was housed. It aimed to appeal to the modern gentleman, who was reportedly most likely to be afflicted by this speech impediment. According to Beasley and Ketley, stammering was a nervous affliction of a very particular kind. It was not related to hysteria or any other nervous disease associated with weakness or femininity. Rather, the stammerer was a “victim of civilization”. Suffering from a surplus of intelligence, his brain was too rapid for the mouth and tongue, its synapses (often described with telegraphy metaphors) firing with such zeal that the occasional short-circuit seemed unavoidable. Other experts of the time had suggested, similarly, that the greater demands modern life put on barristers and clerks made them more likely to develop a stammer, and that the impediment had “increased on the path to civilization”. Observers had also noted that savages, women and children did not stammer. Early statistical studies in France, particularly, had shown an enormous discrepancy in the gender of stammerers, and throughout the nineteenth century different theories to explain this gender gap were put forward. In this paper, I analyze (pseudo)scientific studies from London, Paris and Leipzig to analyze how stammering was turned from a ‘moral’ into a ‘modern’ affliction (defined by gender, class, race and age), in which psychological, neurological and cultural/environmental issues cooperated to stifle the gentlemanly tongue.Josephine Hoegaerts is a Research Fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies. Her research on the social history of the human voice focusses on scientific, educational and political practices of sound-production. Recent publications include “Speaking like Intelligent Men: Vocal Articulations of Authority and Identity in the House of Commons in the Nineteenth Century”, in: Radical History Review and “Speechlessness and Acoustic Normality in Nineteenth-Century Deaf Education”, in Rethinking Disability (in press).Session B: Addiction Alessia PanneseSense and Sensibility in 19th-Century AddictionDrug addiction is a disease of modernity, whose development and dissemination are linked to the rise of surgery and the invention of the hypodermic syringe, which opened new routes for drug administration and use both in medical and recreational settings. By the mid-nineteenth century, drug addiction in Britain was widespread across all social classes, affecting not only writers and artists, but also surgeons themselves. Drawing on specific case studies, I will examine ways in which the nineteenth-century discourse on drug addiction was negotiated within and between the artistic and medical milieus, and suggest that this dual articulation of addiction in medical and artistic terms both owed and contributed to the Darwin-inspired understanding of consciousness as manifesting itself along a continuum ranging from the most primitive kind of sensation to the most refined expression of aesthetic sensibility.Alessia Pannese is a postdoctoral researcher in clinical experimental medicine in the Addictions Department at King's College London, and graduate student in history of art at Exeter College, University of Oxford. She trained in law (Rome), veterinary medicine (Perugia), veterinary science (Cambridge), human neurobiology (Columbia), and literature and arts (Oxford). She has authored empirical, theoretical, and interdisciplinary research in peer reviewed journals and edited volumes, and has contributed to theatre programme notes and museum exhibition catalogues. She has been the recipient of Columbia University Science, Italian Academy Art & Neuroscience, and Marie Curie - Bridge (European Union Seventh Framework Programme) fellowships.Thembisa WaetjenHabit-Forming Substances and Medicinal Modernities in Colonial South Africa, 1885–1910This paper traces changes in the forms, circulation, definitions and legal regulation of narcotic medicinal preparations/substances in British South African colonies during the last quarter of the long nineteenth century. It explores how medical knowledges about addiction coming from the imperial metropol were negotiated with locally constituted understandings and practices, and identifies encounters and conflicts that proved especially transformative. The period represents one of political and demographic ferment associated with the mineral revolution and militarisation, as well as – following the South African war – with the move from colonial government towards nation-state.In a context of racial rule and emergent regimes of migrant labour exploitation, plural systems of health and healing were drawn into political focus. Ingestion of narcotic substances, and the problem of chemically dependent bodies, came to be sites of concern for reasons increasingly related to modernist civic projects that – through a discourse of a public good – linked health to race ideology, labour control, and class respectability. Thus, for example, debates about the medicinal properties of cannabis sativa (among indentured migrants from India in the 1880s), and about smoking opium (among Chinese indentured migrants in the early 1900s), highlighted how ‘ethnic’ construction of bodies vied with (or were aligned to) universalistic bio-medical interpretations. The uses of chlorodyne, morphia, cocaine and other chemical innovations, popular with settler communities in this period, raised concerns about white racial respectability and the ‘spread’ of worrisome ‘habits’ to subjugated populations. Antagonism between British and ‘Dutch’ (Boer) pharmacopeias had to be resolved post-war, as ‘white’ solidarities became the premise of modernist nation-building.Drawing upon various archival sources covering the Natal, Cape and Transvaal colonies, as well as the South African Medical Journal, Chemist and Druggist and similar publications, this paper will provide a broad, context-sensitive picture of modernist medical discourses. Thembisa Waetjen (PhD University of Oregon) is a sociologist-turned-historian from California who lectured in the department of history at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa, for 13 years and is currently a research fellow at the Durban University of Technology. She writes on twentieth century South African political, cultural and gendered life. Up until recently, her focus has been mainly on Indian diaspora in KwaZulu-Natal, with three books co-authored with colleague Goolam Vahed on Muslim social history in Durban. Her interest in opiates and the narcopolitical state represents new work. It has produced three forthcoming articles: ‘Poppies and Gold: Opium and Law-Making on the Witwatersrand, 1904-1910’ (Journal of African History); ‘The Rise and Fall of the Opium Trade in the Transvaal’ (Journal of Southern African Studies); and ‘Drug-Dealing Doctors and Unstable Subjects: Opium, Medicine and Authority in the Cape Colony, 1907-1910’ (South African Historical Journal). Douglas SmallCocaine, Technology, and Modernity, 1884–1914In March 1886, Chambers’s Journal wrote: ‘The discovery of cocaine figures as a wonder of the age. Cocaine has flashed like a meteor before the eyes of the world, and it is destined in the future to occupy a high position in the estimation of those who combat the ravages of disease.’ Cocaine had only entered the public consciousness late in 1884, when it was discovered that a solution of the compound would, if introduced into the eye, neutralise its sensitivity to pain. In effect, cocaine was the first practical local anaesthetic, able for the first time to abolish pain without the dangers and uncertainties attendant upon chloroform and ether. The British Medical Journal hailed the drug as having ‘immediately wrought a complete revolution’ in modern medicine. This paper examines how, despite knowledge of its potential addictiveness and toxicity, cocaine came to embody the ‘revolutionary’ pace of modernity and technological advancement in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.In journalism, fiction, and medical literature from this period, cocaine is presented as the iconic discovery of modern medicine; a ‘meteor’ blazing across the fin-de-siècle technological firmament. But the drug is also presented as an emblem of the medical man’s own transcendent modernity. In novels such as Harry Stillwell Edwards’s Sons and Fathers (1896), the effectiveness of cocaine provides the ideal image for the decisive expertise of the modern surgeon. Likewise, in Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, the detective’s cocaine consumption paradoxically signals his rejection of emotion and bodily pleasure in favour of a totally professional, cerebral existence. Edwards describes his surgeon, Dr Campbell, as ‘The Hand of Science,’ while Conan Doyle figures his detective as ‘an automaton – a calculating-machine’. In both the realms of fiction and medicine, cocaine signified the modernity, professional proficiency, and technological attainment of the age distilled into a material, medicinal form.Douglas Small is a Teaching Fellow at the University of Glasgow. He is the author of Sherlock Holmes and Cocaine: A 7% Solution for Modern Professionalism, and Masters of Healing: Cocaine and the Idealised Image of the Victorian Medical Man. He is currently preparing a monograph on the cultural history of cocaine in the Victorian and Edwardian periods ................
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