Fashionable Diseases - The People
Dr Jonathan Andrews,
Reader in the History of Psychiatry in the School of History, Classics and Archaeology at Newcastle University, is a Co-investigator on the project.
His research interests reside primarily in the history of mental and nervous illnesses, learning disabilities and the history of psychiatry, in Britain, from roughly 1600-1914. He has published 3 monographs in the field, most recently (with Andy Scull) Undertaker of the Mind (University of California Press, 2001) and Customers and Patrons of the Mad Trade (University of California Press, 2003), and previous to this (with Roy Porter et al.) The History of BethlemR (outledge, 1997). He has published four edited collections, most recently, with Lesley Topp and James Moran, Madness, Architecture and the Built Environment (Routledge, 2007), and with Anne Digny Sex and Seclusion, Class and Custody (Rodopi, 2004). He has also been working on the History of Broadmoor, focusing on infanticide, arsonists and sex offenders, and a further research project on death, religion and lunacy in Britain, has recently seen the publication of Andrews (ed.) Lunacy's Last Rites: Dying Insane in Britain, c. 1729-1939, a special issue of the journal History of Psychiatry (2012). His interest in fashionable diseases is primarily in patients' perspectives on such diseases, and how these perspectives were mediated by medical ideas and praxis, the medical market and by wider literary and socio-cultural discourses. He is especially interested in widening existing scholarship in this area, to focus on less explored diseases such as gallstones, bilious and dyspepsic disorders, liver complaints, headache and rheumatism, and to contrast the experience and definition of such disorders with démodé complaints such as smallpox, rickets and cholera. He is also concerned to explore the extent to which modish maladies were experienced, emulated and adapted, or vice versa contested further down the social scales, by the emergent (if difficult to define) 'middling sort' and nouveau riches of the Georgian era. Work broadly linked to this area, has included an article case study of on vapours ('Mrs Clerke's case', History of Psychiatry, 1990) and chapter on travel and mental afflictions in Richard Wrigley and George Revill (eds) Pathologies of Travel (Rodopi, 2000).