Fashionable Diseases - Events and Podcasts
If you missed one of our events, you can catch up here. Recordings of our guest lectures from workshops and the keynote speakers from our conference are freely available to everyone. Just click on the "podcast" link under each event. An automated prompt will ask for your email address and then send the recording directly to your inbox where you will have immediate access.
A Night at the Museum: Eighteenth-Century Dance, Fashion and Health
Took place on 21st November 2015
7-9pm
Laing Art Gallery
It was part of "The Being Human Festival"
The Fashionable Diseases team joined Northumbria University’s Eighteenth-Century Research Group to host an evening of period dance, fashion, medicine, design and comedy at the Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle. The event featured a street of sellers, each stall giving a sense of the various shops on an eighteenth-century street from the bookseller’s to the apothecary to the coffee shop. The Fashionable Diseases team in collaboration with Tyne and Wear Museums hosted an exhibition of eighteenth-century ball gowns and formal eveningwear in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century Gallery. And the evening was rounded off with a period-inspired comedy sketch, fan display and dance giving the Newcastle public a delightful evening in the eighteenth century.
Lecture: Gruesome Glamour
Fashionable Diseases of the Long Eighteenth Century
Took place on Thursday 15 October 2015 at Fairfax House
Diseases… fashionable? Professor Allan Ingram and Ashleigh Blackwood (from the Leverhulme-funded Fashionable Diseases research team at Northumbria and Newcastle Universities) investigated how painful and debilitating illnesses including melancholy, consumption and even venereal disease, had fashionable connotations during the eighteenth century. Asking questions about how diseases were imagined and experienced through narratives, representations and labelling, they explored the maladies of high fashion, as well as some of the less fashionable medical secrets that more than a few eighteenth-century figures kept under the bed!
Tuberculosis as a Romantic Disease:
Artistic, Historical & Literary Perspectives
Dr Helen Bynum (Historian), 'Tuberculous Lives - Conforming to the Stereotype?'
Anna Dumitriu (Artist), 'The Romantic Disease: An Artistic Investigation of Tuberculosis'
Took place on Thursday, 18 June 2015 at Newcastle University
Dr Helen Bynum, studied human sciences and medical history at UCL and the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, before lecturing in medical history at the University of Liverpool. She is the author (as Helen Power) of Tropical Medicine in the 20th Century', (Kegan Paul, 1999) and co-editor of the 'Biographies of Disease' series. In this series, she is author of Spitting Blood: The History of Tuberculosis (OUP, 2012).
Anna Dumitriu's work is at the forefront of art and science collaborative practice, with a strong interest in the ethical issues raised by emerging technologies and a focus on microbiology and healthcare. Her installations and performances use a range of biological, digital, and traditional media. She has exhibited in Barcelona, Dublin, Taipei, and London. She is Artist in Residence on the Modernising Medical Microbiology Project at The University of Oxford, and holds Visiting Research Fellowships with the Dept. of Computer Science at the University of Hertfordshire, and with the Wellcome Trust Brighton and Sussex Centre for Global Health Research. Her exhibition 'The Romantic Disease: An Artistic Investigation of Tuberculosis' premiered in London (2014) and has since toured to Amsterdam and Berlin. It entails an artistic investigation into Tuberculosis from early superstitions about the disease to the latest research into genome sequencing of bacteria.
This workshop was organised by the 'Fashionable Diseases: Medicine, Literature and Culture, ca. 1660-1832' project team, a Leverhulme funded collaboration between colleagues in History of Medicine at Newcastle University and English Literature at Northumbria University.
Visit this link to view the presentation and hear the speakers and question sessions
The Diseases, Health Risks and Phobias of Modern and Fashionable Living: Victorian Perspectives
Professor Sally Shuttleworth (University of Oxford), 'Fears and Phobias in Victorian Culture'
Dr Melissa Dickson (University of Oxford) 'Weak Nerves and Fashionable Women in Victorian Literature and Culture'
Dr Jennifer Wallis (University of Oxford) ' "Overheated apartments, balls, tea-parties, and feather beds:" The Risks of Nineteenth-century Fashionable Society'
Was held on Friday, 8 May 2015 at Newcastle University
Sally Shuttleworth, is Professor in the Faculty of English Language and Literature, St Anne's College, University of Oxford, and PI of the ERC funded 'Diseases of Modern Life: Nineteenth-Century Perspectives', a five-year interdisciplinary research project based at St Anne's.
Dr Melissa Dickson is a Postdoctoral Research Assistant on the 'Diseases of Modern Life' project, and focuses upon those diseases and pathologies derived from the Victorian soundscape and new understandings of the auditory experience, as well as on diseases of overpressure relating to education, nervous disorders and phobias.
Dr Jennifer Wallis is a Postdoctoral Research Assistant on the 'Diseases of Modern Life' project, and focuses on climate and health, and addiction in the nineteenth century. She is especially interested in how air was used in nineteenth-century medical technologies - from compressed-air baths to respirators - and how such technologies could alter the individual's relationship with their external environment.
This workshop was organised by the 'Fashionable Diseases: Medicine, Literature and Culture, ca. 1660-1832' project team, a collaboration between colleagues in History of Medicine at Newcastle University and English Literature at Northumbria University.
Visit this link to hear the speakers and question sessions
Fashion and Fashionable Diseases
A joint CloTHINK and Fashionable Diseases seminar
Speakers: Members of the Fashionable Diseases Team in discussion with the CloTHINK Research Group
Wednesday 18 February 2015, 12.30 - 2.00pm;
Room 202 Board Room, 2/F, Design Building, City Campus East Northumbria University
This was a seminar designed to open up a dialogue exploring the relationship between fashion (in both the specific and broad senses) and disease. "Fashionable diseases" (a Leverhulme Trust project emanating from the scholars of literature and the history of medicine) in history as well as in the present could actually be caused by fashionable clothing (tight-lacing causing consumption, for example). Members of the CloTHINK fashion research group and the Fashionable Diseases research project came together to ask what fashion can say about disease, what diseases were fashionable and why, and what diseases might have done to/for fashion. Although the fashionable diseases project team is examining the long C18th primarily, discussion about the contemporary fashion scene was able to provide contexts for thinking about fashion and disease throughout history and the present..
Communities of Interest: Fashionable Diseases
Part of the Northern Network for Medical Humanities Research Workshop
Dr Jonathan Andrews and Dr James Kennaway, Newcastle University
Friday 16th January 2015, 10.30am - 5pm,
Armstrong Building, Newcastle University
As part of a one-day conference workshop for the Northern Network for Medical Humanities Research seminar series, historians of medicine from the Fashionable Diseases project team Dr Jonathan Andrews and Dr James Kennaway discussed their work on patients' perspectives, to see to what extent elite cultural ideas of so-called Fashionable Diseases were reflected in actual experience.
Fashionable Diseases in Georgian Britain: 18th-Century Legacies
Professor Clark Lawlor, Dr Anita O'Connell, Ashleigh Blackwood, Dr James Kennaway, Dr Leigh Wetherall Dickson, Professor Allan Ingram (Northumbria and Newcastle Universities)
Tuesday 18 November, The Mining Institute, Newcastle, 6-8.30pm
From young ladies having attacks of the "vapours" to patricians suffering from gout, the Georgian era offers many examples of diseases that appeared to have associations with social, intellectual or emotional superiority. At the same time, there were doctors who strongly attacked the whole notion and who blamed the luxury of elite lifestyles for the spread of these medical problems. The Fashionable Diseases Project Team hosted an evening of talks and discussion exploring the idea of "fashionable diseases" in the long eighteenth century. Members of the research team discussed their work on the project, drawing on Georgian literature, culture and the history of medicine. The event was part of a series of events organized by Northumbria University's eighteenth-century research group for a UK-wide Festival of Humanities on "Being Human."
Fashionable Diseases: Medicine, Literature and Culture, 1660-1832
An International Conference
Keynote speakers:
Professor Helen Deutsch,
Professor of English
University of California, Los Angeles
"Diseases of Writing"
Professor Sander L. Gilman,
Distinguished Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences and Professor of Psychiatry
Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia
"The Fat Person on the Edgeware Road Omnibus: Fat, Health, and Fashion in the British long 18th Century"
Dr David Shuttleton,
Reader in English
University of Glasgow
"The Fashioning of Fashionable Diseases in the Eighteenth Century"
3rd-5th July 2014, Northumbria and Newcastle Universities
The Fashionable Diseases international conference considered the project's central questions of how and why certain illnesses such as melancholy, vapours, nerves, gout, consumption and biliousness were often perceived as fashionable in eighteenth century literature, medical texts and popular culture. At the conference, over forty speakers from around the world addressed these issues to an audience of over eighty delegates. A full programme is available on our conference page and several will appear in our Fashionable Diseases publications. To listen to the lectures given by our keynote speakers, follow the link to the podcasts.
Links to podcasts: Professor Helen Deutsch, Professor Sander L. Gilman, Dr David Shuttleton
Fashion and illness in Georgian Bath
Professor Annick Cossic, Professor of English, Université de Bretagne Occidentale, France
21st Nov 2013, 1-3pm Sutherland Building Boardroom 2 Northumbria University
Published at different times, Christopher Anstey's The New Bath Guide (1766), Tobias Smollett's The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771) and Jane Austen's Persuasion (1818) all testify to the emergence of new forms of social interaction, particularly on display in spas. The role of illness as an agent of sociability in Bath has been variously apprehended by Anstey, Smollett and Austen, who all three share a first-hand knowledge of a city, ironically nicknamed "the hospital of the nation" or, more positively, "the Queen of Watering-Places ". By offering a comparative study of these texts, this workshop interrogates the representation of fashionable diseases in three literary genres, themselves highly fashionable, the satirical letter, the epistolary novel and the novel of sensibility.
Disability and Fashionable Diseases in Literature and Culture
Professor Michael Davidson, Professor of Literature, University of California, San Diego, Author of Concerto for the Left Hand; Disability and the Defamiliar Body
Professor Stuart Murray, Professor of Literature, University of Leeds, Author of Representing Autism: Culture, Narrative, Fascination
14 November 2013, Sutherland Building Boardroom 1, Northumbria University, 11am-1:30pm
How do the complicated and contested concepts and fields of disability and fashionable disease relate to each other, if at all? How are they represented within the spheres of literature and cultural representation generally? This workshop explored the subject of disability and fashion with the help of two experts in the field of contemporary literature and disability studies.
Fashionable Suicides of the Romantic Era
Dr Michelle Faubert, Associate Professor of Romantic Literature, University of Manitoba, Canada and Visiting Fellow in English, Northumbria University
23rd May 2013, Room 121 Lipman Building, Northumbria University, 2-5pm
A workshop on Fashionable Romantic-era suicide led by Dr Faubert, the author of Rhyming Reason: The Poetry of Romantic-Era Psychologists and editor/co-editor Romanticism and Pleasure, the Broadview Press edition of Mary Wollstonecraft's The Wrongs of Women and Mary, and Volume Four: Medical Writings of Depression and Melancholy, 1660-1800. As part of her current research project on Romantic suicide Dr Faubert discussed the odd phenomenon of fashionable suicides - both fictional and real - in the Romantic period.
The theme of suicide was fashionable, even attractive,
to some in the Romantic era, as it suited the appetite for extreme emotions
favoured by so many men and women in this 'culture of sensibility.' 'Now more than ever seems it rich to
die,' John Keats intones in a seductive poetic expression of the Romantic-era
will to death. Yet, more broadly conceived, Romantic suicide has an inherently
contradictory quality, for it also played a major role in serious, influential
debates about human rights. The goal of the workshop is to explore the inconsistencies
in the Romantic-era view of suicide as, at once, fashionable and a basic
expression of human rights, including women's rights.
Poster
'Making Up People' Reconsidered
Professor Ian Hacking, Professor Emeritus in Philosophy, University of Toronto, Canada
15 May 2013, MEA House Auditorium, Northumbria University, 10:30am-12pm
A guest lecture and discussion with Professor Ian Hacking, the author of Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory, Mad Travellers: Reflections on the Reality of Transient Mental Illnesses, The Social Construction of What?, Probability and Inductive Logic and Historical Ontology, among other works. Professor Hacking explored how new scientific classifications such as multiple personality disorder and autism may affect experiences of them and thus give rise to a new kind of person and way of being. After listening to the workshop you may wish to read the following article: Ian Hacking, 'Kinds of People: Moving Targets.' Proceedings of the British Academy 151 (2007): 285-318.
The Practical and Not-so Practical Art of Fashionable Melancholia: From Black Bile to Hamlet
Professor Clark Lawlor, Professor Allan Ingram, Dr Leigh Wetherall Dickson, Northumbria University
28 February 2013, 'The Practical Art of Medicine Exhibition,' Palace Green Library, Durham University, 5:30-7pm
Professor Clark Lawlor, Professor Allan Ingram and
Dr Leigh Wetherall Dickson from the Fashionable Diseases project were invited
to speak at Palace Green Library, University of Durham as part of an exhibition
of key historical medical books from the library's rare and special collections.
The team presented a history of melancholia from its early links with humoral
imbalance to the representation of misery in the character of Shakespeare's
Hamlet and beyond, highlighting the themes of diagnosis and treatment that
were explored by the exhibition as well as its reputation as a fashionably
sentimental ailment in seventeenth and eighteenth-century literature.
Hypochondria and the Refashioning of Medical Uncertainty
Dr. Catherine Belling, Assistant Professor of Medical Humanities and Bioethics , Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University, Chicago
12 October 2012, Room 121 Lipman Building, Northumbria University, 3-5pm
A workshop on the history of hypochondria from the author of A Condition of Doubt: On the Meanings of Hypochondria. With particular reference to the eighteenth-century rise of pathological anatomy and the late twentieth-century rise of clinical ethics and patient autonomy, Dr Belling considered how the meaning of the term 'hypochondria' has shifted in relation to what medicine has considered certain. The paper was followed by a discussion on the changing shape of hypochondria through history.