Medicine and Modernity in the Long Nineteenth Century
St Anne’s College, University of Oxford
Saturday 10 – Sunday 11 September 2016
Saturday 10 September
9.00 Arrivals and registration
9.30 Welcome and Introduction
9.45 Keynote lecture: Christopher Hamlin, What is your Complaint? Health as Moral Economy in the Long Nineteenth Century
11.00 Coffee break
11.30 Panel sessions
Session A: The Making of Psychological Identities
Mikko Myllykangas, Suicide as a Sign of Modernity and its Criticism in Finnish Suicide Discourse in the 19th Century
Bernhard Leitner, The Mirror Stage of Pathology: Trajectories of Psychiatric Concepts in the Making of Modern Japan
Katariina Parhi, Dangerous Age of Nervousness: Modernity, Crime, and Legal Responsibility
Session B: Medical Marketing
Alice Tsay, Pills for Our Ills: Patent Medicine Marketing and the Formation of Global Modernity
Lesley Steinitz, Swallowing Modernity: Advertising a Nerve-Strengthening Food
Sophie Ratcliffe, “Giovanni’s got some splendid pills!” Daisy Miller and the ‘Virus of Suggestion’
Session C: Disseminating Scientific Knowledge
Andrew Mangham, William Gaskell, Sanitary Reform and the Diseases of Modern Manchester
Jeffrey Zalar, Strain: Catholic Reactions to Science in Germany, 1840–1914
Jens Lohfert Jørgensen, Bacteriological Modernism
1.00 Lunch
2.00 Panel sessions
Session A: Illness and Politics
Laurens Schlicht, The Revolutionary Shock: The French Revolution and the Medical Construction of the Modern Subject (France, 1800–1830s)
Alex Chase-Levenson, Sanitation and Civilization: The Eastern Question and the Plague
Daphne Rozenblatt, Political Origins of the Modern Psychopath
Session B: Maintaining Health Abroad
Jennifer Kain, ‘Few can benefit more than the over-taxed and over-worried brain worker’: 19th-Century Voyages for Health
Daniel Simpson, Poison Arrows and Unsound Minds: Medical Encounters in the Victorian South Pacific
Angharad Fletcher, Sex, Drugs and Suicide: Nursing Encounters on the ‘Frontiers’ of Empire, 1880–1914
Session C: Masculinity, Modernity, and Mental Health
Amy Milne-Smith, “I have Overworked my Brain”: Men’s Relationship to Work in Modern Britain
Philippa Lewis, An Outdated Emotion? Feeling Shy in fin-de-siècle France
Matthew Klugman, Football Fever – A Disease of Modern Life?
3.30 Coffee break
4.00 Panel sessions
Session A: Sick Landscapes
Erin Lafford, ‘Your vile fenny atmosphere’: Clare’s Fenlands and Climatic Susceptibility
Manon Mathias, Excrement and Infectious Disease in the Late 19th-Century French Novel
Keir Waddington, Drought, Disease, and Modernity in Rural Wales, c.1880–1914
Session B: Health, Disease, and Technology
David Trotter, Digital Disease: Communication in the Telegraph Era
Projit Mukharji, Metaphoric Modernity: Railways, Telegraphs and the New Ayurvedic Body in Victorian Bengal
Galina Kichigina, Electrical Therapy for the Heart: German Scientific Medicine and British Physiology. The Cases of Hugo von Ziemssen and John MacWilliam
Session C: Fatigue
Laura Mainwaring, Deficiency of the Vital Forces: The Rhetoric of Overwork in the 19th-Century Medical Marketplace
Susan Matt and Luke Fernandez, Focus and Fatigue: Cerebral Hyperaemia and the Perils of Specialized Knowledge in 19th-Century America
Steffan Blayney, ‘Drooping with the century’: Fatigue and the fin-de-siècle
5.30 Break
6.00 Drinks reception
7.00 Dinner in St Anne’s Dining Hall
Sunday 11 September
9.30 Panel sessions
Session A: Children’s Health and Disease
Mallory Cohn, Modern Complaints: Victorian Precocity and the Regulation of the Child
Steven Taylor, Imperfect Bodies: The Waifs and Strays Society, Childhood Disability, and Improvement
Jutta Ahlbeck, The Nervous Child and the Disease of Modernity
Session B: Illness, Identity, and Migration
Brad Campbell, Neurasthenia and the New Negro: The 19th-Century Psychiatric Origins of a Modern American Type
Sally Swartz, Migration, Dislocation and Trauma: The Case of Jewish Immigrants to Cape Colony during the 19th Century
Jessica Howell, Enervated India: Tropical Neurasthenia and the Fictions of Empire
Session C: The Body and Modernity
Agnes Arnold-Foster, Pathology of Progress: Cancer in 19th-Century Britain
Helen Goodman, Symptoms of Stress and the Modern Man of Science
F.E. Thurston, The (Re-) Discovery of Noise-Induced Hearing Loss in the 19th Century
11.00 Coffee break
11.30 Panel sessions
Session A: Physical Culture and the Regulation of the Body
Zachary Turpin, “Manly Health and Training”: Whitman’s Long-Lost Guide to Fitness and 19th-Century Anxieties about Physiological Purity and Perfectibility
Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Anorexia Nervosa: Modernity and Appetite
Alexander Pyrges, Corpulence as an Affliction of the Modern World. Medical and Popular Views in 19th-Century Germany
Session B: Nervousness
Sonsoles Hernández Barbosa, Diversification or Sensory Unification? Ideas around the Evolution of the Senses in fin-de-siècle Culture
Michael Guida, Sonic Therapy: Harmony for Disordered Nerves
David Freis, Preventing Mental Illness in One’s Sleep: Nervousness, Psychiatric Prophylaxis and the Invention of Mental Hygiene in fin-de-siècle Germany
Session C: Medical Practitioners
Sam Nesamony, Medical Philanthropy: ‘Medical Chest’ and ‘Touring Clinics’ of Missionaries in Colonial India
Torsten Riotte, Science, Technology and Individual Responsibility: The Professional, Judicial and Public Debate about Medical Negligence during the 19th Century
Carol-Ann Farkas, The Woman Doctor as Medical and Moral Authority: Nervous Disorders, Purity Campaigns, and Gender Relations in Helen Brent, MD
1.00 Lunch
2.00 Panel sessions
Session A: Rhythmic and Non-Rhythmic Bodies
Laura Marcus, Rhythm and Adaptation in the Machine Age
Karen Chase, Wynken, Blynken, and Nod
Josephine Hoegaerts, Victims of Civilization: Recording, Counting and Curing Stammerers in 19th-Century Western Europe
Session B: Addiction
Alessia Pannese, Sense and Sensibility in 19th-Century Addiction
Thembisa Waetjen, Habit-Forming Substances and Medicinal Modernities in Colonial South Africa, 1885–1910
Douglas Small, Cocaine, Technology, and Modernity, 1884–1914
Session C: Understanding and Managing Psychiatric Disorder
Kristine Swenson, Phrenology as Neurodiversity: The Fowlers and Modern Brain Disorders
Alfons Zarzoso, A New Medicine for the Insane in a Modern and Industrial Barcelona
Susan Sidlauskas, Picturing/Narrating the ‘Voluntary Boarder’ at Holloway Sanatorium c.1890
3.30 Coffee break
4.00 Keynote lecture: Laura Otis, What’s at Stake in Judging the Health and Pathology of Emotions?
5.00 Conference close
For more information: https://diseasesofmodernlife.org/conference-2016/
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