POSTGRADUATE MEDICAL HUMANITIES

2018 CONFERENCE

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UNIVERSITY OF EXETER, 7-8 June
Table of Contents
POSTGRADUATE MEDICAL HUMANITIES................................................ 1

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .................................................................... 3

PROGRAMME: DAY 1, THURSDAY 7TH .................................................. 4

PROGRAMME: DAY 1 CONTINUED ....................................................... 5

PROGRAMME: DAY 2, FRIDAY 8TH ....................................................... 6

PROGRAMME: DAY 2 CONTINUED ....................................................... 7

KEYNOTE LECTURE: DR. STEVEN KAPP ................................................ 8

Exploring Diagnosis: Autism and neurodiversity......................................................... 8

KEYNOTE LECTURE: DR. SARAH BULL ................................................. 9

Book-Made Medicine: Plasticity and the Uses of Medical Print in Victorian Britain ............. 9

FIXED: THE SCIENCE/FICTION OF HUMAN ENHANCEMENT........................ 10

CONFERENCE VENUE ..................................................................... 11

FIXED SCREENING VENUE ................................................................ 12

DINNER VENUE ............................................................................. 13

ABSTRACTS ................................................................................. 14

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 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The 2018 conference committee would like to thank the following for their generous
support:

The conference committee would also like to thank Cathryn Baker, Charlotte Juggins,
Barbara Dunn and Dr Matt Barber for their advice and support.

Front image: ‘Anatomical fugitive sheets’. In Hans Weygel, Auszlegung und

beschreybung der Anatomi (Nuremberg, 1573). Image courtesy of the Wellcome
Collectio

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 PROGRAMME: DAY 1, THURSDAY 7 T H

9:00 – 9:30 Registration

9:30 – 9:45 Opening remarks Thomas Bray from the Wellcome Trust: funding opportunities.
9:45 – 10:45 Keynote lecture Dr. Steven Kapp: Exploring Diagnosis: Autism and Neurodiversity.
10:45 – 11:00 Coffee break
Emily Gates: “Art lives on forever”: Artistic Activism and Depictions of
the American AIDS Crisis.

Alice Zamboni: A ‘Schilderkundige anatomie’? The reception of

Panel 1: anatomical knowledge among artists in the 17th century Dutch Republic.
11:00 – 13:00 Medicine in Visual
Arts and Popular Christine Slobogin: The BAPRAS Archive as a Space and Metaphor of
Trauma.
Culture
Calum Smith: The relationship between the medicalization of eating
and representations of corpulence in film noir and contemporary
American realist cinema.

Agnieszka Bill-Duda: Women’s reproductive rights in Poland: a critical

look at identity, media, and populist rhetoric.
Panel 2: Lucy Morgan: From wonder drug to feminist nightmare: Clomiphene
Reproduction and Citrate in the UK between 1961 and 2000.
11:00 – 13:00 Medical
Technologies Sasha Loyal: Using intersectionality to explore reproductive timing
within British South Asian communities.

Maria Larrain: Untangling Tongue-tie: Cutting Through the

Medicalisation of Breastfeeding.

13:00 – 14:00 Lunch break

Azita Chellappoo: Is racism a public health concern?

Elliott Reichardt: US Colonial Public Health and Biomedical Innovation

14:00 – 15:30 Panel 1: in Haiti from 1915-1934.
Public Health
Yijie Huang: A View from Peking’s Street: Drinking Water, Wells and
Hygiene in Late Nineteenth-Century Beijing.

Tom Ronan: Functional disorders in medical curricula.

Panel 2:
Bozhena Zoritch: Entangled story of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity
14:00 – 15:30 Medical Disorder (ADHD).
Approaches to
Disorders Elena Sharratt: Using Ian Hacking’s metaphor of an ‘ecological niche’ to
explore the emergence and disappearance of BIID.

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 PROGRAMME: DAY 1 CONTINUED

15:30 – 15:45 Coffee break

Mario Portugal Ramirez: “A war on dengue fever”: the securitization
of dengue fever outbreak in Bolivia.

Lu Chen: No Better Choice: The Certification of Smallpox Eradication

Panel 1: in China, 1973-1985.
15:45 – 17:15 Eradicating
Epidemics Sesan Johnson: Cholera Epidemics and Public Health Discourse in
Ibadan, 1970-1996: A Call for Research in Public Health History in
Nigeria.

Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow: Literature and the Atypical Special Interest as

Therapeutic Practice.
Panel 2: Chao-Long Jin: Crossing Two Cultures of Literature and Medicine: To
Medicine and the Lighthouse in the Context of Early-Twentieth-Century
15:45 – 17:15 Literature Neuroscience.

Marystella Ramirez Guerra: The unconscious and the soul in Carl

Gustave Carus’ Psyche: history of the soul.

17:30 – 19:00 Screening and panel Screening: FIXED: The Science/Fiction of Human Enhancement.
discussion
20:00 – 23:00 Dinner Cosy Club
Exeter

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 PROGRAMME: DAY 2, FRIDAY 8 T H

9:30 – 10:30 Keynote lecture Dr. Sarah Bull: Book-Made Medicine: Plasticity and the Uses of
Medical Print in Victorian Britain.
10:30 – 10:45 Coffee break
Ana Tomcic: Last walls are made of glass: trauma, culture and the
body’s metaphors today and a hundred years ago.
Panel 1: Botsa Katara: The Prosthetic Body: Abled, Disabled or Posthuman?
10:45 – 12:15 Medicine and the
Body Hannah Rogers: Automobiles and Abortion: An Exploration into the
Relationship Between Depictions of the Automobile and the
Female Body in Joan Didion’s Play it as it Lays.

Elizabeth Gourd: Narrating trauma: the role of witness in Greek

tragedy.
Panel 2: Alexandra Effe: (Dis-)Continuous Minds, Bodies, and Narratives.
10:45 – 12:15 Medicine and
Narration Marianne Quinn: ‘Keloid Scarring’ as a Narrative in Toni Morrison’s
Beloved.

12:15 – 13:15 Lunch break

Alfred Freeborn: What was ‘biological’ about the ‘biological
revolution’ in psychiatry?

Anna Kemball: ‘We got to tell this story again’: Storytelling,

Panel 1: Psychiatry, and the Medicine Wheel in Thomas King’s Green Grass,
13:15 – 14:45 Psychiatry Running Water.

Gordon Bates: Charles Lloyd Tuckey and the second coming of

British Medical Hypnosis.

Kate Docking: The Paths of Female Doctors and Nurses to

Ravensbrück Concentration Camp, 1933-1945

Beckie Rutherford: ‘Apart or A Part’? Disabled women,

Panel 2: Sisterhood, and the Women’s Liberation Movement in Britain,
13:15 – 14:45 Medicine and politics 1979-1992

Rhiannon Cogbill: Medical and Financial Entanglements in Dorothy

Richardson’s Pilgrimage

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 PROGRAMME: DAY 2 CONTINUED

14:45 – 15:00 Coffee break

Alex Serafimov: The Surgical (re)creation of Gender Roles – The
Case Study of Lobotomy.

Lauren Chatterton: The Medicalisation of Gendered Dress and

Panel 1: its Sexual History.
15:00 – 16:30 Gender in Medicine
Anna Jamieson: Fashioning melancholia? Crazy Janes in the
eighteenth century.

Davina Kirkpatrick: Fifty-two ways to deal with sudden and

Panel 2: unexpected death
15:00 – 16:30 Medicine and Creative Dr. Andrew Williams: The Boudiccae – 21st century mothers’
Arts voices- a short film.

16:30 – 17:00 Closing remarks

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 KEYNOTE LECTURE: DR. STEVEN KAPP

Dr. Steven Kapp works as a research fellow on the Wellcome Trust-funded project
Exploring Diagnosis: Autism and Neurodiversity. In October 2016 he joined Egenis to
study how conceptions of autism, neurodiversity, and support associate with identity,
lived experiences, and quality of life.

EXPLORING DIAGNOSIS: AUTISM AND NEURODIVERSITY

This lecture builds on Dr. Kapp’s research and participation in self-advocacy movements,
including first authorship on a study on autism and neurodiversity in Developmental
Psychology that presented the first known direct comparison of autistic and non-autistic
people’s attitudes toward autism. Dr. Kapp’s keynote features presentations from
members of the Exploring Diagnosis research project in Egenis (sociology) at the
University of Exeter. Dr Steven Kapp will share narratives from an upcoming book
featuring accounts from activists in autism’s neurodiversity movement.

As part of this lecture, Rhianna White will discuss an experimental social psychology
study on the effects on labelling adolescents with autism.

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 KEYNOTE LECTURE: DR. SARAH BULL

Dr. Sarah Bull is a Wellcome Research Fellow in Medical Humanities in the Department
of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. Her research
focuses on the histories of medicine, sexuality, and print culture in the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries. She has published articles on these topics in the Bulletin of
the History of Medicine, Book History, the Victorian Review and Porn Studies, and is
currently completing a monograph, The Business of Sexual Knowledge: Medical
Publishing and Obscenity in Victorian Britain.

BOOK-MADE MEDICINE: PLASTICITY AND THE USES OF MEDICAL PRINT IN

VICTORIAN BRITAIN

Scholars in the medical humanities draw on medical publications for information: we

use them to find out more about how health and disease have been understood at
different times, in different places, and among different populations; how medical
practices and policies have changed; and about medicine’s relationship with other forms
of enquiry. We use these documents understanding that they can be interpreted in
different ways and used for different purposes. Our research is less inflected, however,
by awareness of how knowledge about print’s plasticity has shaped the production of
medical works themselves.

This talk examines how understandings of print as a material and malleable medium
shaped medical communication in Victorian Britain. Medics, writers, publishers and
booksellers understood that medical texts were not fixed objects: they could be broken
apart and stitched together, remixed and remastered for different audiences and for
different purposes. And they knew that the use-value of medical publications stretched
far beyond their informational content: medical books and journals could act as
advertisements, as political statements, as display items, as fodder for masturbation.
This knowledge structured the operations of medical publishing during the nineteenth
century, making the diffusion of medical knowledge multi-layered and hard to predict.
At the same time, it influenced how authorities approached medical reform, using rules
about how to publish as proxies to regulate medical practice.

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 FIXED: THE SCIENCE/FICTION OF HUMAN ENHANCEMENT

A haunting, subtle, urgent documentary, FIXED questions commonly held beliefs about
disability and normalcy by exploring technologies that promise to change our bodies and
mind forever. Told primarily through the perspectives of five people with disabilities: a
scientist, journalist, disability justice educator, bionics engineer and exoskeleton test
pilot, FIXED takes a close look at the implications of emerging human enhancement
technologies for the future of humanity.Produced, directed and edited by Regan
Brashear.

Panel participants:

Professor Susan Kelly is Director of Research at the Department of Sociology,

Philosophy and Anthropology at the University of Exeter. She also serves as the director
of the Health, Technology and Society (HTS) Research Group at Egenis (ESRC Centre for
Genomics in Society). Professor Kelly’s research focuses on the development of new
biomedical forms of investigation and intervention into human bodies and beings, with
a particular interest in the arenas of reproduction (prenatal testing and diagnosis),
mental health, childhood disorders, and complex diseases.

Eleanor Lisney is a co-founder and coordinator of the disabled women’s collective

Sisters of Frida. She is an access advisor, public speaker, a content writer and secretary
of NUJ LIBNM branch. She has written for Media Diversified. Eleanor Lisney serves on
the British Council Disability Advisory Panel and the web team of the International
Network of Women with Disabilities. She is a co-founder of #cripthevoteUK.

Dr Andrew Williams is a consultant community paediatrician, medical historian, curator

of the archive at the Northampton General Hospital, playwright and filmmaker. In 2004,
he set up in Northampton the world’s first paediatric Virtual Academic Unit. The Virtual
Academic Unit works in partnership with tertiary centres both nationally and
internationally, helping to define new variants of some of the neurodegenerative
conditions for patients that he is managing as their consultant paediatrician. Dr.
Williams was an expert reviewer and contributor to the UNICEF sponsored ‘International
Charter for Ethical Research in Children’ (2013). He won the 2015 WellChild Doctor
Award.

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 CONFERENCE VENUE

Margaret rooms, Queen’s building, Queen’s Drive, University of

Exeter
Approximately a 16-minute walk from Exeter St Davids train station or a just a
few minutes on the University minibus service (Mon-Fri 07:45 – 10:30) which
departs from St. Davids every 15 minutes or so and is free of charge.

Approximately 12-minute bus journey from the town Centre or Exeter Central
Station (D bus).

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 FIXED SCREENING VENUE

The screening of ‘FIXED’ is at 17:30 at Lecture Theatre D,

Streatham Court.
This is just a few minutes’ walk from the conference venue.

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 DINNER VENUE

The conference dinner will start at 20:00 on Thursday at

Cosy Club, Halford Wing, Dean Clarke House, 1 Southernhay

Gardens, Exeter EX1 1SG

An approximately 23-minute walk from campus, alternatively the D bus goes

from campus to the town Centre, from which it is about 5 minutes to Cosy
Club.

Please be informed that the set budget covers food only – drinks have to be ordered
separately and paid for by the delegates themselves.

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 ABSTRACTS

Gordon Bates, Birkbeck, University of London: Charles Lloyd Tuckey and the second coming
of British Medical Hypnosis.

In the last years of the nineteenth century, the British general public and physicians became
fascinated by the healing potential of hypnosis. Its effectiveness and legitimacy was regularly
debated in the British Medical Journal and the Lancet even as gothic novels of the period depicted
it as a potent force for both good and evil. While the French neurologists Charcot and Janet are
routinely mentioned in the histories of hypnosis and by literary scholars of the gothic, the British
doctors have been ignored. Charles Lloyd Tuckey, who spearheaded the ‘New Hypnosis’
movement, is all but forgotten. He has never been the subject of a PhD thesis and is only referred
to obliquely by medical historians and the three waves of cultural theorists of mesmerism
including Alison Winter. Fin-de-siècle hypnotism has been the focus of particular attention as it
falls at a nexus of concerns about pseudoscience, the occult, evolving theories of the mind,
entertainment and fantasies of control. Most writers have conveniently ignored the gap between
European interest in Charcot’s work in the late 1870s and the British hypnotic renaissance fifteen
years later. CLT’s article on ‘Faith-healing as a medical treatment’ was published in the lay
journal The Nineteenth Century in 1888. It was a well-crafted, persuasive and convincing
description of the work performed by Ambroise-Auguste Liébeault in Nancy and was a wake up
call for the medical establishment. I will outline the themes of the paper and make the case for
its significance and the need for a reappraisal of the life and contribution of Lloyd Tuckey.

Agnieszka Bill-Duda, Concordia University: Women’s reproductive rights in Poland: a critical

look at identity, media, and populist rhetoric

Since 1993 Poland has made abortion procedures available to women only in the cases of rape
and incest, threat to the mother’s life and deformity of the foetus. On 3 October, 2016,
thousands of women protested a bill to ban abortions entirely. PiS (Law and Justice party, freshly
in power) withdrew the proposed bill following the force of the protests. In recent years, actions
of the PiS party have isolated Poland from the EU. From amassing power over media, to taking
steps to dismantle the autonomous power of the judiciary, the party has received warnings of
possible EU sanctions. The historical context of the party’s coming to power and its actions since,
is coterminous with women’s rights protests of 2016. In this presentation I will argue that a
particular identity crafting through government-controlled media platforms, through nationalist
and antagonistic rhetoric, have allowed for a climate where proponents of women’s rights are
forcefully othered. In this way, the identities crafted through state media necessitate that being
pro-life means to be pro-Polish. To side with feminism is to side against the dominant narrative
supported by the state and the Catholic institutions.

Rhiannon Cogbill, University of Birmingham: Medical and Financial Entanglements in Dorothy

Richardson’s Pilgrimage’

Dorothy Richardson’s thirteen volume novel sequence, Pilgrimage (1915-1967), is increasingly

recognized as a key text in the literary modernist canon. Its meandering, elliptical depiction of
the life of semi-autobiographical protagonist, Miriam Henderson, has induced scholars to analyse
its stream of consciousness style, examine what it suggests about women and the public sphere,

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question its treatment of nationhood and race, and otherwise engage with it in many interesting
and productive ways. However, relatively little work has dealt with Pilgrimage’s deep
engagement with illness and the medical, which is distinctly framed by an assemblage of
psychoanalytic thought, changes in medical practice, and inherited nineteenth-century ideas of
womanhood. My paper will take up this broad narrative thread running through the novel
sequence, attending particularly to gendered experiences specific to Pilgrimage’s temporal
setting at the turn of the twentieth century. I will argue that Richardson makes a claim about
the entanglement of the medical and the financial, drawing attention to the repeated, specific
textual links between her female characters’ experiences of illness and their financial instability.
I will further discuss how her presentation of this entanglement in Pilgrimage corresponds to
ideas put forth in her ‘Comments by a Layman’ columns for The Dental Record journal. Finally,
I will go on to connect these ideas with broader cultural conversations about labour and health
during this period.

Lauren Chatterton, Concordia University: The Medicalization of Gendered Dress and its
Sexual History

Cross-dressing had a colourful and controversial history in the 20th century. This paper reviews
how cross-dressing came to be of medical concern, exploring the ways transvestism was defined
and the social consequences thereof. Cross-dressing refers to any instance of someone wearing
clothing deemed inappropriate for their gender. The concept depends on a rigidly binary
perspective of gendered clothes. For males, to cross-dress is to wear clothing that signals
womanhood, such as skirts, heels, and accessories such as earrings or makeup. Cross-dressing is
a not a particularly popular activity, but it is widespread across time and place. Any society that
differentiates between men’s and women’s clothing is likely to have people who wear the “wrong”
ones (Bullough & Bullough 1993). As a disease category, cross-dressing is known as transvestism,
a term coined by physician Magnus Hirschfeld in 1910. The medical construction of cross dressing
as a sexual and/or gendered deviation from the “normal” has continued through the twentieth
century, usually under the umbrellas of psychology and psychiatry. Medical research was
concerned with what caused transvestism, whether it could (or should) be cured, and how
transvestites might be connected to other heavily medicalized terms: transsexuality and sexual
fetishism. In the 21st century, transvestism is better known as a pejorative than an acceptable
medical label. However, transvestic fetishism remains in the DSM-5. For some, cross-dressing
falls neatly into transgenderism, while others embrace it as a sexual fetish. In medical
publications, however, transvestism remains a symptom. As both sexual and gendered deviations
became more acceptable, and gender dysphoria replaces other medicalized genders, what has
become of transvestism? What does this mean for the cross-dressers the term concerns?
Reference: Bullough, V. L. & B. Bullough. 1993. Cross Dressing, Sex, and Gender. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press.

Azita Chellappoo, University of Cambridge: Is Racism a Public Health Concern?

There are several ways in which racism can affect health outcomes: for example, racist attitudes
held by medical professionals can affect the treatment patients receive, there can be differences
between racial groups in terms of access to healthcare and health-related resources, and some
racial groups may face an increased risk of bodily harm, such as injuries from police brutality.
The recognition of some of the ways in which racial disparities in health outcomes come about
has led to solutions such as calls for equality of access to healthcare.

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However, there has been comparatively little attention given to the way in which living in a
racially hierarchical society can result in long-term physical manifestations of disease. These
kinds of effects can manifest either directly (for example, through increased stress when
interacting with individuals from other racial groups, which may have long-term effects) or
indirectly (such as in the uptake of health-harming behaviours like smoking in response to
increased stress). I argue that this is a unique effect of racism on health that cannot be addressed
through improving equality of access to healthcare, as the inequality arises from differences in
experience that are unavoidable in a racially structured society. Additionally, these effects
cannot be decomposed into inequalities in socioeconomic status. Nancy Krieger (2005) uses the
term “embodied inequality” to link instances of social discrimination with bodily effects, and
therefore health outcomes. I build on and go further than this, to argue that a racially structured
society in itself leads to inequalities in health outcomes, that this inequality can deepen social
inequalities, and that current proposals to remedy racial health inequalities fail to address this.
Reference: Krieger, N. (2005). Embodiment: a conceptual glossary for epidemiology. Journal of
Epidemiology & Community Health, 59(5), 350-355.

Lu Chen, University of York: No Better Choice: The Certification of Smallpox Eradication in

China, 1973-1985

International and global health initiatives are at their most effective when policies are adapted
to the political, social, economic, and cultural diversities within nations where individual
programmes are introduced. Carefully and critically researched historical assessments of the
recent past can provide such important background material, which can help representatives of
international agencies negotiate work at all levels of governance. The history of the global
Smallpox Eradication Programme (SEP) is widely considered to be a successful example. The
success of the smallpox eradication has been widely documented and analysed, and the
important roles of the WHO and the big players such as the U.S. and USSR. The WHO encountered
some challenges on the certification of smallpox eradication when it comes to the countries with
political sensitivity, such as China. China was not a member of the WHO when the global SEP
delivered, but it was necessary for the WHO to certify China as smallpox free in 1970s in order
to announce this great achievement to the world. Although it was known by the WHO that the
rigor of the evaluation process decided the credibility of the certification of smallpox eradication,
the approaches used in the certification of China had to be subjected to the political tensions.
The process of certification of smallpox eradication in China suggested that the success of
implementation of an international programme was not only decided by the collaboration
strategies made in the national level, but also relied on the thoroughly implementation from the
local level. Such complexity can only be revealed by a careful analysis of unpublished papers
dealing with the day-to-day discussions among local authorities and field workers who
contributed to smallpox eradication at the grassroots level.

Kate Docking, University of Kent: The Paths of Female Doctors and Nurses to Ravensbrück
Concentration Camp, 1933-1945.

During the Second World War in Nazi Germany, a handful of state-employed female doctors and
nurses worked in the hospital at Ravensbrück concentration camp. These women gave poor
medical care to prisoners; they frequently administered no medicine or the wrong treatment.
Female medical personnel also engaged in practices that violated traditional ideals in medicine.
They assisted in the non-consensual human experiments that took place on inmates at the camp,
administered lethal injections to prisoners, and poisoned the sick with powdered substances. In
spite of their role in Nazi policies of persecution, these women have been generally overlooked

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by historians of the Third Reich. This paper aims to partly fill this lacuna by examining how six
female medical personnel came to work at Ravensbrück. It will argue that the paths which led
these women to the camp ultimately differed depending on their individual circumstances. While
some were forced to work at the camp, coerced by the Third Reich’s labour authorities, the
precise circumstance of their compulsion varied amongst individuals. Other women came to
Ravensbrück voluntarily, but this was not borne out of an ideological desire to serve the Third
Reich, but rather stemmed from the need to improve financial situations and the opportunity for
career progression. In detailing how individual women came to work at the camp, this paper will
more widely demonstrate how the third Reich’s policies of persecution ultimately came to be
executed by examining how people became involved with the regime in the first instance. Given
the concerning rise of the extreme right today, it seems ever more pertinent to analyse how
ordinary people can become involved in extremist regimes so that we can learn lessons from the
past.

Alexandra Effe, Giessen University; Visting Scholar at King’s College, London:

(Dis-)Continuous Minds, Bodies, and Narratives.

Medical practice primarily aims to preserve or restore the patient’s bodily and mental integrity.
Discontinuity, in this context, is an ailment and a deficiency. Yet, designating a mind or body as
broken implies judgment and standards of normativity. As research on identity has established,
selves and lives are neither linear nor unified, and fields such as medical anthropology, critical
disability studies, and trauma studies have contributed to bringing the physical and psychological
rifts and ruptures in the self to the center of research. From a different theoretical background,
poststructuralist accounts of subjectivity and language theorize the self as multiple, refracted,
relational, and uncertain. Cultural productions with a generic focus on the self have shifted from
traditional autobiography’s linear life narratives, to forms emphasizing physical, mental, and
biographical discontinuity. This paper analyzes literary depiction of disease in first-person
narratives, such as autobiography, memoir, or autofiction, asking how (dis-)continuity of mind
and body is mirrored at the level of narration, e.g. through structure and syntax. In so doing, the
paper explores the ability of fiction to capture and perform the lived experience of bodily and
mental (dis-)integrity. Ultimately, the paper also thinks about the potential and limitations of
different forms of life-narrative relevant for the field of the medical humanities, considering
genres such as case story, medical record, and fiction.

Alfred Freeborn, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin: What was “biological” about the

“biological revolution” in psychiatry?

This paper draws from interviews with psychiatrists and psychologists in the UK and USA who
began research projects in the late 1970s and 1980s which re-centred clinical research on
biological validators for psychiatric illnesses. The key historical bifurcation traced here is the
divergence in experimental cultures between earlier attempts by psychiatrists to performatively
realize the brain through electromechanical models and the experimental neurobiology which
focussed on in vivo attempts to unlock brain function. The experimental culture of the latter
proved politically useful for the psychiatrists of the 1980s in using an in vivo experimental design
which supported a reductive biological realism. I argue here that attention to the different
experimental cultures is an effective way to understand how the meaning of the biological in
psychiatry was transformed in this period. By also looking at how the theories associated with
these experimental cultures were popularized in “brain books”, comparing works such as Grey
Walter’s The Living Brain (1953) with Nancy Andreasen’s The Broken Brain (1984) these
constellations of concepts and theories will be contextualised in their political and social context.

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Overall, the “biological revolution” will be assessed as a moment in the shifting identity of the
late-modern psychiatrist, and as part of a longer historical attempt to construct a ‘biology of
mind’.

Emily Gates, University of Kent: “Art lives on forever:” Artistic Activism and Depictions of
the American AIDs Crisis.

On June 5th, 1981, the United States Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) published
a report that found the emergence of a rare lung disease, among other strange disorders, in five
previously healthy gay men from Los Angeles. By the time the report was published, two of the
five men had died, and over the next few days the CDC received a number of similar reports.
This occurrence, which seemed like an epidemic from a science-fiction film rather than a reality
in the modern era, was the beginning of the American AIDs crisis. The epidemic, which was
virtually ignored by the U.S. government, devastated the lives of thousands of Americans and
sparked nationwide outrage. This outrage became a useful tool as family, friends, and those
infected organized to spread awareness about AIDs and the government’s wilful ignorance. For
some, the best way to combat AIDs was to protest in the streets. Others found equally useful
ways to protest by producing meaningful works of art in an effort to preserve the stories of AIDs
patients and to communicate to the masses the devastation of the crisis. These works took many
forms, including photographs, film, documentary, as well as painting and sculpture, and led
critics to debate over which was the best way to represent AIDs. In this presentation, several key
artistic responses to the AIDs crisis, such as Nicholas Nixon’s People with AIDs and the NAMES
Project Foundation’s AIDs Memorial Quilt will be discussed in order to explore to what extent
these works preserve the stories of AIDs patients and also how they utilize their artistic medium
to continue the AIDs conversation.

Elizabeth Gourd, University of Bristol: Narrating trauma: the role of witness in Greek tragedy.

[…] You are spared the worst of these painful

events; since you did not behold them.
Nevertheless, in so far as my memory serves,
you will learn the misfortunes of that unhappy woman. (Soph. OT 1237-40)

It is a recognisable feature of ancient Greek tragedy that violence – and in particular, violent
death – was not presented on the stage (Sommerstein 2010, 30). Yet this is not to say that the
tragedies were violence-free: rather, the violence performed offstage is often narrated in
gruesome, vivid detail by some witness who has observed the whole event. Whether the action
is that of Pentheus being torn to shreds in Euripides’ Bacchae or of Oedipus stabbing himself
blind in Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus, every element is painstakingly illustrated so that the
audience may envisage the scene. In the above quotation from Oedipus Tyrannus, the witness-
figure impresses upon his audience that they cannot know the painful extent of the tragedy,
since they were not present (ἡ γὰρ ὄψις οὐ πάρα). Nevertheless, he is determined to help them
learn (πεύσει) what has happened, recreating the scene through his detailed verbal account.
Given what we now understand of trauma as preverbal (van der Kolk 2014, 43) or near impossible
to relate, this paper examines the seemingly dichotomous relationship between the harrowing,
unspeakable violence that occurs offstage in Greek tragedy and the articulate narration onstage
thereof. I aim to explore the function of this witness narrative: what is the dramatic effect of
giving words and voice to the otherwise stifled experience of trauma? And why must these
accounts be given in such nauseating graphic detail? This study exemplifies a wider movement

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towards using close textual analysis of ancient Greek tragedy to contribute to our modern
psychoanalytic understandings.

Yijie Huang, University of Cambridge: A View from Peking’s Streets: Drinking Water, Wells
and Hygiene in Late Nineteenth-Century Beijing.

This essay builds up a microcosm for investigating how Chinese maintained public health in the
late imperial period through theories and practices that were often downplayed or misunderstood
according to principals of Western hygienic sciences. I limit the scope of my research to the
drinking water, wells and water sanitation in late nineteenth-century Beijing. First, I examine
how Beijingers altered the main source of drinking water from the moat outside the city to the
wells down the city streets. By comparing with contemporary Western examples of seeking for
drinking water sources outside cities, I argue that Beijing’s local path of urbanisation and
hygienic experience varied substantially from that of European cities. Second, I focus on
Beijingers’ strict distinctions between water of different qualities and their unremitting pursuit
of sweet water despite great expense and inconvenience. I argue that the traditional idea of
weisheng (卫生) comprised the main motivation of public’s indefatigable pursuit of sweet water.
The prevalence of the idea weisheng transformed drinking sweet water from a way of preserving
private health into most Beijingers’ common pursuit, rendering practices of personal health
influence far beyond the personal sphere. Third, I explore shuiwozi (水窝子), the chief local
association taking full charge of well water supply. For sweet water was an expensive commodity,
owners of shuiwozi managed and protected their wells in various ways. Such protection, originally
driven by profit, effectively ensured the cleanliness of water drunk by numerous Beijing’s
residents. Thus, I argue that the commercialisation of sweet water profoundly contributed to
water sanitation in late nineteenth-century Beijing. I also argue that hygiene in the late imperial
China was not necessarily practised by government-dominated organisations with an explicit
understanding of hygienic science, but often by local groups out of diverse purposes.

Anna Jamieson, Birkbeck, University of London: Fashioning melancholia? Crazy Janes in the
eighteenth century Anna Jamieson.

Exploring the varying modes of ‘healthy’ and ‘unhealthy’ madness available for public
consumption during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, this paper will focus on
the cultural figure of ‘Crazy Jane’. Questioning fashionable concepts surrounding illness, it will
frame ‘Jane’ within a culture of spectacle, sentimentality and emotional expressiveness.
Ultimately, it will interrogate the newly feminised representations of madness that the period
proliferated, whilst stressing that these representations fell into two camps: the first, an
ameliorating, harmless and almost attractive form of melancholy; the second a sexualised, raving
and violent mania, often found within the form of the incarcerated madwoman. During this
period, the melancholic, lovelorn ‘Crazy Jane’ became a familiar sentimental trope, as her image
spread across visual, textual and material culture. Through plays, poetry, novels, ballads,
periodicals, chinaware, and miscellaneous items such as hats, ‘Jane’ became a popular figure of
entertainment. Not merely designed to entertain however, Jane also inspired pity, sympathy,
and sometimes even mimicry, as it became increasingly fashionable for members of polite society
to err on the ‘healthy’ side of melancholia. Through detailed analysis of a number of these
sources, yet to be the focus of historical study, I will question why Jane became a prominent
prototype for female madness, and consider the psychological repercussions that her
proliferation had upon common understandings of mental health — for both men and women. In
doing so, I will plot the ways that the madwoman became a figure through which sane society’s

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political and social anxieties could be made manifest. Addressing previously unexplored aspects
of the history of psychiatry, this paper will engage with themes of gender and sexuality as well
as recent debates within visual culture and museum studies, that consider the display and
viewing of suffering.

Chao-Long Jin, University of Exeter: Crossing Two Cultures of Literature and Medicine: To
the Lighthouse in the Context of Early-Twentieth-Century Neuroscience.

This paper examines the modernist writer Virginia Woolf's 1927 novel To the Lighthouse through
theoretical and cultural frameworks of early-twentieth-century neuroscience. Woolf had an
ambiguous relationship with the medical cultures of her day, especially with her one-time
attending physician Henry Head. Woolf was brought to Head due to her nervous breakdown
followed by an overdose of veronal in 1913. Many years later, having read To the Lighthouse,
Head proclaimed it the most wonderful book. Nevertheless, his opinion towards Woolf's novel is
still in want of explanation. In recent years, little research has explored Woolf's understanding
of the mind regarding contemporary neuroscience and cognitive science. The intellectual
resonance of Woolf's diary on illness and Head's research on the nervous system was first analysed
in Susie Christensen's doctoral thesis in 2013. However, Christensen still highlights the need for
further studies on how Woolf's fiction corresponds to Head's medical writing. Thus, this paper
investigates how Woolf's literary presentation of human perception creates a dialogue with or
challenges Head as a neurologist, with specific reference to Head's 1926 publication Aphasia and
Kindred Disorders. My aim is to probe the way that these two texts are interlinked and complexly
co-generative.

Sesan Johnson, French Institute for Research in Africa: Cholera Epidemics and Public Health
Discourse in Ibadan, 1970 – 1996: A Call for Research in Public Health History in Nigeria.

Existing works on cholera epidemic in Nigeria have focused more on its medical and
epidemiological aspects. However, detailed historical studies which focus on the spread and
interventions on cholera epidemics have not been carried out. Carrying out a detailed study of
cholera epidemics and interventions in Ibadan from 1970 to 1996 will look at intersections
between cholera epidemics and public health discourses by exposing and interrogating the
variances, dichotomies, connectedness, corollary and paradoxes between and/or among
ministries of health and non-governmental agencies as well the people and the communities.
This is the gap that this study intends to fill. Specifically, the study adopts Ibadan as a case to
highlight the fluidity and multiplicity of multi-factorial causes of the disease and multi-sectoral
responses to the disease. The study employs both primary and secondary sources of data. Inter-
disciplinary approach of historical analysis is employed in this study whereby information and
findings from cognate science disciplines particularly medicines, public health, and epidemiology
are sourced and used. The interpretation is both narrative and descriptive. Africa and African
historians need to refigure the image of history in public health particularly in our understanding
of diseases. Hence both public health professionals and historians themselves must wake up to
the idea that issues around public health and diseases are not only epidemiological but also
historical. Fundamentally, this study will help to explain public health discourse in Ibadan as one
in which Africans were/are actively engaged in choices, interventions and policies that are
shaping the direction of their medical futures.

Botsa Katara, Durham University: The Prosthetic Body: Abled, Disabled or Posthuman?

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The growing advancement of medical sciences coupled with an obsessive veneration of
technology has rendered the human body being perceived as obsolete, mortal, and inefficient.
The unhinged blending of technology with the body has drastically altered the experience of
living with a disability. Amputations and prosthesis have transformed into sophisticated electric
circuitry of metals, wires, miniature chips or drugs that promise a cyborgian or post human
efficiency that surpasses flesh and blood.I will argue how the pursuit of machinic perfectionism
of the body has resulted into an absolute dismissal of what it means to have and live with a
disability. The paper will demonstrate that the wave of image culture, capitalism and
consumerism has rendered the body itself as an emblem of disability that needs to be urgently
equipped to fight its limitations and incompetence. Amputations are not restricted to being
extensions to a disabled body but are memory and intelligence enhancing drugs or a third arm
attached to the existing two. The ramifications of this are negation of agency, irrationality of
affect, the loss of the singularity of the experience of being a prosthetic. Under the framework
of phenomenology and affect theory this paper will focus on the select works of Beckett, Melville,
and Coetzee along with sci-fi, cyborg fictions, and illness memoirs of prosthetics. It will
demonstrate how the relationship of the self with the body is beyond its functionality. Our
experiences, cognition, perception, and subjectivity are intertwined with physical body.

Anna Kemball, University of Edinburgh: “ We got to tell this story again”: Storytelling,
Psychiatry and the Medicine Wheel in Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water.

This paper will examine how Green Grass, Running Water (1993) depicts mental health using
indigenous strategies of storytelling. Thomas King (of Cherokee, German and Greek descent)
juxtaposes Native American and Judeo-Christian creation stories, trickster narratives, and
canonical works of American literature to indict the processes of North American colonialism,
including the pathologisation of indigenous political resistance and environmental activism. With
reference to indigenous literary critics (Paula Gunn Allen, Gerald Vizenor, and Thomas King
himself) as well as indigenous health practitioners, this paper shall explore Green Grass, Running
Water’s structural and thematic use of the Medicine Wheel. This model of health informs Native
American medicine and has, more recently, been adopted as a tool for indigenous literary
criticism. Given that the medical humanities have begun to actively explore diverse cultural and
political positions, I will emphasise the importance of considering an indigenous representation
of mental illness within culturally specific paradigms. I will then discuss the extent to which the
novel subverts Western narratives of ‘native prosthesis’ (Kaiser, 2015; an adaptation of Mitchell
and Snyder’s seminal theory within disability studies) and confronts Western representations of
Native American mental health. More specifically, I will focus on the unique, if overlooked,
position of the Four Indians as escaped psychiatric patients. Given that these four elders are the
novel’s primary narrators, I will discuss the implications that arise as creation stories and colonial
US history are remembered and retold through the lens of indigenous mental health.

Davina Kirckpatrick, Plymouth University: Fifty-two ways to deal with sudden and
unexpected death.

The paper embarks on a journey that addresses the abject borders of the body, as flesh (Voss,
2013, Kristeva, 1982; Weiss; 1999) It offers a glimpse, through a reflexive gaze, of the body as a
sexual subject. Through a combination of arts-based research, auto-ethnography and reflexivity,
this paper playfully explores sexual intensity as a way of re-finding a sense of power and control
and equivalence to the intensity of grief and loss following sudden and unexpected death. Where
does writing into and from our ghosts take us in our inquiries? The playful presentation of being
alive, dead and ghostly seems to create slippage between worlds – life afterlife, trace.”

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(Kirkpatrick in Speedy and Wyatt 2014:42). Stories provide infinite possibilities, and a multiplicity
of possible meanings that can provide “fruitful liminal space....to stand on the side of hope and
in a place of agency.” (Speedy 2008:16). There is a bridge between narrative inquiry/auto-
ethnography and creative arts practice, that prompts a confidence to speak in a variety of voices,
revealing what William James (1890:291) calls a “constellation of selves/characters/self
positions”, and what Haraway (1991:193) and Strathern (1991:126) call “partial connections”.
This paper threads across the bridge.

Maria Larrain, University College London: Untangling Tongue-tie: Cutting Through the
Medicalisation of Breastfeeding.

This paper explores the increasing problem of infant ‘tongue-tie’ (ankyloglossia) diagnoses as a
socio-cultural and biomedical construction. Tongue-tie is a congenital oral anomaly of the lingual
frenulum that can restrict movements of the tongue, and is considered to affect 3-4% of newborns.
In the English-speaking world, tongue-tie has become an increasingly popular diagnosis in
newborns when experiencing breastfeeding difficulties. Yet a critical anthropological approach
signifies how the phenomena is a divisive issue amongst healthcare professionals, parents and
women, and demonstrates how rates of intervention have increased as part of a broader
medicalisation of breastfeeding and infant feeding. I examine whether tongue and frenotomy is
a medical and surgical response to the difficulties faced by lactating women and the result of the
public health message ‘breast is best’ which puts pressure on women to initiate and successfully
breast feed. I will situate the significance of tongue-tie and frenotomy in cultures of modern
parenting, women’s selfhood and identity as mothers and primary caregivers, and infant nutrition.
I critically-evaluate how evidence is disseminated, accepted or dismissed by healthcare
professionals and parents alike and the role of social media in this process to unpack the
professional entanglements that have helped promulgate tongue-tie as a ‘problem’ that needs
correcting.

Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow, University of Kent: Literature and the Atypical Special Interest as
Therapeutic Practice.

This paper repositions both fiction and the special interest as models through which the autistic
individual can trace social behaviours. The autistic person and the creative narrative have been
medically constructed as incompatible. Such external polarization is largely based on the reliance
on theory of mind as a diagnostic tool for autism. The medical perception of deficient narrative
ability as an autistic identifier is a reductive practice which prevents the atypical community
from engaging with and producing literary narratives. This paper challenges such constructs by
demonstrating that both the creative narrative and the atypical special interests can function as
potential guides to the neurotypical world. The paper harnesses the creative narrative as a useful
reference for otherwise invisible social codes and conventions. Literary works by Henry James,
Edith Wharton and Alan Hollingshurst are demonstrated to be a provision for the atypical framing
of normative behaviours. Such minutely observed literature provides a fixed space in which
neurotypical dialogue and interaction can be studied and contextualised. Recognising the codes
and conventions, even within a historic society, can inform our understanding of current social
norms, just as dead languages colour an appreciation of our first language. The paper also
provides close readings from the researcher’s own novel; this work employs the special interest
as a prism through which an autistic narrator interprets the neurotypical world. The novel
demonstrates the creative and social utility of atypical subject focus. The specific focus common
to autistic individuals has historically been medicalised as obstructive to normative development.
In recent years, Affinity Therapy has begun to counter this problematic ideology by encouraging

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the special interest as an opportunity for communication and understanding. All the novels
examined here demonstrate that literature can both utilise the special interest of an atypical
narrator to the same effect and also decode social conventions.

Sasha Loyal, De Montfort University: Using intersectionality to explore reproductive timing

within British South Asian communities.

In the context of the current European ‘demographic crisis’- characterised by an increasingly

ageing population and shrinking family sizes - the question of reproductive timing and especially
reproductive ‘delay’ is of considerable interest in political, public and academic debates (Radu
& Radu, 2014). Such trends have prompted a number of studies to investigate the factors behind
reproductive decision-making, in particular the postponement of motherhood. Whilst white
women have been at the centre of public and academic discourses about reasons for delayed
childbearing (Walshe, 2013), women from minority ethnic communities have been silenced in
these debates. This work-in-progress study uses intersectionality as a framework to investigate
the ways in which ethnicity, culture and religion, and wider changing norms around family size
and parenting practices, might shape reproductive decision-making and perceptions about the
‘right time’ to have children in British South Asian communities. The advantages of using an
intersectional approach in research focused on ethnic minority groups will be highlighted,
particularly how it can be used to explore the ways in which complex ranges of social identifiers
and psychological attributes shape individual meanings. Limitations identified in current
literature regarding psychological research and the use of identity categories will be discussed,
along with suggestions as to how intersectionality as a theoretical and methodological framework
can improve the investigation into social categories and diversity within groups.

Lucy Morgan, University of Cambridge: From wonder drug to feminist nightmare: clomiphene
citrate in the UK between 1961 and 2000.

Clomiphene Citrate (sold under the brand name Clomid) was reported to induce ovulation in 1961,
and it is still used for that purpose (among others) today. It was the first ovulation-induction
drug to be widely used in the UK, giving infertility doctors the ability to ‘effectively’ treat
anovulatory infertility. However, by the 1980s the drug was being critiqued by feminist writers.
Given that Clomid has played a significant role in the treatment of infertility for over half a
century, it is surprising that historians have not yet given this reproductive technology any
attention. I reviewed work pertaining to Clomid in biomedical literature (from the British Medical
Journal and The Lancet) and feminist literature (from the Feminist International Network of
Resistance to Reproductive and Genetic Engineering website, Trouble and Strife, and Spare Rib)
in order to understand the development, testing, and early use of the drug. Throughout analysis
of these sources, I paid careful attention to how clinical trials, the drug, and its users were
mutually constructed. This analysis emphasises the importance of looking at technological
development as a long-term project, during which many actors and dynamics may alter the
trajectory of a technology. This form of history is proposed as an alternative to histories that
prioritize biomedical research, often at the expense of the experiences of users. In the case of
Clomid, the biomedical literature reduces women to their body parts and a list of ‘non serious’
side effects. By considering the user experiences presented in feminist literature, I reveal aspects
of drug development rarely discussed in biomedical research. Thus, this research provides the
first integrated history of the development of Clomid, incorporating both biomedical and user
perspectives.

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Mario Portugal Ramirez, University of Massachusetts Boston:“A war on dengue fever”: the
securitization of dengue fever outbreak in Bolivia.

Dengue fever is a common disease in Latin America. In 2009, a massive epidemic stroke Bolivia
and it was clear that the Bolivian public health system lacked human and economic resources to
face such problem. Soon, a massive panic started among capital cities. The dengue fever
outbreak was reported for the first time in one of the less populated Bolivian cities, but soon it
affected the whole country and put in danger neighboring nations. The media was an important
actor during the outbreak. They reported when the dengue fever started and when it ended, but
most importantly, they contributed to securitize the population, that is, a process with which a
state transforms a topic into a matter of security. In terms of health, it can address concerns on
global health. The media developed a discourse about the dengue fever, its causes,
consequences, and what the Bolivian Government did to fight against the problem. Therefore,
there was a narrative that we can disentangle through the following question: which were the
elements of the human security & global health discourse that the Bolivian media shaped in 2009
during the dengue fever outbreak? To answer this question, in this paper I will use a critical
discourse analysis to discuss how two Bolivian newspapers framed the securitization discourse
during the outbreak. I argue that the media had a central role to develop a discourse of
securitization that changed its focus from a domestic public health issue to a global health one.
This discourse on the dengue fever outbreak raised and combined three specific topics: a
narrative of fear about the consequences of an epidemic, internal migrants and poor people as
suspect communities that can transmit the disease, and the dengue fever as a war that must be
battled.

Marianne Quinn, University of Bristol:‘ Keloid Scarring as a Narrative in Toni Morrison’s

Beloved’.

This paper examines the depiction of scarring in Toni Morrison’s Beloved and illustrates how the
novel serves as a narrative for incorrectly healed keloid scars. The weaved, polyphonic structure
of the novel mimics the formation of the thick collagen strands found in keloid tissue. Relating
the novel’s suspended sense of time to Cathy Caruth’s studies on the belatedness of trauma
illustrates how the non-linear timeframe of Beloved reflects the experience of many suffering
from unresolved trauma. Central to both the novel and keloid scarring is overgrowth; both of
wounds and emotions, with many physical injuries developing into mental wounds. The character
of Beloved reflects several symptoms of keloid scarring, such as pain and delayed onset, with her
dominion over Sethe mirroring the loss of control and identity that many patients report with a
disfigurement such as a keloid. While it is a failure to degrade and re-absorb wound-healing cells
and proteins that results in keloids, in Beloved it is the failure of a family and a community to
break down and process the traumas of their past that prevents them from healing.

Marystella Ramirez Guerra, RWTH Aachen University: The unconscious and the soul in Carl
Gustave Carus’ Psyche: history of the soul.

The paper is part of a project that looks at the relationship between the medical debates on the
soul during the later 17th and early 18th Century between Albrecht von Haller and Christian
Wolff, and the concept of the unconscious that emerged during the Romantic movement. The
concept of the unconscious was made popular by Freud and his depicting of it as a part of his
psychoanalysis. Prior to this German Romantic thought saw in the concept the key to
understanding the link between the soul and the body. This was manifested in the writings and
art works of many members of the Jena circle. It’s nature, if it existed at all as some intellectuals

24
claimed, was difficult to define but most seemed agreed that it symbolised the non-material
feelings and thoughts that characterised most human endeavours; as such it had a definable
nature. The concept had first been written about extensively in the three-part biography of a
concept that the physician and painter Carl Gustav Carus had published in the early years of the
19th Century. His work Psyche; history of the soul and his paintings described as Seele Reinigung
(soul cleansing) will serve during the presentation as gateway to better understanding the origins
of the concept of the unconscious and how it was perceived by the romantic movement. This will
clarify the meaning the unconscious, the soul, and the psyche had within German medicine and
philosophy prior to the existence of the discipline of psychology and its adoption of the concept
as part of its repertoire for understanding the human mind.

Elliott Reichardt, University of Cambridge: US Colonial Public Health and Biomedical

Innovation in Haiti from 1915-1934.

Using a case study of rural healthcare in Haiti from 1915 the beginning of the American
occupation to 1935 the end of the official American withdrawal from Haiti. I examine how public
health & biomedical research had deeply symbiotic relationship with the goals of the US colonial
authorities. Drawing upon Mbembé theorising, I argue the “state of exception” imposed during
this time period enabled doctors from the US occupation to casually disregard the basic human
dignity of the rural Black Haitians they experimented on. The indifference to the humanity of
the Haitians they experimented on enabled biomedical innovation to thrive, as the tissues and
blood of rural Haitians could be easily harvested for experimental research, notably resulting in
the “discovery” of yaws as separate from syphilis. Second, I argue that biomedicine and public
health were excellent for justifying and executing the actual “civilising” the US occupation aimed
to complete. Using a system of rural health dispensaries, the Americans provided millions of
doses of quinine and salvarsan (treatment for yaws) that provided rapid and effective treatments
of the common infectious diseases in Haiti. However, the imbued their biotechnical knowledge
with symbolic meaning, believing that their medicines would transform the culture of those who
metabolised it. In tandem, public health research support beliefs that rural Haitians were “filthy”,
“disease ridden” and “ignorant”, while simultaneously using such knowledge to the materially
dismantle and modify family structure, work practices and other features of their social lives to
“civilise” them. Biomedicine, I argue has historically a deeply symbiotic relationship to
colonialism and was routinely weaponised, problematically, I conclude contemporary discussions
of biomedicine tend to possess an “amnesia” neglecting the colonial origins of a wide variety of
public health and biomedical practice and their legacy in contemporary medical practice.

Hannah Rogers, University of Kent: Automobiles and Abortion: An Exploration into the
Relationship Between Depictions of the Automobile and the Female Body in Joan Didion’s
Play it as it Lays.

Within this paper, I will examine the relationship between depictions of the automobile and
female body experience within Joan Didion’s 1970 novel, Play it as it Lays. In the novel, Didion
creates a purposefully one-dimensional setting, created by frequent mention to place names
mapped together by highways and freeways. I wish to explore the significance of this
cartographic landscape in relation to the female body, interrogating the geographical and
emotional space that exists between the technological advancements of the Cold War period and
female body experience. I will do this by comparing Didion’s presentation of the automobile with
her depictions of female fertility, exemplified by Maria’s enjoyment of driving on the freeway
and her pregnancy and backstreet abortion. I am particularly interested in the role of the
automobile in facilitating the west coast film culture that permeates the novel, examining the

25
ways in which such a culture reduces the female body to a cosmetic image. The juxtaposition
that Didion creates between this portrayal of the female body and the actual experience of her
characters suggests that there is a vast, and oftentimes detrimental, chasm between the
advancement of technology in the Cold War period and the quality of women’s healthcare. By
framing this paper within the context of the Women’s Health Movement, I will draw attention to
the ways in which Play it as it Lays can be read as a novel that questions the effectiveness of
women’s healthcare, as well as challenging the cultural discourses on women’s bodies that were
created by Hollywood culture in a post-war United States.

Tom Ronan, University of Cambridge: Functional disorders in medical curricula.

In this paper I make a case for the greater inclusion of medical humanities in medical school
curricula, with particular regard to the benefits that this would bring to the understanding of
functional disorders. Numerous commentators have described the ways in which the humanities
have the capacity to make doctors more empathic, reflective, and thoughtful, or better able to
engage with illness as a narrative entity. Empathy and professionalism are undoubtedly important
tools in the management of functional disorders. However, I hope to frame the utility of the
medical humanities from a slightly different angle. I argue that nosology deserves a place in the
medical curriculum, beside material looking at the history and philosophy of medicine. Concepts
of disease categorisation are acquired osmotically through medical school, though I argue that a
more explicit pedagogical approach would pay dividends. Functional disorders, one such category
of disease, are symptom clusters defined by the absence of clear biomarkers or
pathophysiological mechanisms. As such, they often accrue stigma from clinicians who dismiss
patients’ symptoms as imagined or purely psychological. Psychological factors undoubtedly play
a role, but progress cannot be made unless doctors are able to grapple with the complex interplay
of mental and physical factors, and to relay this to patients in a way that is informative and non-
judgemental. Stigma could be diminished if students were encouraged to think more critically
about the nature and limits of medical knowledge. By looking back through the history of medical
science, they would develop an appreciation of the ways that the boundaries, categories, and
definitions of disease tend to move and morph over time. Future doctors would be better
equipped to with the skills needed to epistemically analyse current medical knowledge, and to
consider the ways in which this knowledge can be applied to everyday clinical encounters.

Beckie Rutherford, University of Warwick:‘Women with Disabilities – we go to meetings too!’

Disabled women and the Women’s Liberation Movement in Britain, 1979-1992.

Historical scholarship on the Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM) in Britain is still in its infancy
and much of the current debate is led by the generation of women who drove the movement
itself. The approaching 50th anniversary of the first national WLM conference (held in Oxford in
1970) calls for some prudent reflection on the cultural legacy of the WLM; and specifically, one
that addresses both its accomplishments and shortcomings from the perspective of marginalised
subjects. This paper will contribute to this by exploring the experience of disabled women active
in the WLM through an examination of the coverage of disability issues by the iconic feminist
journal, Spare Rib between 1979 and 1992. The politicization of disability gained traction in
Britain in the mid-1970s in line with growing recognition of the social model of disability. There
are clear parallels between the social model and the principles of the WLM which similarly
advocated the social construction, rather than biological determination of women’s identity.
From the late 1970s the intersection of disability issues and feminist politics was given a
consistent platform in the pages of Spare Rib. I will highlight the correlation between the seven
official demands of the WLM (formulated around issues of equal pay, equal opportunities,

26
sexuality, reproductive rights etc.) and the specific content of Spare Rib features that drew
attention to disability issues. This will demonstrate that both the alliances and tensions between
the disabled and non-disabled feminist community challenge the perception of a demographically
homogenous Women’s Liberation Movement. In spite of the (arguably tokenistic) inclusion of
disabled women’s issues in the pages of Spare Rib, the sources themselves raise the important
question of how well integrated the voices of disabled women were within the WLM as a whole.

Alex Serafimov, University of Nottingham: The Surgical (re)creation of Gender Roles. The
Case Study of Lobotomy.

During my research into the lobotomy procedure, a brain operation for mental disorder carried
out on over 50,000 people in North America and around 15,000 in the UK alone, I have uncovered
novel evidence that it intentionally functioned as a way to impose gender roles. The performance
of “proper” gender roles could be inculcated in patients because the procedure often led to
passivity, apathy and regression, creating what doctors called the “golden opportunity” to
“retrain” the patient into the gendered behaviours they had been failing to carry out with little
resistance. The specific gender roles which lobotomy aimed to (re)create in women were the
desire and ability to carry out household work, to be sexually available for their spouses, while
at the same time reducing “promiscuity” and emotionality. In men, the gender roles which were
encouraged were, conversely to women, sexual confidence and assertiveness, and the ability and
desire to work, be productive and provide for the family as the “breadwinner”. In examining the
case study of lobotomy, I have given special attention to the experiences of women, as they
made up two-thirds of lobotomy cases and seemed special “targets” of the procedure. For
instance, in many disturbing examples, disgruntled husbands are described in the literature as
coercing their wives into the operation in large part because they thought their spouses were
failing in their “duty” to be an emotionally stable wife, mother, housekeeper and sexual partner.
However, I have also amassed new evidence that lobotomy functioned as a way to enforce
specific forms of traditional masculinity. Thus, informed by critical and feminist approaches, I
will argue that the lobotomy functioned as an example of far-reaching medical social control,
understood as how medical means are employed to minimise or eliminate “deviant” behaviour
while encouraging socially expected and acceptable behaviour. This claim is evidenced by a
critical discussion of the theory and practice of the lobotomy procedure, is informed by an
extensive reading of primary and secondary medical literature, and is illustrated with reference
to various patient cases.

Elena Sharratt, University of Exeter: Using Ian Hacking’s metaphor of an ‘ecological niche’
to explore the emergence and disappearance of Body Integrity Identity Disorder.

Body Integrity Identity Disorder (or BIID) refers to a rare psychological condition wherein the
individual sufferer feels as if they were born in an incorrectly abled body and thus has an
overwhelming desire to become disabled. This diagnosis was initially coined in 2005, and,
following this, it was proposed for the 2012 revision of the DSM. At the time, and, perhaps
inevitably, this proposal prompted both widespread interest and heightened concern from
clinicians, bioethicists, potential sufferers and the general public alike. Significantly however,
this attention was soon revealed to be both premature and unnecessary. When the DSM was
finally updated, BIID was not included and, shortly thereafter, it all but disappeared from the
cultural and medical horizon. In this paper I examine BIID as a phenomenon which I see as
intrinsically contingent upon the conditions of this recent historical moment. In relation to this,
I ask two interconnected questions. Firstly, why did this seemingly strange and irrational
‘disorder’ emerge to begin with and, secondly, why, after becoming relatively established, did

27
it, just as dramatically, disappear again? In order to address these questions, I utilise the work
of Ian Hacking. Within his work, Hacking has suggested that, for a ‘transient mental illness’ to
emerge within a particular culture, it must find its place within an ‘ecological niche’ comprised
of four key ‘vectors’. In this paper, I empirically explore the applicability and limits of this
metaphor as it relates to BIID. In order to do so, I draw upon data gathered through archival
research within an online community for BIID sufferers.

Christine Slobogin, Birckbeck, University of London: The BAPRAS Archive as a Space and
Metaphor for Trauma.

This paper will explore histories and definitions of trauma as they relate to the World War II
surgical drawings of Dickie Orpen (1914-2008), a student of Slade professor Henry Tonks and
daughter of portraitist William Orpen. From 1942 to 1945, Dickie Orpen followed Tonks’s World
War I example by observing and depicting wartime plastic surgeries, creating over two thousand
pencil and pen drawings. I intend to differentiate between physical and psychological trauma—
discussing which of these two categories, if either, can be read in Orpen’s drawings and
sketchbooks. This paper will focus on detailed visual analysis of several of Orpen’s pencil
portraits of facially-wounded patients, using them to explore historical and contemporary
meanings of trauma as described by physicians and scholars such as William Sargant, Allen Young,
and Cathy Caruth. Going beyond a theoretical approach, this presentation will utilise in-depth
archival research to argue that the various narratives that arise from the necessary structure and
organisation of surgical drawings mirror the definitions and treatment of trauma from World War
II to the present. Through analysing the configuration of the Dickie Orpen archival collection,
through the use of several key definitions of trauma, and through closely looking at Orpen’s
images themselves, this paper will hypothesise that Orpen’s work defines trauma as a historically
specific concept, one that depends on social context, but one that is also different for each
person. The artistic composition and archival organisation of her works show that trauma is a
type of both mental and physical pain that continually haunts and returns, a wound that cannot
be relegated to the past.

Calum Smith, University of Cambridge: The relationship between the medicalisation of eating
and representations of corpulence in film noir and contemporary American realist cinema.

Ed Cornell, the sinister detective in I Wake Up Screaming (1941), claims that nobody could have
feelings for “a worm like me”. He blames his undesirability on his corpulence. Separated by 68
years and genre boundaries, in Precious (2009), Claireece ‘Precious’ Jones’ laments: “Momma
said I can’t dance. Plus, she said who wants to see my big ass dancing anyhow”. Like Cornell, she
holds that her undesirability is caused by her corpulence. That these characters both associate
corpulence with undesirability is far from accidental. Despite their plot, stylistic, and contextual
differences, both film noir and contemporary American realist cinema utilize corpulent bodies
in identical ways. Corpulence is equated with the same morally problematic characteristics in
both genres. This is a result of the particular way that food and eating have been medicalised
over the course of the last century. That food came to be understood as constituted primarily by
‘calories’, and that bodies consequently came to be viewed as mechanomorphic entities for
whom food was deemed to be nothing more than a ‘fuel’ has had the consequence that
maintaining a ‘healthy’ body size is deemed the responsibility of the individual. If you are ‘fat’,
the argument goes, the only person to blame is yourself. It is this assumption which underpins
the specific representations of corpulent bodies in film noir and contemporary American realist
cinema. I trace two ways that the corpulent body is utilised in the film genres discussed, and
explain how they are both dependent on the assumption that ‘fat’ individuals are ‘fat’ because

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they cannot control their appetites. Reasons why this view remains widespread, despite
arguments that it oversimplifies the relationship between corpulence and food, are also
discussed. In so doing, I aim to contribute to a wider discussion on the relationship between
health, medicine, and popular culture.

Ana Tomcic, University of Exeter: Last walls are made of glass: trauma, culture and the body's
metaphors today and one hundred years ago.

In 1919 the American poet Hilda Doolittle arrived on the Scilly Isles to recover from a series of
tragic events which had conditioned her experience of World War I. Her father and brother were
among the war victims and she had just overcome an attack of influenza that had nearly killed
herself and her new-born child. For H.D., the following years were marked by a series of visions
or psychic episodes. The Scilly Isles hosted one such vision, the so-called jelly-fish experience.
The author described it as a feeling of seeing things underwater, as if encapsulated by a
protective cap or glass dome. Years later, when H.D. became Freud’s patient (in 1933), she
would appropriate his interpretation of the event and turn it into the foundation of a complex
personal mythology. Ironically, just as she and Freud were going to discuss the significance of
war trauma in the genesis of her vision, a new war was looming on the horizon. In 2017 The New
Yorker published an article about refugee children in Sweden who, faced with the prospect of
deportation, would fall into a sleep-like state in which they would persist, without waking, for
months. One of the teenagers who eventually managed to recover disclosed that his time in bed
was accompanied by a hallucination. He felt he was “in a glass box with fragile walls, deep in
the ocean”. If he spoke or moved, the glass would shatter. Both culture critics and doctors quickly
became interested in this experience. Many wondered whether the type of physical reaction had
anything to do with the children’s cultural background. Many more noted the uncanny parallels
to the psychosomatic disorders of one hundred years ago, the kinds Freud would have dealt with.
Yet what does the common experience of the Russian refugee boy and the American poet tell us
about the universality of the body’s organic metaphors and its reactions in states of trauma,
desolation and helplessness? This paper will offer insight into H.D.’s experience and its cultural
interpretation in order to examine the causes and consequences of its recent repetition and what
this may teach us about the human body, its defence mechanisms and the stake of culture in the
process of healing.

Andrew Williams : The Boudiccae – 21st century mothers’ voices – a short film

‘The Boudiccae’ is a 21st century project created firstly as a 9 voiced play and now as a short
film (32 minutes) based around 4 such voices. It is a performance piece of interlocking
monologues of Northamptonshire (UK) mothers who have children with special needs. It
encapsulates what are the principal child health issues today; such managing chronic evolving
complex disability, palliative care, child adoption and acceptance of children with complex
needs by their non-disabled peers. It highlights the families’ perspective and what they
encounter when raising a child with complex health needs. I hope this film will teach compassion
in the light of the Francis Report (2013).2 Its target audience is trainee healthcare professionals
(medical, nursing, health visiting) whose limited experience of life means they have little to
draw on when faced for the first time with children with complex needs and their families. As
part of this educational aspiration, the film is being shown to trainee health care professionals
in the East Midlands. The film was produced by RIG Film Productions. The script was devised by
Andrew N. Williams and the screenplay written by Andrew N. Williams and Darren White. The
director is Darren White. Northampton General Hospital Charitable Funds, Waitrose Community
Fund (2 appeals), the Virtual Academic Unit and an anonymous donor funded the film.

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Alice Zamboni, Courtauld Institute of Art: A ‘schilderkundige anatomie’? The reception of
anatomical knowledge among artists in the 17th century Dutch Republic.

In his speech on the Necessity of Anatomy (1634), Dutch physician Jan van Beverwijk (1594-1647)
emphasised that anatomy was indispensable not only to medical practitioners, but also to artists
who aspired to master the depiction of the human body. Medicine and art were then perceived
as distinctive fields intersecting in the study of ‘ontleding’ (anatomy), whose knowledge was
exploited to different ends: to heal and to depict the body. However, such diversity in scopes
elicits questions around the signification that the practice of anatomy and its semantics acquired
within artistic and medical circles. This paper proposes to assess the circulation of knowledge of
human anatomy in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic through a focus on treatises
discussing and visualising the human body conceived by and for artists. The manuals by the
painter Samuel van Hoogstraten (1678) and book publisher Willem Goeree (1682) yield insights
into their elaboration of a ‘schilderkundige anatomie’: an ‘artistic’ anatomy befitting artists’
education, yet visually and textually indebted to coeval medical studies. Art historians
traditionally regard illustrated medical volumes stemming from the collaboration of draughtsmen
and physicians as evidence of artists’ engagement with anatomy. Such cooperations were,
however, rare in the seventeenth-century Netherlands. This paper shall argue that illustrated
anatomy books for artists illuminate a different facet of their dialogue with medical knowledge.
Within the thriving Dutch editorial market, at a time when copperplate engraving gave new
impulse to book illustration, the comparison of anatomy manuals for artists and physicians
highlights the significance of books as powerful tools for knowledge exchange. The comparison
of printed illustrations from these volumes allows us to interrogate the epistemic role of images
in art and medical practice, and assay similarities in visual thinking beyond the differences in
the ‘artistic’ and ‘medical’ understanding of that multifaceted, necessary knowledge of anatomy.

Bozhena Zoritch, Birkbeck, University of London: Entangled story of Attention Deficit

Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) .

ADHD is a common neurodevelopmental disorder in children which is more recently being

recognised in adults as well. Although a description of difficulties with attention affecting
education has been described by Alexander Crichton as far back as 1798, it is in the last 50 years
that the diagnostic label of ADHD has dramatically increased to the point of being assigned to 9
percent of school age children in the USA. Prescriptions of medication for ADHD has paralleled
the increase in diagnosis. Assessing effectiveness of diagnosis, treatment, genetic markers, brain
morphology and environmental triggers has resulted in high volume of research. However, there
is still paucity of ethnographic and qualitative research looking at lived experience of having a
child with ADHD. This study is an analysis of families’ narratives as well as teachers’ and health
professionals’ narratives in order to understand the factors within culture and society in which
children live that results in an impairment concept used to confirm ADHD diagnosis. In addition,
as evidence based medicine has limitations in delivering effective health care, parents’
experience of treatment for ADHD is explored in order to understand the factors which determine
why and when the treatment is effective. Entanglement narrative including historical, biological,
cultural and environmental factors is created in an attempt to avoid medical a non-medical
model locking horns and resulting in binary (op)position. Critical story of ADHD using medical
humanities methodology tracking social change and families’ narratives should go hand in hand
with neuroscience and trials of treatment research. Reinvented mantra of quality improvement
in healthcare should benefit from this entanglement narrative so a string of practical suggestion
is also given.

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