Working with 19th-century Medical and Health Periodicals

On 30 May Diseases of Modern Life will be co-hosting a workshop with fellow project Constructing Scientific Communities, on 'Working with Nineteenth-Century Medical and Health Periodicals'. The nineteenth century saw an explosion in the number of medical periodicals available to the interested reader. Publications such as the Lancet and British Medical Journal are familiar names to many of us, still published and widely read today. The period also saw a huge range of smaller journals appearing, as practitioners increasingly organised themselves into more discrete medical 'specialisms' towards the end of the century. The Asylum Journal, later Journal of Mental Science, for example, sought to bring together the knowledge of those working in the expanding field of psychiatry, whilst The Homoeopathic World provided a forum for discussion for those practicing homoeopathic medicine, and was read both by medical professionals and laypeople.

As digitization projects advance, an increasing number of these medical periodicals are becoming available to researchers. We are interested in learning more about the nature and methodologies of current research projects that involve working with these journals, as well as broader issues surrounding this kind of research. Our speakers will be asking questions about how to read periodicals, how to situate these materials within a broader historical medical context, and how to construct narratives based on periodical research.

Periodicals workshop, May 2015, programme

The workshop is now fully booked, but we will be tweeting throughout the day using the hashtag #medpers, so please do follow us at @diseasesmodlife or @conscicom and join in the conversation!