Dr Melissa Dickson

Postdoctoral Research Assistant

Melissa Dickson worked for nearly 4 years as a Postdoctoral Researcher on the Diseases of Modern Life project, before taking up her role as Lecturer in Victorian Literature at the University of Birmingham. Her research as part of the Diseases of Modern Life team explored new ways of listening, and new understandings of the body’s physiological and psychological responses to sound and music in the nineteenth century.

She has a PhD from King’s College, London, and an MPhil, BA, and University Medal from the University of Queensland, Australia. She is the author of Cultural Encounters with the Arabian Nights in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2019) and a co-author of Anxious Times: Medicine and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (2019).

Selected contributions

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Something in the Air?

29 May 2016

I have never been able to help but scoff at the success of bottled water as a concept.

This is Your Brain on Speed

24 March 2016

The Australian television series, The Weekly, recently ran an exposé on the putative benefits of the profusion of whey protein powders currently being marketed as bodybuilding aids.

Who Let the Dogs Out?

02 February 2016

The phrase "black dog", when it doesn't bring to mind Led Zeppelin IV, is usually associated with Winston Churchill, whose favoured term it was to refer to his depression.

Requiem for a Cliché

01 December 2015

One of the hallmarks of the sci-fi horror genre is its tendency to generate instant clichés.

Call for Papers: Medicine and Modernity in the Long Nineteenth Century, 10-11 September 2016 at St Anne's College

12 October 2015

CfP for Medicine and Modernity in the Long Nineteenth Century at St Anne's College, Oxford 10th - 11th September 2016

Crackpot File Revisited

06 October 2015

Regular readers of this blog might recall that I have a file in my desk that is the repository of all the half-baked pseudo-scientific crackpot ideas that I have come across in the course of my research and filed under 'C'.

Be Still My Beating Heart

06 August 2015

One frequently made observation about the nineteenth century is that it was marked by a number of breakthroughs in medicine and the sciences which revealed forces that shape humanity.

(Fashionable) Diseases of Modern Life

18 May 2015

On 8 May three quarters of the Diseases of Modern Life team - Melissa Dickson, Sally Shuttleworth, and Jennifer Wallis - visited Newcastle University to meet with the Fashionable Diseases team and take part in a workshop.

Journal cover featuring the headline 'Psychic Pianist'

The Psychic Pianist

19 March 2015

There is a well-known anecdote about an appearance Peter Sellers made on Parkinson many years ago.

The Brain Child of Mariano Luigi Patrizi

13 December 2014

If the project of medical science may be described as the exploration of the human body, then surely its final, vastest, most mysterious frontier is the brain.

Illustration of the elephants Hans and Maguerite

The Dogs' Bach

21 October 2014

Making the news last week was the amusing story of the zoo in Belgium that recently captured a video of a family of elephants appearing to sway in unison to a performance of live classical music.

Air bath from thomson Ben Rhydding The Asclepiad

"Ourselves"

24 September 2014

Last weekend provided us with an exciting opportunity to introduce our research projects to a slightly different audience than the one we usually interact with: the ladies and gentlemen who participated in Meeting Minds.