Posts

The Diseases of Modern Life project is very pleased to announce that Dr Emilie Taylor-Brown will be joining the team on Monday 24th October.

This is a guest post by Dr. Jennifer S. Kain, a Junior Research Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London, and author of 'The Ne-er-do-well: Representing the Dysfunctional Migrant Mind, New Zealand 1850-1920'.

On 10th September 2016, the Diseases of Modern Life project was featured in the Dutch national newspaper Trouw.

This is a guest post by Dr Douglas Small, a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow in Literature and Medicine at the University of Glasgow and the author of 'Sherlock Holmes and Cocaine: A 7% Solution for Modern Professionalism'.

Dr Melissa Dickson's piece on the history of the stethoscope has been published on the Medium channel at The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities.

From telegraphs to television sets, new technologies have often been imagined as strange or magical in the popular consciousness.

We live, we are so often told, in an information age. It is an era obsessed with space, time and speed.

In 1873, a speaker at the Royal Dublin Society declared that 'many persons are inclined to deny altogether the existence of a weather-science'.

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

In the nineteenth century, natural history was an increasingly popular pursuit. As our sister project Constructing Scientific Communities is exploring, the 1800s saw the growth of several specialist organisations and periodicals devoted to the field.

In his book on machines and modernity in India, historian David Arnold rightly points out that 'big technologies' like the telegraph and the railways have received more attention from scholars than smaller, 'everyday technologies'.

Urbanisation increased dramatically during the mid-to-late 19th century, and modernity became synonymous with the swelling cities.

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.

In 1904 The Lancet considered the many risks to health posed by modern life. The collecting together of more and more people in the bustling spaces of the city was, they wrote, a perfect means of disseminating infection.

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.

It seems appropriate to post my final addiction-themed post of the year on New Year's Eve.

I've been doing a lot of work on lady secret drinkers recently (such as the eau de cologne tipplers I devoted a previous post to).

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

I've always felt uncomfortable around waxworks and dummies.

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

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'.

On 17 September 2015, in the course of a research trip to Japan, I had the pleasure of joining Prof Akihito Suzuki and a number of early career researchers at Keio University.

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.