PhD Presentation Day

On Tuesday, February 1st, I’ll be giving a 15 minute presentation of my work-in-progress to fellow Edinburgh 1st-year PhDs. The talk is tentatively entitled: “Dissecting the Soul: Medical Theory and Religious Debate during the Scottish Enlightenment”. I’m using it as a chance to present my current thinking about—and motivation for—my thesis topic to a non-specialist audience.

I hope to explain why a focus on the soul is rich with possibilities, especially in a medical context. I will provide a sense of the different implications it has for various fields of inquiry in the eighteenth century. I will then take a particular example in the medical context and show how it relates to a broader religious framework, thereby also showing how labelling the Enlightenment as an age of increasing secularisation and ‘rationality’ is misleading. Or at least, that’s the plan.

LitSciMed Conference – Summary Thoughts

The first event of the LitSciMed Conference is now over. I am writing this from an Edinburgh cafe, as I reflect upon the experience.

While not every session or lecture was directly relevant to my own field of research, the conference was, overall, quite valuable, especially for the connections I’ve made with fellow students and academics. I think that’s where its real worth lies. The intellectual content of the talks was certainly stimulating, and it was good to see how others approached their own research. But I suspect I’ll look back on my time at St. Deiniol’s and remember the conversations I had outside of the official sessions and talks as being the most helpful and fruitful.

I think the next event, 25-27 March 2010 in London, might be worth applying for as well, though there’s no guarantee that I’ll be awarded a spot (I am not AHRC-funded). But it’s worth a shot.

The teaching team will include:

Simon Chaplin (RCS)

Jane Darcy (KCL)

Brian Hurwitz (KCL)

Frances Larson (Durham)

Ross McFarlane (Wellcome Library)

Jenn Philips-Bacher (Wellcome)

Carol Reeves (Wellcome)

Sharon Ruston (Salford)

William Schupbach (Wellcome)

Alannah Tomkins (Keele)

Neil Vickers (KCL)

Day 1: Bibliographic Tools in Literature, Medicine and Science Interdisciplinary Research (Wellcome Library).

Day 2: How to do Meaningful Interdisciplinary Research Linking Literature and Medicine (King’s College, London).

Day 3: Literature, Medicine, and Material Culture (Royal College of Surgeons)

LitSciMed Conference – Day Five (Final Day)

The Day in Manchester (Mosi & John Rylands Library)

We headed out early to take a coach from Hawarden to Manchester. I was keen on seeing the city because it was essentially my first foray into northern England. Upon arriving, my first impression of Manchester was that it was a bit like Boston. Now, this may have had something to do with all the snow on the ground; but not entirely. There was a Bostonian brick and industry feel about the place. And that, of course, makes sense, given both Manchester’s and Boston’s histories.

We began at MOSI – Manchester’s Museum of Science and Industry. We attended a workshop (housed in a building located at the very first passenger and cargo railway in the entire world – a pilgrimage site for railway history junkies) where we grappled with the materiality of objects (we tried to guess what they were while blindfolded) and discussed the goals and uses of a science museum like MOSI. Then we split into groups and explored different areas of the large, multi-building museum.

My group headed to the science exhibit where we learned about the history of science through the lens of Manchester and famous Mancunians who have added to the history of science and technology. Most notable of these were the chemical theorist John Dalton and the physicist Ernest Rutherford (J.P. Joule comes close behind). It was an interesting exhibit – and the video recreations were unintentionally hilarious – though I wondered how the chronological timeline was decided upon. Who chose the events and using what criteria? Apparently the design firm had a very large hand in setting things up and that created tension with the in-house folks – I could see that in the layout.

After lunch, we made the short walk to the John Rylands Library (part of the University of Manchester). Wow. I was stunned by the aesthetic beauty of the building (some say it is the preeminent example of neo-Gothic architecture in all of Europe!), and the grandeur of the Historic Reading Room. My tongue was caught in my throat when we (too briefly) walked through the exhibition space; there was a first impression printing of the third edition of Newton’s Principia Mathematica sitting on display, along with a small fragment in Greek from St. John’s Gospel, probably written in the first half of the second century A.D., and “thus ranks as the earliest known fragment of the New Testament in any language.” I mean: mind-boggling.

We then ‘retired’ to a back room with two archivists to learn about – and to see – some of their holdings that had to do with the history of science and medicine. John Dalton’s papers were there, in addition to some books and letters from the eighteenth-century. Some of the meeting minutes for meetings of the X Club (founded by Huxley) were also there. Pretty impressive and a reason to return, in the future, to Manchester.

I wish I had had the chance to spend more time in Manchester, but I’ve seen enough to want to go back. It was, despite the early beginning and the pressure of catching a train in the snow at the end of it, one of my favorite days of the training programme.

LitSciMed Conference – Day Four

Today was perhaps the most exhausting but also the most rewarding of the conference.

We listened to an excellent talk by Gowan Dawson on the interconnections between science and literature as seen through the case study of Richard Own (1804-92), the English paleontologist and critic of Darwin. He had some very suggestive things to say about the link between the serial fiction of the time (exemplified by Owen’s fried Charles Dickens) and the form of Owen’s own work.

In the session workshop, David Amigoni moderated our discussion of ‘literary Darwinism’, which is the interpretation of literature through the prism of evolutionary theory, especially psychology. It’s safe to say that most of us found it difficult to appreciate literary Darwinism; in fact, we let loose a slew of criticisms of the entire methodology. It seemed to many of us to presuppose an outdated and inaccurate understanding of science and was not balanced in its criticisms of literary theory. The debate we had was freewheeling but not out-of-control, and while it was harsh, I didn’t feel like it was particularly unfair to literary Darwinism.

We had the evening off, and we capped our time at St. Deiniol’s—at least some of us—by spending an hour or two at the local pub, the Fox and Grapes. I learned some new words (‘twee’, ‘to skyve’) and heard some English perspectives on which cities to visit and which to avoid.

All in all, a stimulating, tiring but enjoyable day.

LitSciMed Conference – Day Three

A little navel-gazing – I gave my 10 minute presentation on Day Three in the evening. It was good practice for a similar presentation I’ll have to give at the beginning of February to fellow PhD students at Edinburgh. The challenge was to make it accessible to students who don’t necessarily have a background in the history of science/medicine, or even in history more generally (there are a number of English students here).

I think it went over fine, but I’m still a bit unsatisfied with the motivating focus of the project. I mention the soul, the Scottish Enlightenment, and the ’science of Man’ in the title of my thesis, but I haven’t made a good case, yet, for how they all fit together.

Right now, I’m focused on understanding debates about the nature of the soul among medical theorists. In my intellectual background chapter, I’ll begin with the debates during the Renaissance, move on to the complicated seventeenth-century, culminating in John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), and then survey the scene in Britain and Scotland in particular as the 18th century gets underway. This is in preparation for a more targeted focus on the debate in Scottish medical circles in the works of figures like Alexander Monro primus, Robert Whytt, John Gregory and William Cullen.

But where does the ’science of Man’ that Hume, Reid and others were trying to construct fit into the picture? How were these related to medical debates about the nature of the soul and the mind-body relation? More thoughts on this later.

To return to the conference: I thought the presentations were almost uniformly excellent, especially given that most students are just in their first year, having only begun a handful of months ago. I think this goes for both the content and delivery, although perhaps the biggest challenge for most of us was time management.

LitSciMed Conference – Day Two

My brain is a bit fried at the moment, so I’m going to bypass the academic lectures and workshops we had today. They were interesting and engaging, although the 500 year overview lecture of the history of medicine was fairly familiar to me, and I found my focus going in and out. But quite a number of the other students really found it helpful.

But I did enjoy our free time (between 5 and 6:45pm), I decided to get some air (in the snow!) and walked the 200 meters or so to the main street (perhaps the only street) in Hawarden. I met up with some fellow students by chance, and we went to the main pub in town, called the Fox and Grapes. It was a charming, local pub with wood beams and quotations on the ceiling. Would be nice to return, if we have time. Perhaps for the final night?

-Another interesting night of Postgraduate talks

Josie talked about her thesis, which surveys depictions of race and genetics in recent British fiction (post Genome Project). She will make use of postcolonial theory in an analysis of some recent novels, including works by Zadie Smith and Kazuo Ishiguro.

Chisomo discussed her project to construct a cultural analysis of HIV/AIDS Representation. She hopes to deconstruct and demystify the literature that has come about as a result of the AIDS epidemic. I was surprised to hear that AIDS existed in sub-saharan Africa for years before it was discovered in San Francisco in 1981, but it was not understood or recognized by Western scientists because it was called the Slim disease and blamed on witchcraft in the local communities where it was found.

Steve talked about the concept of a pathological childhood and the emergence of the normal child in 20thC Britain.

Jackie Mountain (an apt name, she admits) works on early modern attitudes to volcanoes.

Finally, Christiano (from Italy) discussed his research about Samuel Butler who he thinks has been unfairly misunderstood with respect to understanding the influence of Darwin’s theory of evolution in England.

-About to head to bed. Lots of snow on the ground and we are, apparently, officially snowed in (taxis can’t make it out here).

LitSciMed Conference: Day One

I arrived at the charming St. Deiniol’s Library in Hawardan (North Wales) just in time to drop my bags in my room, say hello to some of my fellow attendees, and go to the introductory lecture. Snow lay on the ground in frozen patches, and the sun was particularly bright.

We had a no-nonsense introduction to the day’s plans and to each other. Then a break for lunch.

Lunch is served in the restaurant/coffee shop, though it reminds one of an old, traditional dormitory cafeteria. There is, in general, an early 20th century feel about St. Deiniol’s that adds to its charm and sense of tranquility—a tranquility that is only partially interrupted by the commanding stares of William Ewart Gladstone, stares broadcast through his portraits and busts on the walls and in the corners of rooms.

We listened to our first plenary lecture, entitled ‘Empiricism and the Novel’, which Dr. Charlotte Sleigh (a historian at the University of Kent) delivered. Although I was a bit sceptical of her understanding of empiricism, her attempt to link the rise of the novel with the rise of science was suggestive.

We also had a tour of the Gladstone Library which has over 250,000 volumes, including a good portion of Gladstone’s own books, annotations and all. I’m going to make an attempt to search the catalog for anything of interest, as soon as I have some down time.

More tomorrow…

AHRC Training Conference

From Jan. 4, to Jan. 8, 2010, I will be attending an AHRC-funded doctoral training conference that will explore the interdisciplinary connections between theories and methodologies in literature, the history of science, and the history of medicine. There are 20 funded places for postgraduates for the first event, which is being held in a small town in north Wales. In fact, the venue is fairly unique: it’s St. Deiniol’s Library, Britain’s most well-known residential library that was set up by William Gladstone and still houses a majority of his enormous book collection.

Details about the conference can be found here.

While there, I will be posting daily updates in the form of a reflective diary.

A growing Corpus Galenicum

Lost works are being rediscovered, even though we are now very far away from the Renaissance. I was surprised to learn from Vivian Nutton’s The Unknown Galen (2002) that

Since 1945 a new fragment of Galen, and often a whole work, has been announced or published on average every two years, and there is every prospect that this will continue for a few years yet. It has added another 25 percent to the already enormous mass of the Corpus Galenicum, and represents the largest accession of writings to any classical author since the Renaissance (vii, my emphasis).

Why Galen and why now? In fact, “the great majority of these ‘new’ Galenic texts come via another route, through a variety of translations into oriental languages, Syriac, Arabic, Hebrew, and Armenian…More can be expected, since many major collections in the Islamic world had not yet been adequately catalogued and access to some of those that have been is not easy. There is always the likelihood, too, of finding an unknown Galenic teatise even in the best regulated libraries” (vii-viii)

So, manuscript hunters, start refreshing your oriental languages and get moving to the libraries of the near East!

There is much more that could be said about this, but I’ll leave it at that for now. It’s a rare but nice corrective to despair about the majority of works that never make it to us from antiquity.

The Standing of Stahl during the late Enlightenment

In the course of reading Peter Hanns Reill’s book Vitalizing Nature in the Enlightenment (2005) [which, for some reason, is not stocked by either the Edinburgh University library or the National Library of Scotland], I have come across some great assessments of Stahl’s stature among some of his successors.

Perhaps the most striking was Johann Friedrich Blumenbach’s opinion that Stahl was “without any doubt whatsoever, one of the greatest, deepest-thinking physicians the world has ever seen.” Allowing for normal hyperbole, this is still a remarkable statement for at least two other reasons: (1) On account of Blumenbach’s later significance as teacher to many of Germany’s 19thC giants of life science (including Alexander von Humboldt and Samuel Thomas Sömmerring, i.a.) and (2) Blumenbach was a professor at Göttingen, “which for years,” Reill writes, “had stood under the dominating influence of Albrecht von Haller”, who was one of Stahl’s foremost critics.

Although Blumenbach is somewhat notorious as one of the founding fathers of physical anthropology (and the use of ‘race’ to categorize human beings), he was a professor of medicine and wrote at least two influential books on physiology and anatomy.