The conference will consider the debate on fashion and sickness that linked melancholy, the vapours, nervousness, gout, consumption and many other diagnoses with the elite and superior sensibility. Its central aim is to take a new look at the topic by taking into account voices from beyond the social and medical elite, focusing on the often unglamorous reality of patient experience and broadening the range of conditions under consideration, including ‘unfashionable’ illnesses. To achieve this, it will take an explicitly interdisciplinary and comparative approach, looking at the role of culture in the broadest sense.
The keynote speakers are: Professor Helen Deutsch (UCLA), ‘Diseases of Writing’, Professor Sander Gilman (Emory), ‘The Fat Person on the Edgeware Road Omnibus: Fat, Health, and Fashion in the British Long 18th Century’, Dr David Shuttleton (Glasgow), ‘The Fashioning of Fashionable Diseases in the Eighteenth Century’
To register to attend the conference or for more information visit our web site or email us for more details.