Fashionable Diseases: Medicine, Literature and Culture c. 1660-1832
Title of project:
Fashionable Diseases: Medicine, Literature and Culture c. 1660-1832
Name and institution of principle investigators:
Professor Clark Lawlor, Northumbria University
Names and institutions of co-investigators/ collaborators:
Dr Jonathan Andrews, Newcastle University
Professor Allan Ingram, Northumbria University
Dr Leigh Wetherall Dickson, Northumbria University
Dr James Kennaway, Newcastle University
Dr Anita O’Connell, Northumbria University
Funding sources:
The Leverhulme Trust
Summary of research:
In the eighteenth century, as well as our own, certain diseases could be construed as endowing a sick person with some social or cultural cachet popularly associated with the illness. Melancholy could lend an air of creativity, gout could indicate class and wealth, and nerves could suggest a fashionable sensibility. A slight illness and enough wealth to travel could lead one to the spas and seaside resorts that, outside of London, formed the centres of fashionable society, or perhaps even lead abroad for warmer climes. As such, fashionable diseases also became the object of stigma, satire and allegations of fakery. They could be linked to the putative artificiality of ‘manners,’ modishness and the posturing of the beau monde. As Alexander Pope’s poetic satire says of women in the ‘Cave of Spleen,’ ‘The fair ones feel such maladies as these, When each new night-dress gives a new disease.’ Yet while social discourses might define it as such, the afflicted might not find the experience of such diseases fashionable at all, but rather a reality of painful suffering.
The ‘Fashionable Diseases’ project interrogates the meanings of the word ‘fashionable’ when applied to disease, and particularly explores the ways in which the medicine, literature and culture of the eighteenth century define and represent often debilitating diseases as fashionable. It seeks to discover how labels alter our conceptions of disease and provide narratives that may be at variance with actual patient experience, or that might even construct that experience. We are especially interested in the role of literary writing in this ‘construction’ of a template for the experience of disease by sufferers. Our research aims to explore the differing discourses and representations of illnesses in the long eighteenth century to deliver a better understanding of the fashionability of disease in our own time.
Project website/webpage:
http://fashionablediseases.
Anticipated time frame of project:
May 2013 – May 2016
Anticipated audiences:
Academic: literature, history, art, music, psychology, medical history, medicine; Non-academic: those interested in history of ideas and eighteenth-century history
Would be interested in hearing from…
Anyone wishing to collaborate, participate in workshops, come along to our events or anyone with similar interests. Please do get in touch.
Tagged as:
fashion, disease, eighteenth century, sensibility, sociability