Live Event: Invalids on the Move

At a time when we are all locked down in our homes, Sally Shuttleworth and Erica Charters take a look, both serious and light-hearted, at the treatment of health and disease in the past, and particularly the period from the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries when invalids were actively encouraged to travel. The discussion will explore the creation of the health resort, and what life was like for invalids living in towns devoted to the sick. We will look at a range of diseases, both real and imagined, from tuberculosis and professional burnout to clergyman’s throat. We will also consider what happened in resorts when, in the 1880s, it was discovered that tuberculosis was infectious. How did hotels respond to the fact that invalids and non-invalids were happily eating and socializing together?

Chaired by Professor Philip Bullock, Academic TORCH Director, Professor of Russian Literature and Music at the University of Oxford, a fellow of Wadham College, Oxford.

Biographies:
Erica Charters
Erica Charters is Associate Professor in Global History and the History of Medicine at the University of Oxford, where she is also Director of Oxford’s Centre for Global History and the Oxford Centre for the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology. Her research examines how war and disease intersect with state formation and state power, particularly in colonial contexts. Her monograph Disease, War, and the Imperial State: The Welfare of British Armed Forces during the Seven Years War (Chicago, 2014) was awarded the George Rosen Prize by the American Association for the History of Medicine, and the Templer Medal for Best First Book by the Society for Army Historical Research. To read more on Erica's research please click here or follow @EricaCharters.

Sally Shuttleworth
Sally Shuttleworth is Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford. She works on the inter-relations of medicine, science and culture, and between 2014-19 ran the large ERC research project, ‘Diseases of Modern Life: Nineteenth-Century Perspectives’. Her most recent book is the co-authored Anxious Times: Medicine and Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2019).