Live Event: Invalids on the Move

Part of the Humanities Cultural Programme, one of the founding
stones for the future Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the
Humanities. 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).