Disease and Narrative: An Interdisciplinary Workshop

Distorted Storytelling: Dubious Narratives of Disease in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century

“The Influenza. Sir,—May I, through your columns, call the attention of that portion of the public who believe in magnetic treatment to its advantage in the popular (or unpopular) epidemic? […] After thirty-six hours’ intense pain, I sent for Mr. Lees, of East Dulwich, who treated me magnetically, and from that moment I suffered no further pain.”

British spiritualism periodical, Light (1891)

A figure comprised of medicine bottles and tablets, representing the patent medicine business, dances behind a pensive Lloyd George; representing attitudes to the introduction of the National Insurance Act of 1911. Wood engraving by B. Partridge, 1912. Wellcome Collection. Source: Wellcome Collection.

From the nineteenth-century onwards, sensational tales of disease were galvanised by an exploding literary marketplace. Diverse print avenues made accessible to the masses scale stories of disease which could be routinely produced and consumed via a number of print vehicles, yet these stories could just as easily undergo rapid distortion, leading to a culture of quackery which threatened to blur medical fact with fiction. Mesmeric pseudo-medical manuals popularised by physicians like John Elliotson purported to cure physical ailments using only invisible phenomena and magnetic powers of the mind. Elsewhere, infectious diseases were articulated in criminal terms to conflate disease and moral threat, as seen in Evangelical and medical texts which vilified prostitutes as vectors of venereal disease to drive the passing of the Contagious Diseases Acts. Insanity was narrativized as an infection of the mind, while short stories, epitomised by Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wall-Paper’ (1892), brought attention to contentious cures for a feminised ‘neurasthenia’. Gothic fin-de-siècle fiction, such as The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) and Dracula (1897), used contagion imagery and disease metaphors to reinforce stigmatising anxieties around ostensibly immoral activities and threats of foreign invasion. And twentieth-century occult narratives re-envisioned major disease epidemics through the lens of spiritualism, including Arthur Conan Doyle whose séance memoir Pheneas Speaks (1924) suggests death from disease as an optimistic ‘promotion’ into the spirit world. This multi-modal variety of storytelling which sought to either propagate the esoteric and pseudo-medical, or to critique quackery, brought attention to dubious narratives of disease which, through their widespread proliferation, could easily have been perceived as convincingly commonplace.

This two-hour interdisciplinary workshop will host University of Birmingham speakers in Psychology, Geography, Creative Writing, History, and Literature to consider questions of authenticity and authority, physical and psychological conceptions of ‘disease’, and narratives of contagion.

Students, staff, and colleagues from across disciplines are warmly encouraged to attend and embrace the opportunity for wide-ranging interdisciplinary discussion. Refreshments will be served and registration is required.

Organisers

Dr Melissa Dickson (University of Queensland, University of Birmingham) and Dr Emily Vincent (University of Birmingham), both on behalf of the CHANSE/UKRI Media and Epidemics project. The event is also organised by the Nineteenth-Century Centre at the University of Birmingham which provides a collaborative network for scholars working across traditional disciplinary, national, and temporal boundaries.