Professor Sally Shuttleworth: List of publications

George Meredith's One of Our Conquerors is a work which explores what the medical campaigner Benjamin Ward Richardson had defined as the ‘Diseases of Modern Life’. By this term he had meant not the obvious physical diseases of cholera and tuberculosis, but rather the mental diseases of strain and exhaustion, and other health problems generated by the pressures of modern city living. This article sets the novel in the context of these medical and cultural debates of the last decades of the century, showing how, in Meredith's hands, such discussions become the starting point for meditations on the state of England, and an analysis, refracted through the disintegrating psychological health of his protagonist, the financier Victor Radnor, of the social and psychological problems of England and her dominions. One of Our Conquerors is a novel about empire, yet interpreted on a broad scale: financial, colonial and psychological. Moving between the intricate processes of sub-conscious thought at one level, and reflections on colonial rule at another, it explores the breakdown of control, from personal to political, and the loss of dominion over self or Other. The doubts, delusions and self-deceptions of the ironically named Victor, and his gradual loss of self-command, express in intimate detail the fragmentation of a once-confident society and empire. Meredith's engagement with the conditions of modernity has much to teach us in our postmodern age as we similarly grapple with the stresses and strains of global modernity.

Carl Westphal’s classic paper on ‘Agoraphobia’ of 1871 laid the foundations for the rapid development of work on phobias, fears and obsessions which sprang up in the last decades of the nineteenth century. This essay explores the intersection of medical and literary discourses of pathological fear as they emerged in the latter half of the century, looking particularly at the ways in which psychiatry turned to literature for case studies of phobia and obsession. I consider the work on fear of, amongst others, American psychologist G. Stanley Hall, and the Italian Angelo Mosso, before focusing on the role played by George Borrow’s neglected work, Lavengro (1851) in the development of late nineteenth-century psychiatric models of fear.

It has become accepted orthodoxy in Literature and Science studies that relations between the two domains are a “two way street,” and that literature and culture do not meekly reflect the new findings of their dominant partner, science, but are actively engaged in a dynamic, reciprocal set of relations with scientific practice and the development of scientific ideas. It is an attractive position (and one to which I have always subscribed), but such reciprocity is decidedly easier to track in historical context, before the consolidation of structures of institutional and professional science, than in the current period. The call for the AHRC “Science in Culture” large grants scheme was thus challenging: applicants were asked not merely to analyse reciprocal relations between science and culture, but to work directly with scientists, and to develop new insights and new methodologies for both sides. A tall order! Over the years I have participated in numerous workshops and conferences with scientists, trying to discover common ground, but never engaged directly in collaborative research. Originally Gowan Dawson and I had been envisaging a strictly historical project, addressing all those thousands of scientific and medical journals which lie mouldering in library basements (and are still largely untouched by digitisation). As historians we are familiar with the “big names”, those journals like the Lancet, the BMJ or Nature which have survived into the present day, and whose dominance in the historical record is now reaffirmed by the digitisation of back numbers, making it easier for scholars to work with them. But what about all those local natural history journals, or medical or public health journals which have faded from historical memory? Our aim, in working with these journals, was to uncover the networks which operated within Victorian science and medicine, and to rewrite in the process the metropolitan and professional focus of much historiography. Yet, such work would not involve any interaction with contemporary science. I had become aware, however, of the emerging phenomenon of “citizen science,” particularly as supported by Zooniverse, the online citizen science platform run by Chris Lintott in the Dept of Astro-Physics at the University of Oxford. It was clear that there were interesting parallels between, for example, the armies of people who participated in the development of natural history in the nineteenth century, and the “citizens” who now go online to help analyse scientific data, whether of astronomical phenomena, cancer cells, or the behaviour of wildlife. In the resulting AHRC project, “Constructing Scientific Communities: Citizen Science in the 19th and 21st Centuries,” based at the Universities of Oxford and Leicester, and run in conjunction with our partners the Natural History Museum, London, the Royal Society, and the Royal College of Surgeons, England, we uncover forgotten histories of large-scale participation in science, and the role of journals in helping to create and consolidate these communities. We also bring such historical knowledge to bear on current practice, exploring ways in which earlier models of scientific communication and community building can help to inform the rapidly changing world of science in the digital age. In addition, the project has also created its own citizen science projects: Science Gossip and Orchid Observers.

Through the Zooniverse platform, volunteers will highlight issues of health and welfare as they relate to work, food, housing and pollution and sanitation. The result will be a large, robust dataset that will enrich the history of London’s health and which will be of interest to social, local and family historians, epidemiologists, and anyone else with an interest in the topic. The project will be launched in 2017 and will be available via the project website at www.conscicom.org/projects and on Zooniverse at https://www.zooniverse.org Project data will be uploaded to this record upon project completion. Diagnosis London is a collaboration between the Zooniverse, the Wellcome Library and the Constructing Scientific Communities project. The project asks citizen historians to tag information from the Medical Officer of Health Reports of London (recently digitised by the Wellcome Library) which were published between 1848 and 1972.

Through the Zooniverse platform, volunteer citizen scientists can access pages from a series of 19th century natural history periodicals and are asked to complete a set of tasks for each page. This creates metadata which can be used by historians and the Biodiversity Heritage Library. The metadata relates to the illustrations hidden in the pages of the digitized periodicals, and by identifying the location, author, type of illustration and producing keywords, the Biodiversity Heritage Library can improve their image based search function and historians can assess a vast amount of information on unknown authors and illustrators from the Victorian era. The publication of books and periodicals are key locations for visualizing knowledge about the natural world. The Biodiversity Heritage Library has digitized and catalogued millions of pages of printed text between the 1400’s and today related to the investigation of the natural world. Illustrations are a large part of these printed pages, and we need your to help identify, classify and correlate them. The data created by tagging illustrations and adding artist and engraver information will have a direct impact on the research of historians who are trying to figure out why, how often, and who made images depicting a whole range of natural sciences in the Victorian period.

Periodicals offer a wonderful guide to the Victorian age, and to the ways in which science entered into the general culture of the time. This study considers a range of different kinds of periodicals, and the diverse ways in which they engaged with contemporary science. Although evolutionary theory was obviously a significant presence, it formed only one part of a complex picture. In the literary-oriented periodicals, for example, we find particular emphasis placed on the ways in which scientific thinking appeared to intersect with the interests of fiction and poetry, whether in theories of selfhood or personal responsibility, or the relations between science and religion. There was also, more generally, a fascination with new inventions, and the possibilities opened up by new technologies, such as the ingenious suggestion for a ‘whispering machine’. Periodicals offer an intricate picture of a society grappling with rapid social and cultural change, charged with the immediacy which comes from their serial and time-bound nature. In their integration of cutting-edge science with the latest fiction or social commentary they established a model we could do well to emulate.

The usual story of medicine in the past couple of centuries is one of growing professionalisation, and increasing distance between patients and practitioners. But is a new era of public participation in medicine upon us? Clinicians and patients are moving towards shared decision making in many areas, whilst some medical journals now invite patients to take part in peer review. Citizen Science projects, such as Cell Slider run by Cancer Research UK and Zooniverse, have enabled the public to contribute to medical research. Such developments open up new possibilities.

This Perspective article reflects on the recent launch of Constructing Scientific Communities: Citizen Science in the 19th and 21st Centuries (http://conscicom.org), a collaboration between the Universities of Oxford and Leicester in partnership with the Natural History Museum, the Royal College of Surgeons, and the Royal Society. It is a multi-strand project, bringing together historians, literary scholars, and contemporary science practitioners, which has been awarded a large grant in the Arts and Humanities Research Council's Science in Culture theme. At its heart lie questions about public involvement in science, the amateur/professional divide, and the possibilities of drawing on understanding of the role of journals in the science and information revolution of the nineteenth century in order to enhance science participation in the digital age.

<p>Freud's theories of the uncanny are generally treated ahistorically as an originary text. This essay places his work in the context of nineteenth-century English theories of childhood development (particularly the work of James Sully), the uncanny, and the unconscious. Drawing on literary texts from Robert Southey, Charles Kingsley, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Frances Power Cobbe, and the art of John William Waterhouse, it explores how the ancient oracular figure of the teraph, interpreted, rather macabrely, as the severed head of a child, became an embodiment of both the workings of the unconscious mind and the uncanny in nineteenth-century culture, and the locus of cultural and social anxieties projected onto the figure of the child.</p>

This book identifies and analyzes the presentation of science in the periodical press in Britain between 1800 and 1900.

Scientific articles appeared side by side with the latest fiction or political reporting, while articles on nonscientific topics and serialized novels invoked scientific theories or used analogies drawn from science.The essays collected in ...

Literary and Cultural Perspectives Matthew Campbell, Jaqueline M. Labbe, Sally Shuttleworth ... Memory and Memorials, 1789-1914 Literary and cultural perspectives Edited by Matthew Campbell, Jacqueline M. Labbe and Sally Shuttleworth&nbsp;...

Charlotte Brontë&#39;s fiction is examined in the context of Victorian constructions of psychology, sexuality, and insanity.