1 00:00:08,490 --> 00:00:17,670 Welcome to Big Tent, Big Ideas. The live online event series from the University of Oxford as part of the Humanities Cultural Programme. 2 00:00:17,670 --> 00:00:23,370 Big tent, big ideas brings together researchers and students from across different disciplines. 3 00:00:23,370 --> 00:00:30,510 We'll explore together some important subjects and ask questions about areas such as the environments, medical, humanities, 4 00:00:30,510 --> 00:00:39,490 A.I. and technology, the history of disease, as well as celebrating stories, having music, song, unhuman identity. 5 00:00:39,490 --> 00:00:41,920 We're bringing you this event programme online. 6 00:00:41,920 --> 00:00:48,710 Whilst we're all distanced from each other and we hope that you are all safe and well during this difficult time. 7 00:00:48,710 --> 00:00:59,900 We look forward to seeing you again in person as soon as we're able to welcome you big that future big tent in person events as part of. 8 00:00:59,900 --> 00:01:01,910 Everyone is welcome in this big tent, 9 00:01:01,910 --> 00:01:09,840 and we thank all our viewers for their ongoing support and we thank to all the participants who'll be contributing to this series. 10 00:01:09,840 --> 00:01:15,770 They've given their time, their words and their big ideas as we come together. 11 00:01:15,770 --> 00:01:21,950 This series would not be possible without the support from so many people, including the torch. 12 00:01:21,950 --> 00:01:27,500 So thank you. And so now to introduce our excellent speakers tonight. 13 00:01:27,500 --> 00:01:29,350 It's an honour to honour, to honour. 14 00:01:29,350 --> 00:01:37,190 It is an honour to host and welcome Sadie Shuttleworth from the English faculty and Erika Charters from the history. 15 00:01:37,190 --> 00:01:41,570 I Shuttleworth is professor of English literature here at the University of Oxford. 16 00:01:41,570 --> 00:01:48,710 She works on the interrelations of medicine, science and culture between 2014 and 2019. 17 00:01:48,710 --> 00:01:55,360 She ran the large ELC research project. Diseases of Modern Life 19th century. 18 00:01:55,360 --> 00:02:00,760 This project explored the medical, literary and cultural responses to the victory in the Victorian age, 19 00:02:00,760 --> 00:02:07,940 to the perceived problems of stress and anticipating many of the preoccupations of our own era. 20 00:02:07,940 --> 00:02:18,080 Sally's most recent book is co-authored Anxious Times, Medicine and Modernity in 19th Century Britain, published in 2019. 21 00:02:18,080 --> 00:02:24,590 Erica Charles is associate professor in global history and the history of medicine at the University of Oxford, 22 00:02:24,590 --> 00:02:32,150 which is also director of Oxford Centre for Global History and the Oxford Centre for the History of Science, Medicine and Knowledge. 23 00:02:32,150 --> 00:02:39,940 Research examines how war and disease intersect with state formation and state power, particularly in colonial contexts. 24 00:02:39,940 --> 00:02:42,850 A monograph, Disease, War and the Imperial States. 25 00:02:42,850 --> 00:02:50,920 The welfare of British armed forces during the Seven Years War was published in 2014 and awarded the George Rosen PRISE by the 26 00:02:50,920 --> 00:02:59,500 American Association for the History of Medicine and the Templer Medal for Best First Book by the Society for Army Stocco Research. 27 00:02:59,500 --> 00:03:06,220 So thank you, both of you, for participating today. I hand over now to for what will I'm sure will be a brilliant discussion. 28 00:03:06,220 --> 00:03:15,740 Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you for the kind of introduction and thank you, all of you, for joining us. 29 00:03:15,740 --> 00:03:21,230 This discussion came out of a discussion that Sally and I were having about her research and 30 00:03:21,230 --> 00:03:26,150 specifically the context that we're on right now where we're being told to stay at home, 31 00:03:26,150 --> 00:03:28,340 not go out to basically not move. 32 00:03:28,340 --> 00:03:35,360 And in various ways, how we're completely immobilised for the sake of our health and for the sake of other people's health as well. 33 00:03:35,360 --> 00:03:41,900 And Sally, you were talking about how this really contrasts with the research that you're doing on the 19th century in Britain 34 00:03:41,900 --> 00:03:49,460 when people who are ill invalids were actually advised to move and to travel around precisely to improve their health, 35 00:03:49,460 --> 00:03:57,350 which we thought was kind of interesting contrast. Sally, do you want to say a little bit more about these villains on the move? 36 00:03:57,350 --> 00:04:05,210 Yes. So as you're saying that the extraordinary contrast to me thinking daily about people being imprisoned 37 00:04:05,210 --> 00:04:10,550 in their homes whilst I'm actually sitting here trying to write about those who are travelling. 38 00:04:10,550 --> 00:04:22,760 So it's it links to the ideas in the 19th century that actually health really depended upon climate and what they called medical climatology. 39 00:04:22,760 --> 00:04:30,350 And I'm looking in particular at health resorts that sprung up especially to cater for the ends of it. 40 00:04:30,350 --> 00:04:37,170 And so these communities that were created that had only invalids and their families. 41 00:04:37,170 --> 00:04:47,930 And so the ones I'm looking at particularly long tome on the French Riviera and Davos in Switzerland, which became international resorts. 42 00:04:47,930 --> 00:04:58,910 But both of them had very strong English colonies. And so I'm looking at the whole ideas of why it was that they thought you should travel. 43 00:04:58,910 --> 00:05:06,620 And what sorts of treatments. And then the whole interrelations of these communities that are focussed entirely around sickness, 44 00:05:06,620 --> 00:05:14,690 which is in many ways what we're experiencing now, I think, because all unus is utterly dominated by it. 45 00:05:14,690 --> 00:05:20,510 And it seems to me that the ways in which people were thinking of these resorts was also 46 00:05:20,510 --> 00:05:26,840 very similar to how we're experiencing the world now is one dominated by forms of disease. 47 00:05:26,840 --> 00:05:32,870 But I should note that the diseases where you had to travel were not something like smallpox, 48 00:05:32,870 --> 00:05:37,700 but rather a tuberculosis or consumption, as they called it, 49 00:05:37,700 --> 00:05:51,560 or other diseases such as overwork, which I'm rather fond of, particularly the professional people in other diseases such as the clerical self raped. 50 00:05:51,560 --> 00:05:55,530 Just a wonderful invention of the 19th century. 51 00:05:55,530 --> 00:06:04,820 My my sense of that, probably many people have heard of these places, these kind of health resorts, these health spies through literature, 52 00:06:04,820 --> 00:06:12,260 because my sense is that in 19th century literature, you have a lot of references, this notion of the envelope travelling the location. 53 00:06:12,260 --> 00:06:16,070 So it's almost a kind of trope, but also that there's some famous individual. 54 00:06:16,070 --> 00:06:19,280 So can you give us a few examples of who we might know, 55 00:06:19,280 --> 00:06:27,100 what we might recognise in terms of this notion of travelling and going to the health resorts and prove one's health? 56 00:06:27,100 --> 00:06:32,540 Yes. So two primary examples would be Robert Louis Stevenson, 57 00:06:32,540 --> 00:06:40,520 who was both at Monto and then at Davos and then various other resort results of Sara Lake in the States, 58 00:06:40,520 --> 00:06:45,410 for example, or John Haddington Simmons, who's less well known, 59 00:06:45,410 --> 00:06:51,890 but was a very major writer in the 19th century who again was in Montreal and then in Davos. 60 00:06:51,890 --> 00:06:58,530 And in fact, it was his writing about Davos that really created the whole move of the English there. 61 00:06:58,530 --> 00:07:08,030 And I think that the whole Davos phenomenon now is actually arising from the whole intellectual 62 00:07:08,030 --> 00:07:13,490 and some literary enclave that dealt that simmons' created for himself whilst he was in Davos, 63 00:07:13,490 --> 00:07:25,100 because he lived there for 16 years and he maintained that he was a man who could only live above 5000 feet. 64 00:07:25,100 --> 00:07:34,960 Because what I'm also looking at is the ways in which there was a complete shift in understanding of how you should kill things. 65 00:07:34,960 --> 00:07:42,050 And so, first of all, it was you had to be warm. So you went to Montauban in the winter because you had blue skies and could 66 00:07:42,050 --> 00:07:47,570 be out in the open air exercising and then suddenly almost overnight shifts. 67 00:07:47,570 --> 00:07:54,680 And you have to go to the Alps in the winter and be frozen to death or not to death, to life. 68 00:07:54,680 --> 00:08:04,900 And so I'm also interested in how medical diagnoses and regimes change to the prime examples. 69 00:08:04,900 --> 00:08:07,440 But there are all sorts of others. 70 00:08:07,440 --> 00:08:18,990 And then literary references to go into Devil's Ultimo to another famous person would be Katherine Mansfield in the 20th century, who isn't long. 71 00:08:18,990 --> 00:08:27,920 I interested. I suppose there's two things that kind of crop up out of this, because one is thinking about the role of doctors in the service. 72 00:08:27,920 --> 00:08:31,250 So do is it. Do you wait for it? Kind of. 73 00:08:31,250 --> 00:08:37,760 Is your doctor prescribing you to go and travel? Are they the ones who are actually controlling this or how much is this actually up to individuals 74 00:08:37,760 --> 00:08:42,170 who I'm guessing might have strong preferences for where they'd like to spend their time, 75 00:08:42,170 --> 00:08:50,180 especially if it's seen as part of a kind of cultural or literary personality to go to these places? 76 00:08:50,180 --> 00:08:57,290 Yes, doctors were immensely powerful because what happened was that just about every resort that 77 00:08:57,290 --> 00:09:03,740 set up published its own statistics as to its climate that we're all rivals with each other. 78 00:09:03,740 --> 00:09:12,330 And then lots of handbooks were published, but they all insisted that it depended on what stage of your disease as to which resort you should go to. 79 00:09:12,330 --> 00:09:17,870 And so only your doctor could tell you which one you need to go to. 80 00:09:17,870 --> 00:09:26,770 And so this particularly society doctors in London, as Andrew Clark, who is doctor to Gladstone famous, 81 00:09:26,770 --> 00:09:33,270 they all said to Darwin, to George, and he said that all the brain workers in Tennyson. 82 00:09:33,270 --> 00:09:38,840 Another one said he advised and first of all, he advised Moton and then he switched to devils. 83 00:09:38,840 --> 00:09:48,980 And so you were you were very much in the hands. But sometimes the patients managed to get the doctor to send the way they wish to go. 84 00:09:48,980 --> 00:09:54,770 So Stephen sent them with was trying to evade his parents and he managed to get some 85 00:09:54,770 --> 00:10:00,330 clerk to tell him he had to go to to but without his parents to look after him. 86 00:10:00,330 --> 00:10:06,580 He was very tense. So, as always, there was a bit of negotiation going there. 87 00:10:06,580 --> 00:10:12,230 So I just didn't say that the other role of the doctor was really in creating the results. 88 00:10:12,230 --> 00:10:17,720 Similar tone was was created and often that they have a mystique around them and a narrative. 89 00:10:17,720 --> 00:10:24,800 So James, Henry Bennett went to Moton, which was just a little fishing village with his oil consumption. 90 00:10:24,800 --> 00:10:32,330 Miraculously, he declares, I was cured. And then he sets up his his own practise. 91 00:10:32,330 --> 00:10:36,770 But he and he he's credited as being the creator. 92 00:10:36,770 --> 00:10:37,550 Tom Course. 93 00:10:37,550 --> 00:10:47,600 What he popularised and it became a resort because of his writings, because he published all over the place, both in the medical and other journals. 94 00:10:47,600 --> 00:10:55,460 But he practised in the resort during the winter and then in London in the summer. 95 00:10:55,460 --> 00:11:02,570 So you can't you get your market that way because you send all your own patients from London. 96 00:11:02,570 --> 00:11:07,070 And the same in Devils. It was a doctor who went there, discovered it. 97 00:11:07,070 --> 00:11:10,890 It was. And then people write about it and said, you doctors. 98 00:11:10,890 --> 00:11:14,530 I had a real stake in these resorts often. 99 00:11:14,530 --> 00:11:20,570 And of course, because I forget the privilege I find very interesting is this kind of commercial aspect, right. 100 00:11:20,570 --> 00:11:27,540 That these are commercial enterprises as well. And I was thinking a lot about how we talk about this notion of medical tourism. 101 00:11:27,540 --> 00:11:32,540 So the ability of some groups of people to travel abroad, get their medical operations done, 102 00:11:32,540 --> 00:11:38,960 which obviously is also a function of how much money, how much leisure time surgeons might have. 103 00:11:38,960 --> 00:11:45,390 And as a historian, I'm always curious about how in some ways we want to draw parallels with what's similar in the past, 104 00:11:45,390 --> 00:11:51,290 but we also want to highlight what's different. So can this be likened to our practise of medical tourism? 105 00:11:51,290 --> 00:11:56,460 In what ways is it different, especially as a kind of commercial enterprise? 106 00:11:56,460 --> 00:12:04,700 Yes. Yes, it is. I always resist medical tourism as a definition for what I'm looking at in the 19th century because 107 00:12:04,700 --> 00:12:11,330 it suggests a level of seriousness and they are always insisting that they were health seekers, 108 00:12:11,330 --> 00:12:24,980 not tourists. And there's a distinction between the resorts that became sort of more for pleasure and those that really did focus on illness. 109 00:12:24,980 --> 00:12:32,490 But there are parallels, obviously, in going to a place for a particular medical reason. 110 00:12:32,490 --> 00:12:39,690 I mean, the other part which you mentioned, which I think is so fundamental to all of this, is this notion of narratives, right. 111 00:12:39,690 --> 00:12:45,380 Of viability, both of the doctors and of the patients and those travelling of the ambulance to 112 00:12:45,380 --> 00:12:50,120 write about their experience and probably use it to promote it to other people, 113 00:12:50,120 --> 00:12:55,880 but also partly to form the expectations of what other people will also record. 114 00:12:55,880 --> 00:12:59,990 I've been thinking a lot in the context of the current pandemic. 115 00:12:59,990 --> 00:13:07,650 How many people have been encouraging us to keep diaries and to write records and to use them for a future in story? 116 00:13:07,650 --> 00:13:15,310 And one of the things I often think about as an historian working on the seventeen hundreds is how when we look back, 117 00:13:15,310 --> 00:13:22,560 you know, 200, 300 years later, we can see reading people's writings that they actually all kind of format. 118 00:13:22,560 --> 00:13:29,450 Right. There's a kind of trope that actually people unconsciously even follow what other people are writing about, 119 00:13:29,450 --> 00:13:36,320 model themselves on things in terms of what they think is worth recording and also what they think isn't worth recording. 120 00:13:36,320 --> 00:13:44,390 So I was wondering, you know, how how much you see the certain kind of trope of what it means to be an invalid in these contacts. 121 00:13:44,390 --> 00:13:50,720 Are there certain formats that people follow? And especially because my understanding is it becomes such a literary giant, right? 122 00:13:50,720 --> 00:13:56,570 It's very much as you said, it's formed by side people of the words man and woman, right? 123 00:13:56,570 --> 00:14:05,180 Yes. Yes. And it's very interesting, you can see, because that they tended to write a lot, in particular the literary invalid's. 124 00:14:05,180 --> 00:14:11,520 And so you have an endless lectures, but also then they the articles that they formed from the letters. 125 00:14:11,520 --> 00:14:18,650 So you can actually see them moving materials from the personal letter to the mother who becomes part of the article. 126 00:14:18,650 --> 00:14:24,850 But yes, that there are there are definite tropes and in part it depends whether you are religious or not, 127 00:14:24,850 --> 00:14:30,470 because the religious ones have a very definite form, 128 00:14:30,470 --> 00:14:40,940 which is insisting that they don't mind death and they were well committed, etc. for those who are not religious. 129 00:14:40,940 --> 00:14:47,240 Huge Soul-Searching. Largely the ones I've been looking at. 130 00:14:47,240 --> 00:14:57,130 It's to do with work. It's whether you've really justified your existence yet on it's so constantly going over. 131 00:14:57,130 --> 00:14:59,310 This is what more they should do. 132 00:14:59,310 --> 00:15:09,380 This is some wonderful examples actually, of the ways in which they would often keep working right until day of death. 133 00:15:09,380 --> 00:15:17,360 There was a historian, John Green, who I should say that many of these invalids, 134 00:15:17,360 --> 00:15:22,740 they actually it was 20 years in the dying sentence that they that they have the condition. 135 00:15:22,740 --> 00:15:32,540 And it came and went. But they were living with it and trying to frame their life around it or not around it, if they could, for that length of time. 136 00:15:32,540 --> 00:15:44,680 But greens are struggling over and over. And then in the final year, when it became clear that he really was dying, he was writing a story. 137 00:15:44,680 --> 00:15:56,210 So for the academic sitting here at the moment thinking, oh, I should be writing an extraordinary example because he. 138 00:15:56,210 --> 00:16:01,810 So he had his wife bring all the books to his bedside and then he'd dictate. 139 00:16:01,810 --> 00:16:10,520 And as it became clearer that he'd only got two weeks left. He said, just give me sleeping draughts every night because I have work to do. 140 00:16:10,520 --> 00:16:14,150 And he continued dictating even that his poor wife. 141 00:16:14,150 --> 00:16:22,330 She got substrate in both of her wrists, attempting to keep up with the words that were flowing out. 142 00:16:22,330 --> 00:16:36,320 So. Extraordinary examples. But also, it is very, very moving, seeing the response of the relatives as well to how you cope with a loved one. 143 00:16:36,320 --> 00:16:38,420 At this point, yes. 144 00:16:38,420 --> 00:16:46,310 I mean, I think I often think as a historian, what's interesting is, of course, there's long periods of history in which ordinary people didn't. 145 00:16:46,310 --> 00:16:54,920 Right. And not only because they weren't literate, but because the notion that you would keep your kind of daily experiences as being useful. 146 00:16:54,920 --> 00:17:00,920 It just wasn't assumed to be something that was significant. And and again, within history, medicine, 147 00:17:00,920 --> 00:17:05,870 I always thought was very interesting that with the rise of social history in the 1960s and this kind of notion, 148 00:17:05,870 --> 00:17:14,630 we got away from just looking at great men and great woman at political institutions and then got instead to look at the experiences of the everyday. 149 00:17:14,630 --> 00:17:21,320 And you see the same movement that happened with the history of medicine to try to access the patient experience rather than just thinking about 150 00:17:21,320 --> 00:17:30,170 doctors and mothers and thinking about scientific achievements to think about what is it what is it like to actually have the experience of illness? 151 00:17:30,170 --> 00:17:35,870 But then I also find that historians have this constant debate about whether you can ever access what it 152 00:17:35,870 --> 00:17:41,860 means to be a patient and to suffer from something beyond the medical framework that's already set up. 153 00:17:41,860 --> 00:17:46,420 Right. Beyond these kind of assumptions. Yes. 154 00:17:46,420 --> 00:17:53,690 Well, you see people constantly trying to cast their own lives in in light of what the doctors are 155 00:17:53,690 --> 00:17:59,030 saying and the new treatments that are coming in and how that and how they'd orient themselves, 156 00:17:59,030 --> 00:18:07,140 particularly if you've gone from sort of being coupled, as I said, in the Winter Garden of the South, to being expected to sort the baby in the. 157 00:18:07,140 --> 00:18:13,170 Cold all day and night. And so the constant sort of processes of adjustment. 158 00:18:13,170 --> 00:18:22,890 But in terms of these of the writing from below and sort of getting a little bit more working class figures from what for what I'm doing, 159 00:18:22,890 --> 00:18:30,390 there's very little because it was mostly the wealthy or the middle wealthy who travelled. 160 00:18:30,390 --> 00:18:39,540 And although they had charities for the indigent cause, they consumptive, et cetera, these were not really the poor. 161 00:18:39,540 --> 00:18:49,470 I wouldn't say. And so it's not until you get the sanitaria coming in at the end of the 19th century that you get working class patients. 162 00:18:49,470 --> 00:19:00,060 And I haven't gone that far. But I think it would be an absolute treasure trove to look at the writings of the lectures from the various semitone. 163 00:19:00,060 --> 00:19:03,570 So can we talk about what what people were actually suffering from? 164 00:19:03,570 --> 00:19:09,630 Because I think this helps us also to think about the disease as it's that tuberculosis. 165 00:19:09,630 --> 00:19:16,980 So what actually are these diseases? And also what is the theory of causation in terms of why people have these diseases? 166 00:19:16,980 --> 00:19:30,780 Yes. So to start with tuberculosis consumption until 1882, when Coke discovered that there was a bacillus causing it. 167 00:19:30,780 --> 00:19:37,230 There were various theories. But one of the dominant ones that it was, was simply that it was hereditary. 168 00:19:37,230 --> 00:19:38,520 And so it was in the family. 169 00:19:38,520 --> 00:19:47,430 And so you actually I was quite astonished to discover that it was there were lots of books saying that if it was in the family. 170 00:19:47,430 --> 00:19:54,300 Actually, it was your duty to send your child or to take your child to another climate. 171 00:19:54,300 --> 00:19:58,500 In order to prepare them for entry into the British climate. 172 00:19:58,500 --> 00:20:02,970 And so several years should be spent in devils or awful movietone, 173 00:20:02,970 --> 00:20:10,320 or you should take a boat and go right round the world in order to experience the sail journey or on the sea. 174 00:20:10,320 --> 00:20:15,870 So that sense that to be an invalid, you didn't actually have to have any symptoms. 175 00:20:15,870 --> 00:20:20,910 But it's just this fear that you might suffer. And again, you miss the experiences. 176 00:20:20,910 --> 00:20:29,400 Now, it's really helping me understand. I think what it must have been like to live in that fear, nothing showing, but the possibility that. 177 00:20:29,400 --> 00:20:35,610 And so you move heaven and earth to actually make sure that that your children could actually survive. 178 00:20:35,610 --> 00:20:42,930 But the other element then, all of TB was also that it was and then it described it as a disease of debility. 179 00:20:42,930 --> 00:20:54,270 And that's how it got then linked to overwork, because anybody who is seen as sort of working too many hours too long or as a woman 180 00:20:54,270 --> 00:20:59,970 actually doing more than you ought in terms of thinking you could actually then suffer. 181 00:20:59,970 --> 00:21:10,110 And so have to be sent away. And I'm divided on this because I like the notion of Daniel for six months, because you work too hard. 182 00:21:10,110 --> 00:21:24,120 But there is also the worries about malingering. And that was came very much with the idea of the clergyman's sore throat or dysphonia clavichord, 183 00:21:24,120 --> 00:21:32,910 as it was called, which was really described as giving too many sermons and therefore weakening your friend. 184 00:21:32,910 --> 00:21:39,840 There was a lot of scepticism about this, but I have to say that every resort is described as having lots and lots of clergy. 185 00:21:39,840 --> 00:21:47,930 It's clear that they took advantage of this notion that a sore throat and trollops at Barchester Towers, 186 00:21:47,930 --> 00:21:57,630 the Reverend Vaizey Stonn hope was meant to be the things that Canon and residents of the cathedral is never in residence because 10 years ago, 187 00:21:57,630 --> 00:22:03,760 Reid had. Right now, he's famous for his collection of butterflies for me, too. 188 00:22:03,760 --> 00:22:09,540 I'm always fascinated how, of course, there's these different types of diseases, not only according to how they're transmitted, 189 00:22:09,540 --> 00:22:12,510 whether or not people think they're contagious, but as we're seeing right now, 190 00:22:12,510 --> 00:22:17,790 this difference between what we classify as an epidemic and an endemic disease, randomness. 191 00:22:17,790 --> 00:22:24,150 I was thinking how the epidemic that's ongoing right now and the discussions we're having about is it worse than flu? 192 00:22:24,150 --> 00:22:27,720 And I think also people's recognition that maybe we don't talk about about the 193 00:22:27,720 --> 00:22:31,680 number of people who do die from the flu each year as this kind of reminder that, 194 00:22:31,680 --> 00:22:36,630 of course, the onset of an epidemic is an no disease at all, but it's rather epidemic disease. 195 00:22:36,630 --> 00:22:40,710 That's right. So these diseases that a society lives with, 196 00:22:40,710 --> 00:22:49,320 even though it causes very high death rates and I was struck thinking about how some ways what you're discussing is the society that's come to accept 197 00:22:49,320 --> 00:22:57,150 a certain kind of disease as being just part of it and has kind of built built up cultural practises around it or different practises around it. 198 00:22:57,150 --> 00:23:08,020 Because, of course, this is the same period you have cholera. It is very much described as a foreign epidemic disease coming in with quite violent. 199 00:23:08,020 --> 00:23:11,530 Striking symptoms, which people are very worried. 200 00:23:11,530 --> 00:23:19,430 But, of course, over the long period, more people are dying from these endemic diseases, fevers, tuberculosis. 201 00:23:19,430 --> 00:23:26,960 Yes. And again, I think we hear the statistics about how many children died in the Victorian period. 202 00:23:26,960 --> 00:23:33,080 But in up to actually understand what it meant for them because it was different. 203 00:23:33,080 --> 00:23:37,730 I thought that actually they couldn't be so invested in their children. 204 00:23:37,730 --> 00:23:48,790 But you read the letters and of course, they were. And so it is not that sense that they lived almost perpetually in the way that we're living now. 205 00:23:48,790 --> 00:23:56,760 And so although, yes, we have an epidemic. For them, it was actually more lethal than what's happening to us now. 206 00:23:56,760 --> 00:24:00,080 The sheer numbers were extraordinary. Yeah. Yeah. 207 00:24:00,080 --> 00:24:06,230 I think it's always an interesting reminder about how how we conceptualise risk when we think about it in terms of 208 00:24:06,230 --> 00:24:11,750 kind of acceptable numbers of people who are dead or even acceptable numbers of people who are chronically ill. 209 00:24:11,750 --> 00:24:16,640 Right. Because I think the way that captures. Yes. That's happening. Can I ask about. 210 00:24:16,640 --> 00:24:20,950 Because, of course, you mentioned at the beginning and I think it's such a fundamental way of thinking about disease, 211 00:24:20,950 --> 00:24:29,240 is that diseases associated with location. And of course, this gets to the heart and why people need to travel or be 5000 feet. 212 00:24:29,240 --> 00:24:33,500 So let me explain a little bit more about this longstanding view that disease is 213 00:24:33,500 --> 00:24:40,040 often about climates and place rather than kind of invading a virus or bacteria. 214 00:24:40,040 --> 00:24:51,560 Yes. Yes, it is. It's an idea that goes right back to the Greeks. And I did a piece on has water in places, but what happens? 215 00:24:51,560 --> 00:24:58,340 And so as a practise, it's been that right through in medicine, the notion that it's good to travel. 216 00:24:58,340 --> 00:25:06,020 But prior to the 19th century, really without any precision as to why or where to go. 217 00:25:06,020 --> 00:25:10,760 You've got the state. The development of sport is very much in the 18th century. 218 00:25:10,760 --> 00:25:17,840 But that was a specific water, whereas in the 19th century with the medical climatology, it was very, 219 00:25:17,840 --> 00:25:28,130 very specific about the forms of humidity and how dry the what altitude you were at levels of sunshine. 220 00:25:28,130 --> 00:25:34,970 And it was also, I think, strongly linked to the development of pollution in Britain, the sense. 221 00:25:34,970 --> 00:25:37,670 And so it starts really with James CLONK, 222 00:25:37,670 --> 00:25:47,480 who's a doctor in the eighteen twenties who starts to write about the need to travel and go to particular locations. 223 00:25:47,480 --> 00:26:00,510 And from then on, you get the huge growth in statistics, people recording every day so that the precise rainfall, et cetera, in these resorts. 224 00:26:00,510 --> 00:26:12,560 And it was thought that and I suppose rightly, that the there was a real relationship between the body and the mind and on the climate. 225 00:26:12,560 --> 00:26:19,280 And if you've got that balance right, then you could not let me stay the disease. 226 00:26:19,280 --> 00:26:24,080 But many people claimed you could actually cure it. 227 00:26:24,080 --> 00:26:27,520 And it's too late to and you could cure. 228 00:26:27,520 --> 00:26:34,910 I mean, I always find it fascinating, too, because in some ways, the 19th century in Britain in the 19th centuries is a period of intense debate. 229 00:26:34,910 --> 00:26:42,200 Right over causation, over these theories of contagion, whether or not disease is located, for example, 230 00:26:42,200 --> 00:26:49,670 either in urban centres, which definitely follows what people observe compared to rural areas, which seem much more healthy. 231 00:26:49,670 --> 00:26:58,370 Whether it's actually kind of rooted in unsanitary locations within urban centres, but then also how you can see it on a global scale. 232 00:26:58,370 --> 00:27:04,160 So in my work, when people are thinking about the British Empire and their experiences overseas, 233 00:27:04,160 --> 00:27:10,040 disease again appears to be located in climates and trouble climates, of course, 234 00:27:10,040 --> 00:27:14,020 which is why we inherit this notion of tropical diseases and tropical medicine. 235 00:27:14,020 --> 00:27:19,970 And so this kind of interesting way in which observations might be correct in some ways, 236 00:27:19,970 --> 00:27:27,200 even if the kind of underlying mechanism doesn't tie in to what we now know through bacteriology. 237 00:27:27,200 --> 00:27:33,890 Yes. No, I think definitely so. But another aspect of it all was the style of life you would live there. 238 00:27:33,890 --> 00:27:42,500 And again, this was such change because if you're an invalid in Britain, you cuddled and not allowed outside and lying on the sofa all day, 239 00:27:42,500 --> 00:27:51,590 etc. If you went to these resorts, you were encouraged to get out there and walk along the seaside side of that up into the hills. 240 00:27:51,590 --> 00:27:58,460 And then if you went to devils, you were encouraged to go tobogganing and skiing later on. 241 00:27:58,460 --> 00:28:04,670 So a very outdoors life, which is obviously so much healthier for the individual. 242 00:28:04,670 --> 00:28:12,950 So one of the reasons that people properly recovered more was simply that they were living such a more healthy life. 243 00:28:12,950 --> 00:28:19,190 I mean, I always think this is the wonderful thing about historical record and looking back, because that. 244 00:28:19,190 --> 00:28:24,480 Not only can you see a period when people had debating views and actually there was a lot of uncertainty about it, 245 00:28:24,480 --> 00:28:31,370 but sometimes people were prescribing remedies that might have worked, but not for the reasons that they thought. 246 00:28:31,370 --> 00:28:38,390 Which, of course, is, I always think this reminder for us today, we're in a similar period about uncertainty, not being entirely sure. 247 00:28:38,390 --> 00:28:43,820 You can see how debates become very polarised the same way they did in the 19th century. 248 00:28:43,820 --> 00:28:48,080 And of course, I always think as a historian, it might be that one hundred and fifty years from now, 249 00:28:48,080 --> 00:28:51,710 many of the things that we assumed to work for these mechanisms, 250 00:28:51,710 --> 00:29:00,440 we might discover in this kind of ultimate historical humility that actually we've misunderstood various mechanisms. 251 00:29:00,440 --> 00:29:08,120 Yes, definitely. And it's quite interesting looking at what happens in the eighteen eighties when Cook, 252 00:29:08,120 --> 00:29:18,830 it is discovered that the cities because people's you'd expect the patterns of behaviour will suddenly change because it was world news. 253 00:29:18,830 --> 00:29:25,400 But they don't. And in devils they they start claiming it had been claimed before. 254 00:29:25,400 --> 00:29:30,110 But they use this as an excuse that the air was antiseptic. 255 00:29:30,110 --> 00:29:43,540 And so if this was the selling point now of devils that you could escape the bacillus and lived there 5000 feet, I think friendships. 256 00:29:43,540 --> 00:29:50,000 This this is always, again, a very interesting idea for historians of medicine, the strain of disease. 257 00:29:50,000 --> 00:29:56,060 Right. So do when the scientific knowledge changes, do actual human practises change? 258 00:29:56,060 --> 00:30:01,730 And I thought it was really fascinating that actually these health resorts, what they do is they adapt. 259 00:30:01,730 --> 00:30:10,820 Right. That in some ways they're able to to move into this new era of maintain themselves centres and maintain their popularity. 260 00:30:10,820 --> 00:30:15,410 And in some ways, we'd say, you know, they're rebranding according to bacteriology. 261 00:30:15,410 --> 00:30:22,370 Yes. Yes. It reminds me also, I think very often because I work on the history of disease, 262 00:30:22,370 --> 00:30:28,000 people assume that I just look at a kind of bacteria or something in the past that actually fascinates me. 263 00:30:28,000 --> 00:30:34,360 And I don't think it's the same for you. But what fascinates me is how disease is really inseparable from human activity. 264 00:30:34,360 --> 00:30:40,640 So in the same way, when we think about the current pandemic, a lot of what we're discussing is the way human activity, 265 00:30:40,640 --> 00:30:50,000 cultural practises, handshaking, the kind of everyday gestures we have are actually what's responsible for transmission patterns. 266 00:30:50,000 --> 00:30:56,540 This is about human activity and cultural practises, much more than just thinking about scientific knowledge. 267 00:30:56,540 --> 00:31:00,620 But it also always strikes me that humans are amazingly adaptable. 268 00:31:00,620 --> 00:31:05,500 Right. When you have a new one, you have new scientific knowledge. What do people do then? 269 00:31:05,500 --> 00:31:09,290 They use it to their own advantage. In some ways, they often manipulate it. 270 00:31:09,290 --> 00:31:20,720 They come up with new commercial enterprises. They like the idea that they're kind of taking what they have and and profiting in various ways. 271 00:31:20,720 --> 00:31:32,940 Is there any kind of parallel with what we're seeing today? Well, I think the Adopt Tatian that we're seeing today is a parallel in the sense. 272 00:31:32,940 --> 00:31:37,600 But what struck me is just how extraordinarily fast it happens. 273 00:31:37,600 --> 00:31:44,860 The fact that you've now automatically stepped several days, if you see anybody coming, you move it. 274 00:31:44,860 --> 00:31:51,870 So these and that's happened what the space of two, three weeks, it will become absolutely accustomed to new lows. 275 00:31:51,870 --> 00:31:56,410 So I think you can see that as well in the 19th century, 276 00:31:56,410 --> 00:32:10,920 that you find all sorts of ways of justifying continuing your previous sort of activities, as well as somehow now fitting into the new regime. 277 00:32:10,920 --> 00:32:15,930 So what happens that I mean, because I was thinking obviously we all know we've heard of Davos in various ways. 278 00:32:15,930 --> 00:32:25,250 So what's the kind of that after. History, the afterlife of these health resorts, what happens to them? 279 00:32:25,250 --> 00:32:35,330 So from Suvla, eighteen nineties beginning, they say they start to develop sanitoria cleansed. 280 00:32:35,330 --> 00:32:43,600 So no longer do you have your wife, husband and family all living in the hotel, which was the previous mode. 281 00:32:43,600 --> 00:32:52,640 It moves into a strictly controlled and sanitorium environment, so it becomes heavily medicalised and controlled. 282 00:32:52,640 --> 00:33:01,030 So very, very different world. So what I'm looking at is really up until nineteen hundred. 283 00:33:01,030 --> 00:33:11,720 So yeah, it's what I'm looking at I suppose is sort of medicine outside the medical framework and other other examples. 284 00:33:11,720 --> 00:33:20,870 I know, for example, that you're working on something, you're finishing up a special issue that's coming up to do with sleep and stress at the moment. 285 00:33:20,870 --> 00:33:26,890 And I'm because I'm just thinking that I know people will be very interested in this idea of overwork and stress. 286 00:33:26,890 --> 00:33:32,360 Text. You want to talk a little bit more about that contact? Oh, yes. 287 00:33:32,360 --> 00:33:38,650 So it's based on a conference I did with the sleep scientist Russell Foster 288 00:33:38,650 --> 00:33:43,040 and my Disease of Modern Life team at the Royal Society on Sleep and Stress, 289 00:33:43,040 --> 00:33:50,420 past and present. And we actually run from the mediaeval strain to current times and current science, 290 00:33:50,420 --> 00:33:58,840 looking at how people understood sleep and the impact of stress in all the various ways it's been considered in the past. 291 00:33:58,840 --> 00:34:08,570 And in my own work at peace, I'm looking at overworked professionals and the problems of sleep for them, 292 00:34:08,570 --> 00:34:16,390 particularly Bloodstone who had problems sleeping when he was prime minister and was sent off by Andrew Clark to Tutone, 293 00:34:16,390 --> 00:34:23,780 or rather to count to to recover. So, yes, it's quite interesting. 294 00:34:23,780 --> 00:34:34,170 All sorts of things are discovered, such as the ideas of mindfulness and have to get to sleep by imagining the breath in your body. 295 00:34:34,170 --> 00:34:44,490 And then all the sleeping draughts, which are exactly the same as problematic sleeping pills, naps and lots of interesting problems. 296 00:34:44,490 --> 00:34:49,950 I was going to say all sorts of interesting parts. It's a really fantastic project, the view of the modern life. 297 00:34:49,950 --> 00:35:01,550 I would encourage people to cheque it out. I think we now have time to start opening the floor to questions as one does an allied event and fill it. 298 00:35:01,550 --> 00:35:05,420 You're able to take us through that. I am indeed. Thank you. 299 00:35:05,420 --> 00:35:16,340 Thank you, Sally, for a wonderful discussion. And I certainly enjoyed this imaginative journey into the past and into different places. 300 00:35:16,340 --> 00:35:22,160 And I know that people watching I've had wonderful questions as well. 301 00:35:22,160 --> 00:35:27,200 So I wanted to bring together a series of questions. We've had one I'd been about class, 302 00:35:27,200 --> 00:35:34,160 which you touched on a little bit about how much access was there for the working class to these kind of institutions. 303 00:35:34,160 --> 00:35:40,420 But it leads to another question, which is actually one about gender and is there a difference in the way that men and women are treated, 304 00:35:40,420 --> 00:35:46,160 other distinct gender differences around the kind of illnesses that are presented. 305 00:35:46,160 --> 00:35:49,950 Described diagnose times and treated it? 306 00:35:49,950 --> 00:35:56,630 And how much, finally, does this actually relate to the questions of leisure and lifestyle? 307 00:35:56,630 --> 00:35:59,090 What is actually strictly medical questions? One. 308 00:35:59,090 --> 00:36:04,380 One listener I was asking about how does this relate to things like the grand tour and questions of tourism? 309 00:36:04,380 --> 00:36:12,280 So I've smooshed together sort of different questions that I think that you might be able to run with something in those. 310 00:36:12,280 --> 00:36:16,050 Right. Let's start with class. So, yes, you are right. 311 00:36:16,050 --> 00:36:21,920 That's I'm looking really at sort of middle class upwards. 312 00:36:21,920 --> 00:36:28,190 But interestingly, the backlash against this form of travel came in the 80s, 313 00:36:28,190 --> 00:36:33,920 90s when doctors in England started arguing that this is really unfair and actually you 314 00:36:33,920 --> 00:36:41,630 don't need to travel abroad and you could create your own sanitarium in your back garden. 315 00:36:41,630 --> 00:36:49,700 If you have a back garden and that led to the you may be seeing these sheds that people had with 316 00:36:49,700 --> 00:36:56,520 revolving platforms so you could sit in even in the rain in England and actually be outside. 317 00:36:56,520 --> 00:37:03,800 But then that's linked then to the development of the sanitoria, which did take working class. 318 00:37:03,800 --> 00:37:10,410 And as for gender, yes, real differences said the overwork was really meant to be for the male. 319 00:37:10,410 --> 00:37:19,970 You mustn't be a bank or a doctors very much believes that they've suffered from overwork and others. 320 00:37:19,970 --> 00:37:24,520 For women, it was thought. Well, 321 00:37:24,520 --> 00:37:30,010 there's quite a lot about the modern woman and the wonderful novel by Beatrice Harridan that 322 00:37:30,010 --> 00:37:35,860 people here know of but have never read like old ships that pass in the night that set in Devils. 323 00:37:35,860 --> 00:37:44,170 And that's a modern young woman who's done too much thinking and studying and attending political meetings and gets worn out. 324 00:37:44,170 --> 00:37:48,530 So that's another trend of the sort of figure that could be that, 325 00:37:48,530 --> 00:37:56,680 but also that the whole idea of uterine pathology and that you're worn out eating your reproductive system. 326 00:37:56,680 --> 00:38:02,280 So there's Wasner in worn out young women. There's another category that you'd find. 327 00:38:02,280 --> 00:38:11,400 And then so what's the final bit to say? It was about the sort of medicine and illness and a measure of the idea of, oh, yes, on the grand go. 328 00:38:11,400 --> 00:38:15,370 What do you say? Not all. I think of a lovely place in the south of France. 329 00:38:15,370 --> 00:38:19,870 Gorgeous trees and a very agreement I meant. But you've taken us through our medical history of it. 330 00:38:19,870 --> 00:38:23,710 Yes, yes. Yes. And so the reason linked to the Gruntal. 331 00:38:23,710 --> 00:38:33,070 But I think we have to be careful to differentiate some people who went on the grant or actually went with their physician because they were ill. 332 00:38:33,070 --> 00:38:42,760 But mostly it was tourism and education, whereas the places I'm looking at tried absolutely to say we are not for that. 333 00:38:42,760 --> 00:38:49,030 So there was a phrase they use your health seeking, not sightseeing. 334 00:38:49,030 --> 00:38:57,430 But nonetheless, a lot of the the memoirs of the professional men who went there said, 335 00:38:57,430 --> 00:39:03,100 you know, this is rather wonderful because it is legitimate idleness. 336 00:39:03,100 --> 00:39:10,270 So I am allowed to be here by the seashore and see the olive groves and the blossoms and not work. 337 00:39:10,270 --> 00:39:14,320 But it is legitimate because it is medical. 338 00:39:14,320 --> 00:39:22,540 So it was that's quite interesting in the way in which medical authority is used 339 00:39:22,540 --> 00:39:27,490 there to justify often for these people who can't stop themselves working. 340 00:39:27,490 --> 00:39:39,730 So is the Baptist minister, Charles Spurgeon. He went to Montreal for, I think, some twelve years or more before he here every winter before he died. 341 00:39:39,730 --> 00:39:46,600 But whilst he was there, he sat in Bennett's garden and dictated sermons all day long. 342 00:39:46,600 --> 00:39:54,940 So a sense that it's idleness and it's beauty. But also you've got to make sure it's work as well. 343 00:39:54,940 --> 00:39:59,290 Brilliant. I'm my day job is teaching Russian literature and all the 19th century novels. 344 00:39:59,290 --> 00:40:04,320 I know which are about spa towns and things are actually all to do with getting married and meeting people. 345 00:40:04,320 --> 00:40:11,330 And there's an interesting interaction that between. They sort of end of life exhaustion at the end, 346 00:40:11,330 --> 00:40:18,740 whereas whereas a different stage that I've got a couple of other questions which are coming around sanitaria given that we've been talking about. 347 00:40:18,740 --> 00:40:22,850 Someone has asked come rising from Saskatchewan, writing about Sasquatch. 348 00:40:22,850 --> 00:40:30,980 That actually happened to those buildings in those institutions. Have I survived in any form or what's happened to them physically or culturally? 349 00:40:30,980 --> 00:40:34,760 And someone has also asked a couple of people have asked, 350 00:40:34,760 --> 00:40:44,090 what about the locals and their reaction to these as if they're coming with medical conditions, some anxiety about this. 351 00:40:44,090 --> 00:40:49,280 So there's there's a whole group of questions that are coming. Yes. So the buildings. 352 00:40:49,280 --> 00:40:58,310 So Saranac Lake, virtually the entire town, because there are a lot of individual cottages, has been preserved as a sanitarium. 353 00:40:58,310 --> 00:41:07,250 So you can go and see them as they were. Others get repurposed as hospitals. 354 00:41:07,250 --> 00:41:16,880 And there are quite a lot. The just mothballed. And this one I want to go and see in Italy, that apparently is just completely abandoned. 355 00:41:16,880 --> 00:41:22,460 And so you have these eerie institutions that can be. 356 00:41:22,460 --> 00:41:26,010 So, yes, a variety of things happening. 357 00:41:26,010 --> 00:41:36,080 But I find that sanitaria, along with insane asylums, tend to get made into fancy apartments these days as well, quite interestingly. 358 00:41:36,080 --> 00:41:47,690 But then with reference to the response of the locals, yes, it shifts around nineteen hundred. 359 00:41:47,690 --> 00:41:58,280 So up until that time, they're welcoming it with open arms because this this is obviously bringing in lots of money often, which the locals. 360 00:41:58,280 --> 00:42:05,720 So it's it's an interesting form of colonisation because, well, they describe themselves as English colonies. 361 00:42:05,720 --> 00:42:13,370 In fact, they're probably being exploited rather than the other way around because it's the locals who are building the hotels, et cetera. 362 00:42:13,370 --> 00:42:22,540 But once the idea of tuberculosis being infectious the own lives, then you get you get the worries. 363 00:42:22,540 --> 00:42:31,110 Why should we be letting these people in? And I've just been looking at Shipp's Diaries for Invalid's going out to Australia and New Zealand. 364 00:42:31,110 --> 00:42:34,520 And up until nineteen hundred. Yes. 365 00:42:34,520 --> 00:42:39,840 Come. And then suddenly the ships attending up and the locals are saying, no, we're not going to let these ships in. 366 00:42:39,840 --> 00:42:44,390 Again, a real parallel with what's happening now. 367 00:42:44,390 --> 00:42:50,690 Is there anything that that resonates with things that you work on from a slightly different perspective? 368 00:42:50,690 --> 00:42:55,640 Might I have to say as a little more grim? So I work very much on these drawing boards. 369 00:42:55,640 --> 00:43:01,480 I tend to look at soldiers and sailors. And one of the interesting things is and even in the seventeen hundreds. 370 00:43:01,480 --> 00:43:06,080 Because a lot of it is about European wars that are being fought in the colonies. 371 00:43:06,080 --> 00:43:13,640 You still do see this association, which is very much confirmed through observation, that there's more disease in foreign locations. 372 00:43:13,640 --> 00:43:20,990 And so you actually do get even in the seventeen hundreds. Discussion about sending usually officers back home, what they call a change of air. 373 00:43:20,990 --> 00:43:24,650 Back to what they see as being a more temperate climate in the hopes that that will cure them. 374 00:43:24,650 --> 00:43:29,000 But then you also see this being done for soldiers and sailors. 375 00:43:29,000 --> 00:43:31,910 So there is this notion of the kind of again, like Sally was saying, 376 00:43:31,910 --> 00:43:37,130 there's very longstanding tradition of disease being associated with locations in the climates, 377 00:43:37,130 --> 00:43:44,840 not so much with thinking about it as a kind of what we now think of in terms of bacterial invasion and particular practises. 378 00:43:44,840 --> 00:43:54,410 I think unless people said with the question of leisure, what I find very interesting is or my time period, because I'm looking at very common people, 379 00:43:54,410 --> 00:44:03,620 especially when we're thinking about soldiers and sailors, just having a rest in a hospital is a kind of luxury in some ways. 380 00:44:03,620 --> 00:44:08,660 And of course, that's one of the things I find very interesting when we're doing history of medicine is what I'm often looking 381 00:44:08,660 --> 00:44:14,720 for on the record as an example of medicine isn't so much a kind of therapeutic in terms of vaccines or drugs, 382 00:44:14,720 --> 00:44:18,380 but very often just having five days we were in a hospital. 383 00:44:18,380 --> 00:44:25,250 You're not having to work, you're not having to labour, and you're also being given very plentiful diets. 384 00:44:25,250 --> 00:44:32,480 That's actually quite tangible form of medical care, but it's not something that we might usually expect to be able to find in the record. 385 00:44:32,480 --> 00:44:38,520 So I think in some ways, looking into Sally's points about what are these medical practises. 386 00:44:38,520 --> 00:44:49,400 Right. So this notion of rests, the notion of rich foods or whatnot can actually be quite, quite a potent form of healing in the past. 387 00:44:49,400 --> 00:44:55,670 Thank you. Thank you both. Now, a couple of questions have come in on a sort of religious spiritual topic. 388 00:44:55,670 --> 00:45:01,190 We've had Dick Parsons with sore throats, and one of the questions was, 389 00:45:01,190 --> 00:45:06,020 is there a connexion between sort of physical treatment of the body and questions of sort of moral regeneration 390 00:45:06,020 --> 00:45:16,400 and moral capacity to an ideas inherent about such about character and its soulfulness or character? 391 00:45:16,400 --> 00:45:18,680 And another one was given that people are travelling. 392 00:45:18,680 --> 00:45:25,370 They may be travelling to different parts of the world with different religious cultures, with different religious traditions. 393 00:45:25,370 --> 00:45:29,890 Is there any sense of that physical journey? 394 00:45:29,890 --> 00:45:34,970 That is very much expose people to rather different spiritual ideas when they get to wherever they're going. 395 00:45:34,970 --> 00:45:46,620 When they meet people in these often quite diverse communities. So what's the up with that one on the moral? 396 00:45:46,620 --> 00:45:58,080 What I found quite interesting is the difference between Montel and Davos, the Spurgeon, who is this very famous preacher, 397 00:45:58,080 --> 00:46:04,710 talked about the fact that say you could be closer to God if you were in monotone because you are. 398 00:46:04,710 --> 00:46:10,110 Jesus went to the seaside and there was also an olive groves. Wonderful explanation. 399 00:46:10,110 --> 00:46:14,610 And sections argued that you really should go there for your spiritual regeneration. 400 00:46:14,610 --> 00:46:24,450 And then Spurgeon offered it very much as as as a form of spiritual regeneration as well as a sort of improvement of the body. 401 00:46:24,450 --> 00:46:27,210 But then with the growth of devils, 402 00:46:27,210 --> 00:46:39,060 they start to market themselves as being more moral because more manly than being effeminate, lounging around in the south. 403 00:46:39,060 --> 00:46:49,920 And so there's a sense that if you were British, you really ought to be going to the cold northern climes of the Alps to strengthen your resolve. 404 00:46:49,920 --> 00:46:57,840 So it's again, it's it's forms of marketing. But I think the whole moral issue is constantly there. 405 00:46:57,840 --> 00:47:03,630 People trying to justify their form of life, pondering on it. 406 00:47:03,630 --> 00:47:12,360 Stephensons forever wondering in this, is it right this time taking up people's time and energy and money in this way? 407 00:47:12,360 --> 00:47:21,840 So a lot of soul searching and then with reference to religion, obviously, I'm just I'm just looking at Europe, 408 00:47:21,840 --> 00:47:30,030 but I have been interested in the way in which I'm picking up on Erica's point about sort of going out to the tropics, et cetera. 409 00:47:30,030 --> 00:47:39,080 A lot of people coming through would actually come that were serving soldiers coming back from India. 410 00:47:39,080 --> 00:47:44,490 And there was quite a lot of Indian philosophy that starts to mingle in. 411 00:47:44,490 --> 00:47:50,720 And this is in my sleep research as well as the there's the health resort was the research. 412 00:47:50,720 --> 00:47:52,860 So it's really quite interesting. 413 00:47:52,860 --> 00:48:06,040 That said that there is responding to and picking up of ideas, obviously not wholesale transformation, but some openness to new ideas. 414 00:48:06,040 --> 00:48:12,600 I mean, I would just add, Sally was pointing out the word bracing comes apart and descriptions, 415 00:48:12,600 --> 00:48:17,230 and I was thinking in terms of what what it means to say that a place is bracing and how it seems 416 00:48:17,230 --> 00:48:23,610 to have these kind of moral or constitutional contradictions as well as the physical connotation. 417 00:48:23,610 --> 00:48:27,630 But I also think I've been struck again since we're talking about this notion of marriage. 418 00:48:27,630 --> 00:48:36,090 And some people keeping diaries that, of course, the very practise of keeping a diary had this Christian spiritual origin and definitely in my period. 419 00:48:36,090 --> 00:48:39,010 Now, this is about a process of self-examination. 420 00:48:39,010 --> 00:48:44,170 And so they always it always strikes me that even today when people are being encouraged to keep diaries, 421 00:48:44,170 --> 00:48:48,490 that we're actually continuing on this kind of long Christian Western practise, 422 00:48:48,490 --> 00:48:56,080 even though we don't quite recognise the roots of it in various ways, that self-examination and penitence in some form. 423 00:48:56,080 --> 00:49:04,140 Yes, they did. You know, I've had a couple of questions which are a bit presentist in in nature. 424 00:49:04,140 --> 00:49:08,700 And we've been definitely sort of trying to talk about the past as best as a foreign country. 425 00:49:08,700 --> 00:49:19,330 But we keep coming back to parallels with the present day. One of them has been pointing out the presence in our current discussion about 426 00:49:19,330 --> 00:49:24,580 relationship with the animal world and the natural world more and more generally. 427 00:49:24,580 --> 00:49:28,300 And is there discussion in the text you're looking at, the periods you're looking at? 428 00:49:28,300 --> 00:49:33,070 Does the discussion also take in that question or is this a purely human debate at this period? 429 00:49:33,070 --> 00:49:42,340 Because, of course, we know that the debates around us covered in markets and there are all kinds of really quite I under examined 430 00:49:42,340 --> 00:49:49,630 questions of how we perceive and talk about other cultures in this completely global debate where we're at the moment. 431 00:49:49,630 --> 00:49:53,950 On the other question was, was the purpose of study simpler and let's not you. 432 00:49:53,950 --> 00:49:59,950 One was, has there been a really? Have you come across a really good piece of advice in the travelogues or the diaries or the 433 00:49:59,950 --> 00:50:05,080 writings from the past which we could employ now to help us through the present moment? 434 00:50:05,080 --> 00:50:11,520 Is there something we can learn from our forebears to help us through things? 435 00:50:11,520 --> 00:50:14,790 Well, with reference to animals. 436 00:50:14,790 --> 00:50:23,810 Yes, that was considered 19th century, because you've got anthrax and you and you've got sort of the bovine tuberculosis. 437 00:50:23,810 --> 00:50:31,860 And one of the people I've been working on, Benjamin Ward Richardson, who's behind the diseases of modern life to become. 438 00:50:31,860 --> 00:50:43,230 He argued in the eighteen fifties that what they ought to be doing is keeping statistics on local and national basis. 439 00:50:43,230 --> 00:50:49,440 And every week of diseases, both human and animal. 440 00:50:49,440 --> 00:50:53,870 And he was told he was way ahead of his time and to come back in 50 years. 441 00:50:53,870 --> 00:51:01,260 But so there was a real sense that they should be doing this work and thinking about it. 442 00:51:01,260 --> 00:51:05,070 But, yes, it didn't really take off. 443 00:51:05,070 --> 00:51:13,500 And I think we we're suffering from that. Now, I don't know whether you want to sensing on that one. 444 00:51:13,500 --> 00:51:21,180 It's an interesting point I have. And I was thinking, I don't know. People come in about animals specifically and then study numbers so much. 445 00:51:21,180 --> 00:51:25,260 Obviously, they work very closely with them, and especially when we're thinking about armies. 446 00:51:25,260 --> 00:51:30,390 But I was thinking about people's views, about the relationship with what they see as being the natural world. 447 00:51:30,390 --> 00:51:34,080 And obviously, the 19th century, I think you see a kind of transformation of how that's seen. 448 00:51:34,080 --> 00:51:38,100 So it does strike me that the way that we talk about the animal world might be similar to 449 00:51:38,100 --> 00:51:42,570 how we're also thinking about our relationship with what we see as being the natural world. 450 00:51:42,570 --> 00:51:48,450 And especially, I think as a historian, you can see that there's a transformation about whether we think of disease as a kind 451 00:51:48,450 --> 00:51:53,250 of natural occurrence that has a cycle to it that maybe we can't do much about, 452 00:51:53,250 --> 00:51:59,520 but that we just live with, which is a slightly more common view that I see in the seventeen hundreds than to this notion that 453 00:51:59,520 --> 00:52:04,980 actually we can try to transform it and that we should have an ability to contain and manage it, 454 00:52:04,980 --> 00:52:10,680 or even to this notion that we're somehow responsible for these outbreaks because of our our poor relationship, 455 00:52:10,680 --> 00:52:17,820 our kind of imbalance that we have with the natural world. I'm also kind of interested in how even those views are historic sized. 456 00:52:17,820 --> 00:52:25,290 Right. They, too, have a history on various levels. And I suppose thinking about that, there is human. 457 00:52:25,290 --> 00:52:33,120 And then there's the natural environmental. But then there's the interesting sort of blurred gap between someone who's talked about lapdogs. 458 00:52:33,120 --> 00:52:41,430 And I'm thinking a kind of exotic pets in cages around the place. And the interesting way that we bring the natural world in, commodify it up. 459 00:52:41,430 --> 00:52:45,250 But it's a sort of indelible trace off of a world out there. 460 00:52:45,250 --> 00:52:50,130 And then periodically you mention the bovine tuberculosis and anthrax. 461 00:52:50,130 --> 00:52:54,030 But there's a sort of more domestic science to my relationship with the natural world. 462 00:52:54,030 --> 00:53:00,840 And I know lots of cat owners are worried about what they should be doing at the moment with that felines. 463 00:53:00,840 --> 00:53:07,530 But to think about the second part of the question about these sort of advice and things, 464 00:53:07,530 --> 00:53:15,360 one could learn there was a real emphasis on the beauty of the natural landscape in these places and 465 00:53:15,360 --> 00:53:25,200 how one of the curative forms was actually just going out into that beauty and then responding to it. 466 00:53:25,200 --> 00:53:33,010 So a sense of landscape is this space of mindfulness seemed acutely in current terms. 467 00:53:33,010 --> 00:53:35,610 But another piece of advice, 468 00:53:35,610 --> 00:53:47,820 that or desire that they have that I really think we should not have forgotten is the suggestion that all hospitals should have gardens, 469 00:53:47,820 --> 00:53:55,800 that people should be able to be wheeled out into the gardens. And Paxton actually and Joseph Pexton, who did Crystal Palace. 470 00:53:55,800 --> 00:54:04,690 He suggested that all hospitals should have a winter garden attached to them so that all patients could. 471 00:54:04,690 --> 00:54:13,010 Take there and be surrounded by natural plants, which is a wonderful idea, I think. 472 00:54:13,010 --> 00:54:19,260 And you actually see it. What's interesting is you see it in the British army and Navy, even in the seven hundreds died. 473 00:54:19,260 --> 00:54:24,280 There is a recognition both that gardens are useful, especially because they're worried about things such as scurvy. 474 00:54:24,280 --> 00:54:28,090 So they know that fresh, fresh things in general are much better. 475 00:54:28,090 --> 00:54:36,880 So what I kind of find amazing is you can see even from early on that, Fred, the empire, you've you see soldiers planting gardens everywhere. 476 00:54:36,880 --> 00:54:42,940 But they also they're very explicit that they also think the very activity of gardening as a kind of exercise, 477 00:54:42,940 --> 00:54:46,150 a regular discipline, also leads to their health. 478 00:54:46,150 --> 00:54:50,980 So I've been struck by how I and I've always been curious whether it's a kind of longstanding British tradition, 479 00:54:50,980 --> 00:54:56,100 because obviously to me, there's been a lot of discussion in the current epidemic about people's gardens. 480 00:54:56,100 --> 00:54:59,380 Who has access to gardens and so on and so forth. 481 00:54:59,380 --> 00:55:09,190 So both of the products of these gardens, but also the very activity of gardening as being crucial to this notion of health and stability. 482 00:55:09,190 --> 00:55:18,740 Yes. And in parallel with the discussion about opening up gardens and playing fields, et cetera, at the moment, again, in the late 19th century, 483 00:55:18,740 --> 00:55:28,930 they they did argue rather hopelessly, I think, in the sense that that London Square should be closed off, should be opened up when the rich go away. 484 00:55:28,930 --> 00:55:31,350 Only when they go away. 485 00:55:31,350 --> 00:55:42,350 But also, there's a movement to window boxes for the poor in the sense that these things do really matter and impact on health. 486 00:55:42,350 --> 00:55:48,990 But that's that's very resonant for where we are at the moment as we stare at the sky and see the lack of paper trails and yes, 487 00:55:48,990 --> 00:55:52,940 the increased air quality or how much more. And think about our gardening. 488 00:55:52,940 --> 00:56:00,610 And we can often do that unconsciously without thinking about those people who don't have access to that all the time of his careers 489 00:56:00,610 --> 00:56:09,820 or jobs or my circumstances mean those are actually rather luxurious pleasures in life and the products of great privilege. 490 00:56:09,820 --> 00:56:17,710 I'm just looking at the life chats to which I have access here to see whether any more questions have popped up in our last few minutes. 491 00:56:17,710 --> 00:56:24,470 Some people want to sort of go back to the leisure and health question a little bit more. 492 00:56:24,470 --> 00:56:26,680 And someone has asked. 493 00:56:26,680 --> 00:56:34,120 When people go in the early 19th century, for instance, keeps going to Italy, France comes in, they sort of do it off their own bat. 494 00:56:34,120 --> 00:56:42,160 When does this become a much more regulated to the industrialised products of official medicine? 495 00:56:42,160 --> 00:56:46,000 The establishments of practises. Come on. Come with me. Come on. 496 00:56:46,000 --> 00:56:53,380 Dated simply or conveniently, or is it is it more complicated than that? Well, it starts 1920s, 497 00:56:53,380 --> 00:57:00,010 but really I think it's from the eighteen fifties onwards when you get all the guidebooks with the 498 00:57:00,010 --> 00:57:10,630 specific statistics for each place and doctors who are specialising particularly where to go. 499 00:57:10,630 --> 00:57:16,900 And also, of course, as soon as the railways come, it makes it so much easier for people to travel. 500 00:57:16,900 --> 00:57:24,660 So it set up in ways that it's not really possible in early decades. 501 00:57:24,660 --> 00:57:30,430 The railway is a fascinating thing because it's a great engine for mobility. 502 00:57:30,430 --> 00:57:35,230 But at the same time, it's a greatly anxious place because you meet all kinds of people who come together in 503 00:57:35,230 --> 00:57:39,910 a tight space before travelling together and then going off to the essence of Tropeano. 504 00:57:39,910 --> 00:57:44,920 A lot of 19th century literature, all the bad things happen en route to somewhere else. 505 00:57:44,920 --> 00:57:50,950 Maybe that's because I've read too much and I couldn't. But there is something. The best example. 506 00:57:50,950 --> 00:58:00,200 Yes, well, Russian literature always does like. This question, which is has come up now, which I think is a really interesting one. 507 00:58:00,200 --> 00:58:04,000 There's been a lot of discussion says that that's the question. 508 00:58:04,000 --> 00:58:11,810 But the question about Corona virus on reactions to it as being like a war that the military rhetoric. 509 00:58:11,810 --> 00:58:17,110 So it's just a question from this person is. Do you find that rhetoric in the documents you're looking at? 510 00:58:17,110 --> 00:58:21,830 And I suppose I'd like to just take one answer. Like, how useful is that metaphorical use of language? 511 00:58:21,830 --> 00:58:29,060 Can we ever get away from it? And Susan Sontag is crawling up my hair, as I say, thinking about illness as mental. 512 00:58:29,060 --> 00:58:33,290 How do we respond to this use of language that way? We're living through at the moment. 513 00:58:33,290 --> 00:58:37,190 How do you see it in a historical perspective? Yes. 514 00:58:37,190 --> 00:58:39,890 Well, I think it's deeply unhelpful, actually, 515 00:58:39,890 --> 00:58:48,470 because of all the apparatus that goes with thinking about war and the oppositions that normally people against people. 516 00:58:48,470 --> 00:58:55,790 And you're actually seeing that now playing out in our international politics in ways that's really not helpful. 517 00:58:55,790 --> 00:59:05,300 But certainly in the 19th century that they had it with cholera is seen as coming from the east, et cetera, of war. 518 00:59:05,300 --> 00:59:20,350 So all these connotations. But when the tubercle bacillus was discovered, there were pictures of St George, the dragon in the killing. 519 00:59:20,350 --> 00:59:25,550 And that made sense again, that we will conquer by killing the enemy. 520 00:59:25,550 --> 00:59:32,350 So it's always there. But I think it's a loose usage doesn't help. 521 00:59:32,350 --> 00:59:38,150 And Eric and I were just talking earlier about epidemic of sleeplessness, which has become a very common phrase. 522 00:59:38,150 --> 00:59:49,530 Again, I think it's not helpful because that that form of language then creates its own responses and cultural assumptions. 523 00:59:49,530 --> 00:59:56,390 I mean, one thing which I think is interesting is obviously I think especially with this this movement towards bacteriology and 524 00:59:56,390 --> 01:00:03,560 this conceptual framework in which disease is something that invades you from outside instead of what I see in my period, 525 01:00:03,560 --> 01:00:08,810 which is actually diseases about a kind of imbalance that's within you and needs to be you need to be rebalanced. 526 01:00:08,810 --> 01:00:13,460 And so I can see how this war metaphor and this notion that it's an external threat, 527 01:00:13,460 --> 01:00:17,120 that somehow you can keep separate, therefore becomes more common. 528 01:00:17,120 --> 01:00:23,960 But I would also say, look, as a man, as a historian of war, what I also find interesting is, is our way of thinking about war also changes. 529 01:00:23,960 --> 01:00:29,960 Right. So there's a long period, the period that I will work on in which war is seen as part of a natural process, 530 01:00:29,960 --> 01:00:35,300 something that just occurs within societies. And it seems it's a terrible thing, like terrible weather. 531 01:00:35,300 --> 01:00:39,980 But it's but it's natural. It's not something that actually one can control and contain. 532 01:00:39,980 --> 01:00:43,280 And so I also think it's interesting that in the same way that we've kind of borrowed it, 533 01:00:43,280 --> 01:00:46,910 because we also now see disease as being something not that it's a natural process, 534 01:00:46,910 --> 01:00:51,610 but something that needs to be seen as external and something that we can control and manage. 535 01:00:51,610 --> 01:00:56,420 It is another way of thinking about how about our assumptions about our relationship 536 01:00:56,420 --> 01:01:01,730 either with war or with disease and exactly where we stand in position to them. 537 01:01:01,730 --> 01:01:07,370 Well, thank you, both of you. I think our time has come to an end rather remarkably. 538 01:01:07,370 --> 01:01:13,460 This is the first time I've ever done this and the time has just rushed by. There are many more questions we could have taken. 539 01:01:13,460 --> 01:01:20,090 My apologies to those members of the audience out there who ask questions that we couldn't get round to tackling. 540 01:01:20,090 --> 01:01:21,620 But thank you, Erica. 541 01:01:21,620 --> 01:01:30,890 Thank you, Sally, for really taking us through those big ideas and for making us all welcome in this big tent at the time being so. 542 01:01:30,890 --> 01:01:38,540 Thank you. Good luck with your work and helping us all to address both the past and the challenges of the present. 543 01:01:38,540 --> 01:01:45,620 So tell everyone who's been watching. We look forward to seeing you again in a week's time. 544 01:01:45,620 --> 01:01:49,460 Next week, we will meet at five p.m. on Thursday, the twenty third. 545 01:01:49,460 --> 01:01:52,220 If I pool, that is, of course, Shakespeare's birthday. 546 01:01:52,220 --> 01:02:01,010 And we'll be delighted to welcome Emma Smith in a discussion which I'm sure we'll take him Shakespeare and much else besides. 547 01:02:01,010 --> 01:02:08,940 So thank you for being with us. Thank you for bearing with me as I struggle with this brave new world of social distancing. 548 01:02:08,940 --> 01:02:14,510 But it's made me feel very much part of the big community out there. And good luck and keep well. 549 01:02:14,510 --> 01:02:50,305 Thank you all.