Sally Shuttleworth

Constructing Scientific Communities: Citizen Science

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.

Women, Science and Culture: Science in the Nineteenth-century Periodical

The Victorian periodical press offers unique insights into many diverse areas of nineteenth-century experience, and the complex relations between gender, science and culture in particular, yet it has been consistently marginalized as a primary resource in academic study. The Science in the Nineteenth-century Periodical (SciPer) project at the universities of Sheffield and Leeds is creating a new point of access to a wide range of non-specialist periodicals across the century by means of a fully searchable electronic index. By detailing the entire contents of each journal, and not just those articles that have a clear scientific relevance, it becomes clear that science formed a fundamental and integral part of nineteenth-century culture. The electronic index, moreover, will include hypertext cross-reference links that will allow the user to identify a dialogic pattern of encounters between ostensibly diverse articles, rather than only to browse in a simple chronological mode. By adopting this innovative approach, the SciPer database will reveal the manifold intertextual relations between the fictional works of women writers like Elizabeth Gaskell and the scientific articles that often appeared in the pages of the same magazines, and will show that writers of both sexes and across several different genres actively engaged in vibrant interdisciplinary debates concerning scientific issues in a forum provided by the periodical. Although the SciPer database itself is not specifically focused on issues of gender, the index will include several periodicals aimed explicitly at a female readership and, by providing access to titles still rarely utilized in modern scholarship, it will offer further insights into the important contemporary debates about women and science, as well as the more subtle ways, in which gendered imagery was employed within scientific discourse. This article details some critical findings from Punch , The English Womans Domestic Magazine , Cornhill Magazine and the Review of Reviews .

Science periodicals in the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries

From around 100 titles worldwide at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the number of science periodicals grew to an estimated 10 000 by the end, facilitating in the process an exponential growth in popular and professional forms of science.[1][1] Nowadays, scientists might take it for granted

Constructing Scientific Communities: Citizen Science in the Nineteenth and Twenty-First Centuries

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 Councils ‘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.

Victorian visions of child development.

When did medicine first pay attention to the development of the child mind? Most histories would focus on the early 20th century, but that is to ignore the important pre-history of the Victorian era, when early psychiatric writings on childhood were emerging in tandem with the great Victorian novels of childhood and new ways of thinking about the child mind were being constructed in the novels of Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, and George Eliot.

Fear, Phobia and the Victorian Psyche

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.

Old weather: citizen scientists in the 19th and 21st centuries

In 2010 the Royal Society journal Biology Letters publ ished an article, ‘Blackawton bees’, which caused something of a sensation: the findings , on bees’ foraging patterns, were original , but the true original i ty lay in the fact the experiments were in part devised, and the paper written, by a group of 8to 10-year-old chi ldren at Blackawton Primary School in Devon (Blackawton et a l ., 2011).[1] The article attracted cons iderable media attention, troubl ing, as i t did, the boundaries of profess ional science, and distinctions between scienti fic practice and education, not to mention the hierarchies of age and experience. It has not, so far, created a surge of scienti fic papers written by schoolchi ldren, but i t remains a s igni ficant and compel l ing example of what might be poss ible i f we adopt a more inclus ive vis ion of science. The Blackawton bees project has strong resonances for our own AHRC Science in Culture project, ‘Constructing scienti fic communities : ci tizen science in the 19th and 21st centuries ’, which is based at the Univers i ties of Oxford and Leicester, in partnership with the London Natural History Museum, the Royal Col lege of Surgeons and the Royal Society (www.conscicom.org).[2] The project explores , and contributes to, the growing movement of what has come to be known as ‘ci tizen science’, principal ly through the onl ine Zooniverse platform (www.zooniverse.org), founded by co-investigator Chris Lintott, but a lso through historical research into the networks and communities who contributed to science in the 19th century, during a period when profess ional structures were only just emerging.

Book Reviews: Revising the Clinic: Vision and Representation in Victorian Medical Narrative and the Novel.

Revising the Clinic is an ambitious work that sweeps through time from the eighteenth-century medical case history, to Freud at the turn of the twentieth, and integrates analysis of forms of representation in both literary and scientific texts. It is perhaps misleadingly titled, since there is little on clinical case histories between the Philosophical Transactions in the eighteenth century, and Freud at the close. The actual focus lies pre-eminently on forms of vision and representation in the Victorian novel. Whilst there is some discussion of medically related scenes in the novels, the link to science and medicine functions mostly at the level of methodology. Rather than look at specifically medical scenes, Kennedy draws on Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison’s Objectivity (2007) to establish a model of ‘mechanical observation’ that she sees as operative in both scientific and literary texts. The readings of George Eliot’s Adam Bede and Middlemarch thus focus on issues concerning vision and perception, and optical metaphors, rather than representations of illness or bodily ailments. The method is fruitful with regard to yielding new insights into the novels, but not entirely convincing with regard to the parallels drawn with ‘clinical realism’. One of the problems is that Daston and Galison’s arguments, developed with reference to scientific atlases, do not translate easily into clinical medicine. As Kennedy points out in the Middlemarch chapter, the emergence of experimental medicine brought with it a new emphasis on speculation and imagination. ‘Mechanical objectivity’ or ‘observation’ does not capture the complexity of nineteenth-century medical practice, whilst the methodology tends to give primacy to the scientific domain, so that the literary is seen as applying or modifying the scientific, rather than evolving alongside in a process of mutual exchange. More emphasis on the nineteenth-century case history, particularly in the emerging sphere of psychiatry, would have helped to make this case, and also ensured that Freud did not emerge at the end as a sudden and complete departure from previous practice. These quibbles suggest the complexity of Kennedy’s undertaking. Within this perhaps over-ambitious frame there is much of interest. There are good readings of sentimental deathbed scenes in Charles Dickens’s works and in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Ruth, showing how graphic physical detail can be used to build a form of spiritual transcendence. The chapter on clinical realism in the Victorian periodical makes good use of the electronic index of book reviews in the Athenaeum to explore the extraordinary number of nine hundred reviews completed by Edwin Lankester, mostly on scientific and medical topics. It also draws on the work of the Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical project for its analysis of science in the Cornhill and Macmillan’s Magazine. In neither case, however, does it actually cite the electronic source; Kennedy no doubt assumes that both sources could be easily found, but I would like to make a plea for the full referencing and bibliographical citation of electronic sources. The book concludes with a chapter linking the work of Freud with that of Rider Haggard, following up Freud’s suggestion in The Interpretation of Dreams that She (1887) was ‘a strange book, but full of hidden meaning... the eternal feminine, the immortality of our emotions’ (quoted p. 190). Although much has been written on Freud’s methodology, particularly from a literary perspective, Kennedy offers an interesting re-working of notions of romance, drawing on Northrop Frye, to outline the imperialist, romantic quest figured in Freud’s language of exploration. As suggested earlier, however, the fact that Revising the Clinic has not looked at nineteenth-century psychiatric narratives means that Freud is rather taken at his own estimation as a figure who overturns preceding practice. Clearly there are many novel elements in his work, but they would emerge more starkly in an analysis that took into account his immediate predecessors. Kennedy concludes that at the beginning of the twentieth century ‘the novel and its insights had become altogether unavailable as a discursive model for medical prose’ (p. 202). This is, I believe, an overstatement of the case, and overturns some of the complexity mapped out in the text, returning us to a rather standard model of the triumph of clinical objectivity at the turn of the century. Revising the Clinic has much to offer the reader. Whilst its more sweeping claims are not always convincing, it is always engaging, and offers new ways of thinking about the relationships between literary and medical narrative.