This event will entirely take place online.
Speaker: Professor Brian Hurwitz - King's College London
It is often assumed that clinical observations in the long nineteenth-century arose from hospital receiving rooms and wards, apothecaries’ shops and dispensaries; and that outside the developing fields of public and environmental health, clinical phenomena were delineated and attended to indoors. But during this period, the urban environment also became a medical observatory, supporting diverse clinical noticings and intricate descriptions of bodily appearance and nervous disposition.
These observations contributed not only to everyday medical care and follow-up, but to new disease concepts, shaped by the convergence of medical practice in urban areas, the circulation of people in city spaces, street rhythms, and by disparities of poverty, wealth, and health, evident in such living conditions. As well as places of urbanity, this talk examines the way city streets became positioned as locales of medical enquiry - surveillance and noticing - which entered interstitially into clinical understanding and knowledge of the period.
This event will be streamed live here on our website.
There will also be an audience Q&A at the end of the event.
Although this event is free of charge, if you would like to make a donation to support our heritage activities during these difficult times you can do so here.
