Tuesday 10 April 2012

Scurvy&Nostalgia: Jonathan Lamb to speak at Keele

Follow up event: 25th May 2012

Jonathan Lamb, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanitites at Vanderbilt University is to give an exciting talk on Scurvy and Nostalgia at Keele University on 25th May 2012.

The event is conceptualised as a follow up event to stem from the discussions prompted by the Two Cultures conference held on the 12th May 2012. We strongly encourage all delegates and participants of that conference to attend this event for further discussions and to witness the interdisciplinary approach at work!

Professor Lamb is collaborating with James May and Fiona Harrison, neurologists at Vanderbilt Medical School, who have been running a series of experiments on scurbotic mice.

In addition we warmly welcome all interested in the science and literature crossover, in Eighteenth Century studies, Medical History or Scurbotic Mice!

See below abstract:

'Nostalgia was identified as a disease by the Swiss physician Johannes
Hofer in the 17th century, and cited as a medical condition by Joseph Banks when he suffered from it on Cook's first voyage.  Thomas Trotter was the first formally to link it to another disease, scurvy, when he defined the labile emotional condition of its victims as 'scorbutic nostalgia'. Trotter went further than that, he associated nostalgia with an array of social, military and cultural developments (stock market speculation, fixed incomes, naval blockades and novel-reading) which induced a state of mind that was cognate with other forms of imaginative indulgence such as calenture (maritime fever), reverie, second-sight, and the suspension of disbelief typical of naive novel-readers. Trotter's fellow-student of scurvy, Thomas Beddoes, introduced an artificial version of this state of mind at the Pneumatic Institute by means of nitrous oxide, a gas that Samuel Mitchill, an American chemist, had named septon,and identified as the cause of all contagious diseases, among which he numbered scurvy.  Taking scurvy and nitrous oxide together as joint (or atleast parallel) causes of a pathological state of imagination that might loosely be termed nostalgia, I want to see if it is possible to tighten the definition of that ecstatic state of nervous excitement, particularly with regard to altered perceptions of time and space.'


The event is free to all and to be held in the Claus Moser Building at 1pm CM0.12

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