Damaging the Body: Changing Models of Alcohol Harm

The second seminar in the series Damaging the Body: Physical Harm and the Self, 1850 - 2010, will take place in the Wellcome Library this Friday evening.  Details:

Friday 20 April, 6pm

Dr James Nicholls (Bath Spa University)

It All Adds Up: Changing Models of Alcohol Harm

Abstract: 
A few weeks ago the Coalition announced its intention to follow Scotland and introduce minimum unit pricing for alcohol in England and Wales.  Minimum pricing is the latest development in state efforts to reduce alcohol harm that go back centuries.  Taking a long historical perspective, this paper will look at how government policies on drink have reflected changing ideas about the nature of alcohol, and how these ideas relate to wider notions of risk, freedom and physical wellbeing.


The seminar will take place in the Wellcome Library, 2nd floor, 183 Euston Road, NW1 2BE. Please deposit bags and coats in the ground floor cloakroom and meet in the 2nd floor foyer. Doors at 6pm prompt, the seminars will start by 6.15.

The Damaging the Body seminars have been organised by the UCL Centre for the History of Psychological Disciplines in conjunction with the University of the West of England. The aim of the seminars is to provoke interdisciplinary discussion of the ways in which the creation of more diverse histories of bodily damage in the nineteenth century and beyond might open up wider concerns. 

Image: A drunken woman standing in the street in St Giles's, London. Coloured etching by T.L. Busby, ca. 1826 (Wellcome Library no. 726192i).

Big Picture: Addiction

The latest edition of Big Picture, the Wellcome Trust resource for teachers and students, has just been published. It looks at the topic of 'Addiction': analysing the different forms addiction can take and the science used to understand it.

There's more to Big Picture than the magazine, however: extra online resources for 'Addiction' include teaching plans, video interviews and also an image gallery of material drawn from the Library's collections, exploring drug and alcohol use across time.

More information on Big Picture - including downloadable copies of previous issues - is available from the Wellcome Trust's website.

Exploring Wellcome Collection: A Social History of Madness in Europe

What did it mean to suffer mental health problems in the past? How was madness understood and how were patients treated? Drawing on the rich holdings both in the Library and Wellcome Collection, this short course looks at the history of madness in Europe.

Operated in conjunction with our colleagues at Birkbeck College, the course will focus on different ways of classifying and treating insanity, as well as looking at the difference that gender and class made to treatment and diagnosis.

Topics explored include madness in medieval and early modern Europe; 'moral treatment' in the eighteenth century; the asylum age; hysteria and neurasthenia, degeneration and mental deficiency. This module also includes a special case study on alcoholism and madness.

More details can be found on the Birkbeck website.