Please find below the abstract for the next Damaging the Body seminar,
starting at 6pm next Tuesday (8 February), at the Wellcome Trust Centre
for the History of Medicine, 183 Euston Road. Events take place on the 5th
floor, are open to all, and there is no need to book.
Tues 8 Feb: Chris Millard (Queen Mary, University of London) Beyond
Damaged Bodies – “Self-Poisoning” and Pathologised Domestic Space in 1960s
British Psychiatry
During the 1960s, psychiatric interest in “attempted suicide” as a “cry
for help” was able to flourish, following the decriminalization of suicide
in 1961. A particular government-funded research unit, based in Edinburgh
under Morris Carstairs, took the lead in the investigation of this
"epidemic" phenomenon – thought to be prevalent amongst young,
working-class women, and taking the specific form of an "overdose" of
prescription sedatives. In this paper I shall examine the ways in which
people arriving at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh's Regional Poisoning
Treatment Centre were diagnosed and treated. The psychopathology of this
phenomenon was made meaningful by producing it as ritualistic and locating
it within a social network – as a “cry for help”. But a number of
practices, such as interviewing the spouse of the “overdoser”, and the
employment of psychiatric social workers, enabled this phenomenon to be
rooted in marital or romantic troubles, conceptualised as psychopathogenic
domestic space. These projections of and into “the home” were further
enabled by splitting the “physical” damage caused by “the overdose” from
the “underlying psychopathology”, and focussing upon the latter. Thus the
damage to the body (often dismissed as “gestural overdoses”) was
subordinated to the psychic damage rooted in domestic space, helping to
consolidate a psychiatric foothold in physical resuscitation wards.
Mon 21 Feb – Ivan Crozier (Edinburgh) - Culture-Bound Syndromes, Koro and
the Emergence of 'Cosmopolitan' Psychiatry
14 Mar – David Haslam (National Obesity Forum) – Imperfect Bodies? :
Clinical and Sociological Perspectives on Obesity
Mon 9 May - Gemma Angel (UCL) - Title tbc.
Tues 31 May – Sander Gilman (Emory) – Title tbc.
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Sarah Chaney
Research Student
Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL
183 Euston Road
London
NW1 2BE
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