I hope you're unwell: The English indoors and the making of the modern environment.

Join us for an instalment of the Weather, Climate, and Health Research Theme's online talk series.

Dr. Vladimir Jankovic (Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, Manchester) will present on "I hope you’re unwell: the English indoors and the making of the modern environment".

The talk will be followed by a Q&A.

Abstract
In this paper, I sketch the medicalization of domestic interiors in urban England, circa 1750 - 1830, paying attention to the subjectivity of the senses - and especially to the modern experience of unwellness and discomfort - as a source for what might be described as the medical ‘invention’ of the environment. While acknowledging the extensive historical literature on the medicalization of space in relation to the theory of non-naturals, neo-Hippocratism, and medical geography, my objective here is to pursue a different line of inquiry: to suggest that the medical treatment of the stuffy, intimate spaces of urban life created new grounds upon which the modern environment could be conceived as a realm defined by hidden risks requiring management. I consider unwellness, discomfort, and restlessness as conditions that gave rise to a new medical vocabulary emerging in the late Georgian period, epitomized by the virally popular James Beresford’s Miseries of Human Life (1807). I also draw attention to early nineteenth-century treatments of indoor spaces that further encouraged thinking about the interior as a site of both hazard and improvement.

The Zoom link will be circulated closer to the event.

Please note that this event is free to attend.

This talk is organised by the Institute for Medical Humanities' Weather, Climate, and Health Research Theme, co-led by: Jed Stevenson (Anthropology), Maximilian Hepach (Geography) and Angela Marques Filipe (Sociology).