Publications

Key selected research publications from MHRC core staff, affiliates, and research students within the College of Arts are listed below. These items display the enormous wealth of work in the medical humanities, including:

  • History and cultures of psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and psychotherapy, from the Classical period to the present day (Gavin Miller, Sofia Xenophontos, Sheila Dickson)
  • Nineteen-century physician-writers (Megan Coyer, Douglas Small)
  • Book and publishing history (Gavin Miller, Megan Coyer, Dahlia Porter)
  • Enlightenment and eighteenth-century medicine, particularly William Cullen via the AHRC-funded Cullen Project, which offers several thousand digitised and transcribed letters (David Shuttleton, Megan Coyer, Moira Hansen)
  • Science Fiction and medicine (Gavin Miller, Anna McFarlane, Manon Mathias)
  • Cultures of digestive and gut health (Manon Mathias)
  • Epidemic disease (Samuel Cohn, Louise Welsh)
  • Creative Writing for mental health (Carolyn Jess-Cooke)
  • Addiction in literary culture (Douglas Small)
  • Botany and collecting (Dahlia Porter)
  • Death and dying (Joseph Wood, Sabine Wieber)

Key Centre Publications

Dickson, Sheila ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8592-7670 (2016) Krankheit als romantischer Alltag in Achim von Arnims 'Der tolle Invalide' und 'Frau von Saverne'. In: Pape, Walter and Burwick, Roswitha (eds.) Die alltägliche Romantik: Gewöhnliches und Phantastisches, Lebenswelt und Kunst. Series: Schriften der Internationalen Arnim-Gesellschaft (11). De Gruyter: Berlin, pp. 241-255. ISBN 9783110455373

Miller, Gavin ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3144-8233 (2018) Madness decolonized?: Madness as transnational identity in Gail Hornstein’s Agnes’s Jacket. Journal of Medical Humanities, 39(3), pp. 303-323. (doi: 10.1007/s10912-017-9434-8) (PMID:28194547)

Coyer, Megan ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9996-359X (2018) Medicine and improvement in the Scots Magazine; and Edinburgh Literary Miscellany, 1804-17. In: Benchimol, Alex and McKeever, Gerard Lee (eds.) Cultures of Improvement in Scottish Romanticism, 1707-1840. Series: The enlightenment world: political and intellectual history of the long eighteenth century. Routledge, pp. 191-212. ISBN 9781138482937

Jess-Cooke, Carolyn ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9406-1052 (2018) Creative writing for recovery from mental illness. In: Pujolràs-Noguer, Esther and Hand, Felicity (eds.) In/visible Traumas: Healing, Loving, Writing. Femrite Publications.

Welsh, Louise ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4194-0691 (2015) Death is a Welcome Guest. Series: Plague times trilogy, 2. John Murray: London. ISBN 9781848546561

Welsh, Louise ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4194-0691 (2015) A Lovely Way to Burn. Series: Plague times trilogy, 1. John Murray: London. ISBN 9781848546530

Phelan, Sarah ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9151-3201 and Philo, Chris ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2514-4604 (2021) ‘A Walk 21/1/35’: a psychiatric-psychoanalytic fragment meets the new walking studies. Cultural Geographies, 28(1), pp. 157-175. (doi: 10.1177/1474474020956258)

Small, Douglas ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2545-2444 (2015) Sherlock Holmes and cocaine: a 7% solution for modern professionalism. English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920, 58(3), pp. 341-360.

Shuttleton, David E. (2016) ‘Please put a date to your letters …’: the textual evidence for Dr William Cullen's management of his epistolary practice. Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 39(1), pp. 59-77. (doi: 10.1111/1754-0208.12260)

Miller, Gavin ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3144-8233 (2014) Is the agenda for global mental health a form of cultural imperialism? Medical Humanities, 40(2), pp. 131-134. (doi: 10.1136/medhum-2013-010471) (PMID:24625368)

Cohn, Samuel ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4490-5034 (2018) Reasons to revolt: cholera and plague, social violence and blame from Procopius to Surat, 1994. In: Tyner, James (ed.) The Idea of Violence. Series: Kent State University European studies series (5). Viella: Rome, pp. 23-40. ISBN 9788833130736

Hansen, Moira, Smith, Daniel J. ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2267-1951 and Carruthers, Gerard ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7188-9797 (2018) Mood disorder in the personal correspondence of Robert Burns: testing a novel inter-disciplinary approach. Journal of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, 48(2), pp. 165-174. (doi: 10.4997/JRCPE.2018.212)

Dickson, Sheila ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8592-7670 (2019) Bettina von Arnim in ihrer Zeit: Krankheit, Pflege und Homöopathie. In: Becker-Cantarino, Barbara (ed.) Bettina von Arnim Handbuch. De Gruyter: Berlin, Boston, pp. 135-143. ISBN 978311026091

Miller, Gavin ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3144-8233 (2017) David Stafford-Clark (1916-1999): seeing through a celebrity psychiatrist. Wellcome Open Research, 2, 30. (doi: 10.12688/wellcomeopenres.11411.1) (PMID:28503668) (PMCID:PMC5426535)

Dickson, Sheila ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8592-7670 (2018) Rotation therapy for maniacs, melancholics and idiots: theory, practice and perception in European medical and literary case histories. History of Psychiatry, 29(1), pp. 22-37. (doi: 10.1177/0957154X17733176)

Small, Douglas ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2545-2444 (2016) Masters of Healing: Cocaine and the Ideal of the Victorian Medical Man. Journal of Victorian Culture, 21(1), pp. 3-20. (doi: 10.1080/13555502.2015.1124798) (PMID:27110213) (PMCID:PMC4819571)

Miller, Gavin ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3144-8233 (2015) Psychiatric penguins: writing on psychiatry for Penguin Books Ltd, c.1950-c.1980. History of the Human Sciences, 28(4), pp. 76-101. (doi: 10.1177/0952695115586121)

Phelan, Sarah ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9151-3201 (2021) A ‘commonsense’ psychoanalysis: listening to the psychosocial dreamer in interwar Glasgow psychiatry. History of the Human Sciences, 34(3-4), pp. 142-168. (doi: 10.1177/0952695120926035)

Cohn, Jr., Samuel K. ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4490-5034 (2018) Epidemics: Hate and Compassion from the Plague of Athens to AIDS. Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780198819660 (doi: 10.1093/oso/9780198819660.001.0001)

Coyer, Megan ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9996-359X (2015) Medical discourse and ideology in the Edinburgh Review: a Chaldean exemplar. In: Benchimol, Alex, Brown, Rhona and Shuttleton, David (eds.) Before Blackwood's: Scottish Journalism in the Age of Enlightenment. Pickering & Chatto: London, pp. 103-157. ISBN 9781848935501

Mathias, Manon ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1267-4710 (2018) Autointoxication and historical precursors of the microbiome–gut–brain axis. Microbial Ecology in Health and Disease, 29(2), 1548249. (doi: 10.1080/16512235.2018.1548249)

Porter, Dahlia ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0275-7472 (2019) Catalogues for an entropic collection: losses, gains and disciplinary exhaustion in the Hunterian Museum, Glasgow. BJHS Themes, 4, pp. 215-243. (doi: 10.1017/bjt.2019.15)

Cohn Jr, Samuel Kline ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4490-5034 (2017) Cholera revolts: a class struggle we may not like. Social History, 42(2), pp. 162-180. (doi: 10.1080/03071022.2017.1290365)

White, Ross ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4026-6439, McGeachan, Cheryl ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7476-6218, Miller, Gavin ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3144-8233 and Xenofontos, Sophia ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5766-7565 (Eds.) (2020) Special Issue: "Other Psychotherapies” – Healing Interactions Across Time, Geography and Culture [Guest Editors]. Transcultural Psychiatry, 57(6). SAGE Publications.

Miller, Gavin ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3144-8233 (2017) Reflecting on the medicalization of distress. In: White, Ross, Jain, Sumeet, Read, Ursula and Orr, David (eds.) The Palgrave Handbook of Global Mental Health: Sociocultural Perspectives. Palgrave MacMillan: Basingstoke. ISBN 9781137395092

Shuttleton, David E. (2016) The Cullen Project: The Consultation Letters of Dr William Cullen (1710-1790) at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. [Website]

McFarlane, Anna ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1100-8959 (2019) “Becoming acquainted with all that pain”: nursing as activism in Naomi Mitchison’s science fiction. Literature and Medicine, 37(2), pp. 278-297. (doi: 10.1353/lm.2019.0013) (PMID:31885025)

Coyer, Megan ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9996-359X (2014) The Embodied Damnation of James Hogg’s Justified Sinner. Journal of Literature and Science, 7(1), pp. 1-19. (doi: 10.12929/jls.07.1.01)

Jess-Cooke, Carolyn ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9406-1052 (2017) Safety first: safeguards for writing for wellbeing. Mslexia, 76, pp. 52-53.

Miller, Gavin ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3144-8233 (2020) Miracles of Healing: Psychotherapy and Religion in Twentieth-Century Scotland. Series: Scottish religious cultures. Edinburgh University Press: Edinburgh. ISBN 9781474446969

Hansen, Moira (2018) "A mind diseased?": examining Burns's mental health within a modern clinical framework. Burns Chronicle, 2018, pp. 34-43.

Miller, Gavin ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3144-8233 (2020) Science Fiction and Psychology. Series: Liverpool Science Fiction Texts and Studies, 62. Liverpool University Press. ISBN 9781789620603 (doi: 10.3828/liverpool/9781789620603.001.0001)

Xenophontos, Sofia ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5766-7565 (2018) Galen’s Exhortation to the study of medicine: an educational work for prospective medical students. In: Bouras-Vallianatos, P. and Xenophontos, S. (eds.) Greek Medical Literature and its Readers: From Hippocrates to Islam and Byzantium. Series: Publications of the Centre for Hellenic Studies, King's College London. Routledge: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY, pp. 67-93. ISBN 9781472487919 (doi: 10.4324/9781351205276-5)

Porter, Dahlia ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0275-7472 (2017) Specimen poetics: botany, reanimation, and the Romantic collection. Representations, 139(1), pp. 60-94. (doi: 10.1525/rep.2017.139.1.60)

Mathias, Manon ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1267-4710 (2018) Digestion and brain work in Zola and Huysmans. In: Mathias, Manon and Moore, Alison M. (eds.) Gut Feeling and Digestive Health in Nineteenth-Century Literature, History and Culture. Series: Literature, Science and Medicine. Palgrave, pp. 155-176. ISBN 9783030018566

Porter, Dahlia ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0275-7472 (2018) Epistemic images and vital nature: Darwin's Botanic Garden as image text book. European Romantic Review, 29(3), pp. 295-308. (doi: 10.1080/10509585.2018.1465717)

Small, Douglas R.J. ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2545-2444 (2018) Primative doctor and eugenic priest: Grant Allen, M.P. Shiel, and the future of the Victorian medical man. Journal of Literature and Science, 11(2), pp. 40-61.

Moore, Alison M., Mathias, Manon ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1267-4710 and Valeur, Jørgen (2018) Contextualising the microbiota–gut–brain axis in history and culture. Microbial Ecology in Health and Disease, 30(sup1), 1546267. (doi: 10.1080/16512235.2019.1546267) (PMID:30455619) (PMCID:PMC6237169)

Jess-Cooke, Carolyn ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9406-1052 (2015) Should creative writing courses teach ways of building resilience? New Writing, 12(2), pp. 249-259. (doi: 10.1080/14790726.2015.1047855)

Miller, Gavin ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3144-8233 and McFarlane, Anna ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1100-8959 (2016) Science fiction and the medical humanities. Medical Humanities, 42(4), pp. 213-218. (doi: 10.1136/medhum-2016-011144) (PMID:27885035)

Jess-Cooke, Carolyn ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9406-1052 (2017) Creative expression provides a route to recover. YOU Magazine, 28 Nov.

Miller, Gavin ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3144-8233 and McFarlane, Anna ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1100-8959 (2016) Science Fiction and the Medical Humanities [Guest Editors]. Medical Humanities, 42(4),

Xenophontos, Sofia ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5766-7565 (2016) Casting light on the connection between Pseudo-Plutarch’s On the education of children and Galen’s Exhortation to the study of medicine. Latomus, 75(1), pp. 71-77.

Cohn, Samuel ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4490-5034 (2017) Patterns of plague in Late Medieval and early-modern Europe. In: Jackson, Mark (ed.) The Routledge History of Disease. Series: Routledge histories. Taylor and Francis, pp. 165-182. ISBN 9780415720014

Xenophontos, Sophia ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5766-7565 (2014) Psychotherapy and moralising rhetoric in Galen’s newly discovered avoiding distress (Peri Alypias). Medical History, 58(4), pp. 585-603. (doi: 10.1017/mdh.2014.54)

Cohn, Samuel ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4490-5034 (2018) Fear and the corpse: cholera and plague riots compared. In: Lynteris, Christos and Evans, Nicholas (eds.) Histories of Post-mortem Contagion: Infectious corpses and Contested Burials. Series: Medicine and biomedical sciences in modern history. Palgrave Macmillan: New York, pp. 55-81. ISBN 9783319629285

Coyer, Megan J. ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9996-359X and Shuttleton, David E. (2014) Introduction. In: Coyer, Megan J. and Shuttleton, David E. (eds.) Scottish Medicine and Literary Culture, 1726-1832. Series: Clio medica : perspectives in medical humanities (94). Rodopi: Amsterdam, pp. 1-22. ISBN 9789042038912

Mathias, Manon ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1267-4710 and Moore, Alison M. (2018) The gut feelings of medical culture. In: Mathias, Manon and Moore, Alison M. (eds.) Gut Feeling and Digestive Health in Nineteenth-Century Literature, History and Culture. Series: Palgrave studies in literature, science and medicine. Palgrave Macmillan: Cham, pp. 1-14. ISBN 9783030018566 (doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-01857-3_1)

Namouchi, A. et al. (2018) Integrative approach using Yersinia pestis genomes to revisit the historical landscape of plague during the Medieval Period. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 115(50), E11790-E11797. (doi: 10.1073/pnas.1812865115) (PMID:30478041) (PMCID:PMC6294933)

Coyer, Megan J. ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9996-359X (2014) Phrenological controversy and the medical imagination: 'a modern Pythagorean' in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine. In: Coyer, Megan J. and Shuttleton, David E. (eds.) Scottish Medicine and Literary Culture, 1726-1832. Series: Clio Medica: Perspectives in Medical Humanities (94). Rodopi: Amsterdam. ISBN 9789042038912

Miller, Gavin ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3144-8233 and Mcfarlane, Anna ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1100-8959 (Eds.) (2017) A Practical Guide to the Resurrected: 21 Short Stories of Science Fiction and Medicine. Freight Books. ISBN 9781911332503

Wieber, Sabine ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5132-3721 (2013) A beautiful corpse: Vienna's fascination with death. In: Blackshaw, Gemma (ed.) Facing the Modern: The Portrait in Vienna 1900. Yale University Press: New Haven, CT, pp. 173-203. ISBN 9781857095616

Krawczyk, M. ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8830-6236, Wood, J. ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8133-9660 and Clark, D. (2018) Total pain: origins, current practice, and future directions. Omsorg: The Norwegian Journal of Palliative Care, 2018(2),

Dickson, Sheila ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8592-7670 (2015) '[D]as Innere des Menschen aufklär[en]": Poetry as psychology in Moritz's Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde. Publications of the English Goethe Society, 84(1), pp. 18-29. (doi: 10.1179/0959368314Z.00000000045)

Jess-Cooke, Carolyn ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9406-1052 (2015) Voice and Witness: Rethinking Creative Writing Pedagogy for Recovery from Mental Illness. In: National Association of Writers in Education Conference (NAWE), Durham, England, 13-15 Nov 2015, (Unpublished)

Mcfarlane, Anna ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1100-8959 (2016) ‘Anthropomorphic drones’ and colonized bodies: William Gibson’s the peripheral. English Studies in Canada, 42(1-2), pp. 115-131. (doi: 10.1353/esc.2016.0007)

Mathias, Manon ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1267-4710 (2020) A disease-free world: the hygienic utopia in Jules Verne, Camille Flammarion and William Morris. In: Shuttleworth, Sally, Dixon, Melissa and Taylor-Brown, Emilie (eds.) Progress and Pathology: Medicine and Culture in the Nineteenth Century. Manchester University Press, pp. 127-152. ISBN 9781526133687

Coyer, Megan ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9996-359X (2016) Literature and Medicine in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press: Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, 1817-1858. Series: Critical studies in romanticism. Edinburgh University Press: Edinburgh. ISBN 9781474405607

Welsh, Louise ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4194-0691 (2017) No Dominion. Series: Plague times trilogy, 3. John Murray: London. ISBN 9781848546578