Samantha Hosein (University of the West Indies, St Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago, W.I.)

The ‘Who Cares? Psychiatry in the English-speaking World’ international conference, held from the 6-8 February 2025 at the Universite Paris Nanterre, brought together more than twenty-four participants from all across the globe including the Caribbean, France, England and North America. The organizing committee of the event which included Cecile Birks, Claire Deligny, Laurence Dubois and Elisabeth Fauquert, of the Universite Paris Nanterre, and Laetitia Sansonetti of the Universite Sorbonne Nouvelle, all engendered a welcoming atmosphere that was most enjoyable as a first-time participant of such a large academic event. The significance of the conference and its value to academia was further heightened by the very generous bursary sponsored by the Society for the Social History of Medicine (SSHM) of £500, which ultimately allowed for greater accessibility and ease of travel to the location of the event for participants from distant regions, for example, the Caribbean and the Americas. The event aimed to explore the history of psychiatry in English-speaking territories, with special emphasis on mental institutions, patient treatment and experiences, the pathologization of mental illness and the establishment of policies toward mental healthcare. The event featured a series of keynote speeches, panel discussions, and an interactive guided tour of the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, which gave deeper insight into, and understanding of the treatment of mentally ill patients in France.

Overview of Sessions

The conference commenced with its first keynote address by Dr. Rory du Plessis, who is a senior lecturer at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. His address, ‘Humanizing Stories of Care and Connection: Placing the Chronic patients of the Fort England Hospital, South Africa, 1890-1850’, offered an earnest and thought-provoking perspective on mental illness which, as the title suggests, humanized mental patients and helped to restore their identities as people, rather than mere statistics in an annual asylum report. Dr. du Plessis also highlighted the importance of discernment in psychiatry and the different ways in which mental patients could be perceived through various forms such as images and text. The discussion of images and their ability to evoke more empathy in the viewer, when compared to the textual annotations of the psychiatrist, was extremely profound and emphasized the compassionate tone of the major theme of the conference which was, essentially, who cares, who should care and who can be considered as curators of the experiences of the mentally ill?

Following the keynote, a series of panel presentations addressed issues within the history of psychiatry in the English-speaking world on several fronts. The first panel covered pertinent challenges of racism in psychiatry and how this bias disproportionately affected colonial migrant populations. The historical discourse further revealed fascinating common themes such as psychiatric spaces as carceral systems, poor mental healthcare services to non-white populations and the inherent marginalization of mentally ill migrant and colonized populations, all of which were present in the mental institutions highlighted by the presenters such as the St. Ann’s Mental Asylum in Trinidad and Tobago, the Cape Colony mental institutions, immigrant repatriations from the United Kingdom and mental institutions within the United States. Additionally, several other panels focused on pertinent topics involving mental health challenges in the LGBTQIA+ communities, the policing of mental distress in the streets of London, psychiatry and the war period and the portrayal of psychiatry in Hollywood on the silver screen!

Throughout, several key themes emerged, reflecting the challenges and complexities of the field of psychiatry in both historical and contemporary periods. A recurring topic was the effect of British mental healthcare systems and their ideologies on patients as it related to treatment, accommodation, art and therapy. This was particularly evident in the sessions titled, ‘Places of Care in England’ and ‘Art and Creativity’ where Drs. Susan Hogan, Fabienne Moine, Hilary Marland and Han Dee exposed elaborate tapestries of patient experiences within mental institutions. Dr. Hogan, for example, highlighted the therapeutic potential of art for people with mental health issues. She further argued that art provided a non-verbal outlet for exploring mental trauma and distress, thus encouraging a safe space for patients to reconcile with their experiences. Comparatively, doctoral candidate from the Queen Mary University of London, Han Dee gave a powerful exposition of the harrowing experiences of their relative, who was incarcerated at the Broadmoor high-security psychiatric hospital in Crowthorne, Berkshire, England. Dee’s vivid description of the institution coupled with primary accounts from their relative of their rigid treatment and restrictive accommodation at Broadmoor painted a picture of misery and allowed for a visceral understanding of common conditions faced by psychiatric patients under such carceral systems.

In addition to the formal sessions, the conference provided excellent opportunities for networking amongst all the participants involved. Post-doctoral and early career historians alike were able to exchange ideas and offer advice and perspective during coffee breaks, the cocktail reception as well as the conference dinner event. In fact, informal discussions at the post-session networking events sparked potential collaborations between various participants, particularly in the areas of colonialism and racial bias in psychiatry, immigration and the experiences of refugees dealing with mental illness in British asylums. This international conference was a resounding success, providing a comprehensive view of mental healthcare and fostering meaningful discussions on themes such as art therapy and rehabilitation, the humanizing of patients with mental illness and the ideological, judicial and social elements which make-up the mental institutions that house mentally ill individuals. Participants left with fresh insights, new academic and professional connections, and practical strategies to apply in their own projects. In answer to the question of ‘who cares?’, it was evident that the participants from around the globe attending this conference, felt the human responsibility to uplift and magnify the experiences and stories of the mentally ill, so often buried in the apathetic records of psychiatrists for centuries.

by Dr Kate McAllister, University of Kent

On 9-10 January 2025, twenty-eight participants gathered at the University of Kent in Canterbury to attend a workshop titled ‘The Leaky Body: A New Turn in the Humanities and Social Sciences?’ and co-organised by Dr Claire Jones and Dr Kate McAllister. The workshop was generously supported by an Arts and Humanities Research Council Research, Development and Engagement Fellowship (AH/Y003683/1) and the Society for the Social History of Medicine.

Developed by sociologists and philosophers, the leaky body concept emerged in the 1990s to study aspects of the body’s materiality, and explicate and counter the marginalisation of women in modern western patriarchal society. In recent years, this concept has been used across different disciplines, including history, to offer new perspectives on the relationships between particular bodies and the social order, and on embodiment and corporeality. It forms the theoretical foundations for the Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded ‘Buzzers for Bedwetters’ project at the University of Kent.

Participants in Kent’s workshop critiqued the concept of ‘the leaky body’ via nine interdisciplinary panels organised by theme, such as climate and environment, research methodology, media and markets, the archive or the museum, resistance and gender. Participants considered:

• How useful is the turn towards the ‘leaky body’ in the humanities and social sciences?
• In what ways does or might the concept of the leaky body aid studies of corporeality?
• How might disparate fields in the humanities and social sciences be further united through this concept?
• What does focus on the unbounded body reveal that focus on the bounded doesn’t?
• Where do we go next in ‘leaky body studies’?

Various papers interpreted the leaky body concept as a tool to reveal the different meanings ascribed to particular bodies and fluids across time, place and context. Participants for example used this concept to show how and why the consumption of blood was regulated in the sixteenth century, but also critique the feminisation and stigmatisation of urine incontinent bodies in the present. Discussing medieval Islamic legal literature, colonial policies in the nineteenth-century ‘Orient’ and current social media ‘pimple-popping’ videos, other participants explored how certain bodies became seen as transgressive, but also sometimes as socially acceptable: these were bodies leaked fluids from unexpected bodily locations, conflicted with the ambitions of French colonial authorities and were staged online as repulsive yet sometimes satisfying. Attention was also paid to what happens when bodies fail to leak. For Phaethousa in the Hippocratic Epidemics, her amenorrhoeic body was tied to masculinised traits and seen as shameful, ‘Other’.

The leaky body concept was additionally viewed as a way to understand how corporeality and embodied experience relates to the construction of the body as a cultural metaphor: this was shown in papers on the lurid, sensory descriptions of vaginal thrush presented in late-twentieth century Canadian newspapers and women’s literature, and on disordered eating in seventeenth-century England. Focusing on leakiness also shaped how participants understood their own embodiment and conducted their research. Such awareness informed further reflections on the stigmatisation of people living with leaky health conditions (like incontinence) through a focus on the contemporary marketing of pads, and on the possibilities of an ‘explicitly presentist’ history of urinary tract infections, failed treatment and medical uncertainty. There was also discussion about how focus on leakiness foregrounded certain embodied experiences, for example those of women navigating infertility whilst working in the neoliberal academy. Historians of medicine, science and psychiatry were however encouraged to remain aware of the often mediated, fragmentary nature of archival evidence in their efforts to ‘uncover’ such experiences.

Yet, the leaky body concept informed new disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives. This concept proved useful for historians of medicine, in reframing the development of modern disease categories whilst keeping the patient in view, but also offered a conceptual middle ground for research that combines disability studies and the environmental humanities, and explores the material relationships between corporeal porosity, environment, leakage and the disciplining of certain bodies. Considering the meanings attributed to the leaky postmortem body also drew focus to the perspective of non-human entities, such as flies or beetles, thus potentially contributing to post-humanism. The materiality of leakiness was a consistent theme across various papers. Participants discussed the leaky texts of François Rabelais and how they shaped tactile, embodied experiences, but also how children with Inflammatory Bowel Disease embody and negotiate sociomaterial containment at school. Material culture also offered a shared reference point for participants considering the uses of this concept in a heritage context, in revealing how objects produce knowledge by stimulating, managing or hiding leakiness, but also how curating practices might inadvertently sanitise the messy materiality of leaky bodies.

Closing discussions returned to the questions: What is the value of the leaky body concept, and where do we go next? Participants highlighted opportunities for this concept to be more fully applied in modern history, histories of the body or medical history. In a world confronting the effects of climate change, it was suggested that focus might broaden to leaky bodies of vegetation or water, though attention to the human body from the perspective of disability also remained necessary. Above all, this concept was interpreted as a way to establish community across disciplines, produce disruptive research which resonates with people beyond academia and work towards a future where leaky bodies are no longer shamed or hidden. Arguably, the leaky body concept is here to stay.

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by Kate Errington, Birkbeck University and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine; Dr Catherine Medici-Thiemann, University of Nebraska Medical Center; Dr Erin Spinney, University of New Brunswick; Dr Magda(lena) Szarota, Lancaster University; Emma Wathen, University of Wisconsin–Madison.

On the 15-16 July 2024, 15 delegates travelled to the University of Edinburgh for the Reproductive Health Histories Working Group Hybrid Meeting, organised by Jennifer Fraser (King’s College London), Karissa Patton (University of Edinburgh), Whitney Wood (Vancouver Island University) and Agnes Arnold Forster (University of Edinburgh). Supported by the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine (CHSTM), the Reproductive Health Histories Working Group is a collective of scholars who come together each month to think about how present-day issues and personal experiences influence our work in reproductive health history. This hybrid meeting – the final working group of the 23/24 academic year – focused on ‘Histories of the Personal’ and laid plans for our second year of operation. This event was made possible with the support from the Society for the Social History of Medicine, the University of Edinburgh, Vancouver Island University, and the CHSTM.

The two-day event began with a guided tour of the exhibition Women in Revolt at the National Galleries of Scotland Modern 2. The exhibition celebrated art and activism in the United Kingdom, 1970–1990, and explored ‘themes and issues, such as the Women’s Liberation Movement, maternal and domestic experiences, Punk and independent music, Greenham Common and the peace movement, the visibility of black and South Asian women artists, Section 28 and the AIDS epidemic’ as well as the disabled women’s organising (National Galleries of Scotland, 2024). This exhibition offered a thoughtful introduction to the working group proceedings, with archives and artwork that were highly pertinent to our overlapping research interests.

Following the exhibition, we travelled to the University of Edinburgh to begin our working group discussions in earnest. We began with a private screening of The UTI Documentary with commentary from Agnes Arnold Forster and filmmaker Rita Conry. Having both lived with chronic and recurrent UTIs, Arnold Forster and Conry talked about their desire to ‘reveal the debilitating nature of UTIs, shine a light on the current outdated testing and treatment guidelines, and challenge the tendency of healthcare to see women as unreliable witnesses to their own bodies’ (The UTI Documentary, n.d.). This screening was followed by another short documentary by Arnold Forster and Conry – a work in progress about birth control entitled High, Soft and Open.

We were then joined online by working group members who could not attend in-person, to discuss goals for the second year of the working group. Our collective knowledge as scholars from a variety of institutions, fields, and career stages and inter-generational perspectives offers exciting opportunities for future public engagement, pedagogy discussions and mentorship which we plan to investigate. Following a short comfort break, we reconvened for an intimate discussion about pre-circulated readings on histories of the personal. Carol Williams (University of Lethbridge) and Erin Spinney (University of New Brunswick) led discussions on the topics of the Dalkon Shield intrauterine device and endometriosis, respectively. We reflected on our anxiety about injecting our health and experiences into the histories we tell, both in our research and in the classroom. Williams’ and Spinney’s presentations helped us articulate the value in pursuing these histories of the personal, whether through helping students situate their own health experiences in historical narratives or making connections to contemporary approaches to reproductive activism.

We also discussed how disability studies perspectives can enrich these topics, specifically regarding the still-prevalent positivist approaches in many academic institutional settings. These approaches can enhance the false dichotomy between objective and subjective knowledge-making, privileging the former. Conversely, as our discussions have shown, the personal is not only political but also an epistemically and academically valid and timely way of creating knowledge. We also addressed the personal costs related to such approaches and knowledge-making, including the burnout that academics engaged in this research, as well as evidence-based advocacy, can experience, regardless of whether the topic concerns countries at ‘peace’ or war-related contexts, such as Ukraine under Russian invasion.

Minds buzzing with ideas, we capped off the day with haggis and banoffee pie!

The following morning, we resumed discussions about our future goals for the working group, before members travelled to the SSHM Conference in Glasgow. As we embark on our second year, we are sharing our works in progress and identifying intersections in our research. Our aim is to forge further collaborations, facilitate in-depth discussions on topics within the reproductive health histories arena, and to collectively publish our work.

If you are interested in joining the Reproductive Health Histories Working Group, you can read more and sign up online: https://www.chstm.org/content/reproductive-health-histories-0

Martijn van der Meer, Roy Porter Prize Winner 2021/22

Winning the Roy Porter Student Essay Prize is fertile soil for imposter’s syndrome.

When I submitted my manuscript in January 2022, I didn’t have high expectations. The piece was based on the first chapter of my master’s thesis on the conceptual history of heredity in Dutch interwar public health discourse. As I hadn’t been able to land on a PhD position right after my master’s, rewriting that chapter into a more mature manuscript had been my way of staying connected to writing history. When I finally managed to figure out the point of the manuscript with the help of my supervisors—so that it went beyond just being a thorough description—I saw the call for submissions for the prize.  It would be an opportunity to tie up loose ends and test the waters, I figured.

I crossed my fingers and hoped for feedback on why the manuscript might fall short, so that I would be able to develop it further and submit it as an article at a later point. By the time the prize announcement came, months later, I had all but forgotten about it. When Rebecca Wynter reached out to tell me I’d been awarded the prize, I was over the moon. And then, I felt very insecure.

Had they made a mistake? How could my work measure up to the standards of a prize named after one of the coolest historians of the 20th century? More to the point: why would they choose my essay, when previous recipients were scholars I deeply admired? I knew part of the prize involved publishing the essay as an article in Social History of Medicine and delivering a keynote address at the society’s biannual meeting. I started wondering: at what point would they figure out that I wasn’t actually good enough to publish or present according to their expectations? I felt like an intruder in a community where I had to prove myself.

I was wrong, though. And in the process of realizing this, I learned that winning the prize, developing the essay into an article, and delivering a keynote was not about proving myself but about contributing to an international scholarly community.

The peer review process turned out to be less scary than I’d expected. Maybe I was lucky, but the reviewers were critical, challenging, yet very constructive. After the first round, I realized they weren’t testing me. They were assessing whether my article was a substantive contribution to the field. The reviewers weren’t simply thinking along with me. They were critically reflecting on how my article could add value to the vast historiography of eugenics.

The keynote experience followed a similar pattern. After I wrote the first draft of the talk, my colleagues in Rotterdam provided feedback on structuring the narrative so others could follow it more easily. They listened multiple times to multiple versions, ensuring I would speak as grounded as possible. Their focus wasn’t on helping me make an impression but on ensuring that the story I told would resonate and spark engagement.

The conference SSHM 2024, hosted by University of Strathclyde, was an amazing experience. The keynote itself went well, and during the Q&A, I realized the audience wasn’t testing or judging me. The senior academics were not asking questions to critique me, but to engage in a professional conversation as a community of like-minded academics. They weren’t evaluating me. They wanted to help me.

The journey of the Roy Porter Prize has been extraordinary. Not just because of the award, the money, and the opportunities—okay, this is also kind of nice—but because I finally started to understand something one of my supervisors had been trying to teach me for a long time. Writing publications, giving talks, doing research, and even winning a prize is not about proving yourself. Academic work is not about individual achievement. It is about contributing to and sustaining an international community of researchers who help each other grow—one that transcends the increasingly shaky institutional structures in which most historians of medicine are working locally.

To anyone considering submitting an essay: do it! The experience is as rewarding as it is humbling. And it’s a reminder that, at its best, academia is a collaborative effort.

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The 2024/5 round of the Roy Porter Prize for students and recently graduated doctorates closes at 5pm, 1 February 2025. For prize details, rules, and eligibility, please see: https://sshm.org/portfolio/prizes/.