History Affect

The Osler Library for the History of Medicine is bereft of a roof. After a fire this summer, the circulating collection had to be freeze dried, having been subject to the sprinkler system, and is out of action. Osler himself, already in ashes on the site, was not harmed. The archival collection has been moved to the rare books department at McGill's main library and is at least available. Rumour has it that the rest of the Osler books will be rehoused, but will be in closed stacks. It could take years before the library is back in its proper place, but there are not unreasonable doubts about this ever happening. Temporary inconvenience aside, I've been reflecting on the importance of a specialist library such as this. In a digital age, it would seem that many of the old arguments in favour of research libraries are defunct. But being deprived of the Osler as a discrete space has driven home to me the importance of such specialist repositories, not least for the mode of...

It has been put to me, by more than one observer, that I am “unbelievably” productive. The incredulousness, I think, comes from within the realms of what, for want of a better word, is “normal” academic life. Normal academic life, for those rare birds who have attained it, seems to involve a lot of everything that gets in the way of productivity, even as politicians assert the right to judge rare birds precisely by how much they produce, by instituting measuring systems designed further to stifle productivity. It seems, to someone who can, I think, lay no claim to a “normal” academic life, absurd and horrendous in equal measure. My answer to the charge of unbelievability, therefore, is that I am as productive as any academic would be, if the absurdities of academic life were taken away. The rider to this is that I also do not have access to “permanence” in employment. I no longer care for it – haven’t looked for it in years – but the life of a research contractor does come with ...

Over the last several months I have, rather joyfully, been back in the archives. A two-week stint at the Rockefeller Archive Center in Sleepy Hollow, New York, as well as at Columbia University archives, was followed by an extended trip to the Wellcome Library in London. This complements another extensive trip to the Countway Library of Medicine in Boston. All of it pertains to my current project (details here ), which is now gathering pace. I now find myself with another book to write, but for the first time in my career I'm working from photographs of archival records, instead of from notes taken directly. Navigation will likely be problematic, but I think it can be solved via a giant monitor. I was deeply aware, as I chugged away in New York with an actual camera - remember them? - that everyone else (all younger, of course) was using a cellphone with some miraculous application that turned photographs into instantly searchable pdfs. I am reassuring myself that I will still h...

In conjunction with the relaunch of an exhibition I have co-curated with Cynthia Tang at McGill University Library, I re-post this piece that first appeared on the blog WarChildHope . The exhibition runs from January until April, and, if you happen to be in Montreal, the vernissage is on February 6th at 5:30. You can also order my biography of Edward Jenner here . Vaccination was born in a time of war. Children, principal vectors of the smallpox virus, became the incubators of immunological hope. Prior to the massive public-awareness campaign spearheaded by Edward Jenner in 1798, distributing both the knowledge and the means of safe protection against smallpox, the smallpox virus itself had been preserved and propagated in the arms of children. It was common medical practice, in fact well into the nineteenth century, to inoculate children with smallpox in the hope that they would escape with a light dose of the disease. Jenner himself had suffered the ordeal at the age...

I'm extremely pleased to announce the publication of The History of Emotions (Manchester University Press). Get it here . It was written to provide an accessible but nonetheless comprehensive starting point for scholars and students alike to this burgeoning field. Here's the blurb:   The history of emotions is the first accessible book on the theories, methods, achievements, and problems in this burgeoning field of historical inquiry. Historians of emotion borrow heavily from the disciplines of anthropology, psychology, philosophy and neuroscience, and stake out a claim that emotions have a past and change over time. This book introduces students and professional historians to the main areas of concern in the history of emotions, discussing how the emotions intersect with other lines of historical research relating to power, practice, society and morality. Providing a narrative of historical emotions concepts, the book is the go-to handbook for understanding the pro...