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, 
  • 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, S. (2016) Krankheit als romantischer Alltag in Achim von Arnims 'Der tolle Invalide' und 'Frau von Saverne'. In: Pape, W. and Burwick, R. (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, G. (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, M. (2018) Medicine and improvement in the Scots Magazine; and Edinburgh Literary Miscellany, 1804-17. In: Benchimol, A. and McKeever, G. L. (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, C. (2018) Creative writing for recovery from mental illness. In: Pujolràs-Noguer, E. and Hand, F. (eds.) In/visible Traumas: Healing, Loving, Writing. Femrite Publications.

Welsh, L. (2015) Death is a Welcome Guest. Series: Plague times trilogy, 2. John Murray: London. ISBN 9781848546561

Welsh, L. (2015) A Lovely Way to Burn. Series: Plague times trilogy, 1. John Murray: London. ISBN 9781848546530

Phelan, S. and Philo, C. (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, D. (2015) Sherlock Holmes and cocaine: a 7% solution for modern professionalism. English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920, 58(3), pp. 341-360.

Shuttleton, D. 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, G. (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, S. (2018) Reasons to revolt: cholera and plague, social violence and blame from Procopius to Surat, 1994. In: Tyner, J. (ed.) The Idea of Violence. Series: Kent State University European studies series (5). Viella: Rome, pp. 23-40. ISBN 9788833130736

Hansen, M., Smith, D. J. and Carruthers, G. (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, S. (2019) Bettina von Arnim in ihrer Zeit: Krankheit, Pflege und Homöopathie. In: Becker-Cantarino, B. (ed.) Bettina von Arnim Handbuch. De Gruyter: Berlin, Boston, pp. 135-143. ISBN 978311026091

Miller, G. (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, S. (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, D. (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, G. (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, S. (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., S. K. (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, M. (2015) Medical discourse and ideology in the Edinburgh Review: a Chaldean exemplar. In: Benchimol, A., Brown, R. and Shuttleton, D. (eds.) Before Blackwood's: Scottish Journalism in the Age of Enlightenment. Pickering & Chatto: London, pp. 103-157. ISBN 9781848935501

Mathias, M. (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, D. (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, S. K. (2017) Cholera revolts: a class struggle we may not like. Social History, 42(2), pp. 162-180. (doi: 10.1080/03071022.2017.1290365)

White, R. , McGeachan, C. , Miller, G. and Xenofontos, S. (Eds.) (2020) Special Issue: "Other Psychotherapies” – Healing Interactions Across Time, Geography and Culture [Guest Editors]. Transcultural Psychiatry, 57(6). SAGE Publications.

Miller, G. (2017) Reflecting on the medicalization of distress. In: White, R., Jain, S., Read, U. and Orr, D. (eds.) The Palgrave Handbook of Global Mental Health: Sociocultural Perspectives. Palgrave MacMillan: Basingstoke. ISBN 9781137395092

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

McFarlane, A. (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, M. (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, C. (2017) Safety first: safeguards for writing for wellbeing. Mslexia, 76, pp. 52-53.

Miller, G. (2020) Miracles of Healing: Psychotherapy and Religion in Twentieth-Century Scotland. Series: Scottish religious cultures. Edinburgh University Press: Edinburgh. ISBN 9781474446969

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

Miller, G. (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, S. (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, D. (2017) Specimen poetics: botany, reanimation, and the Romantic collection. Representations, 139(1), pp. 60-94. (doi: 10.1525/rep.2017.139.1.60)

Mathias, M. (2018) Digestion and brain work in Zola and Huysmans. In: Mathias, M. and Moore, A. 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, D. (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, D. R.J. (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, A. M., Mathias, M. and Valeur, J. (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, C. (2015) Should creative writing courses teach ways of building resilience? New Writing, 12(2), pp. 249-259. (doi: 10.1080/14790726.2015.1047855)

Miller, G. and McFarlane, A. (2016) Science fiction and the medical humanities. Medical Humanities, 42(4), pp. 213-218. (doi: 10.1136/medhum-2016-011144) (PMID:27885035)

Jess-Cooke, C. (2017) Creative expression provides a route to recover. YOU Magazine, 28 Nov.

Miller, G. and McFarlane, A. (2016) Science Fiction and the Medical Humanities [Guest Editors]. Medical Humanities, 42(4),

Xenophontos, S. (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, S. (2017) Patterns of plague in Late Medieval and early-modern Europe. In: Jackson, M. (ed.) The Routledge History of Disease. Series: Routledge histories. Taylor and Francis, pp. 165-182. ISBN 9780415720014

Xenophontos, S. (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, S. (2018) Fear and the corpse: cholera and plague riots compared. In: Lynteris, C. and Evans, N. (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, M. J. and Shuttleton, D. E. (2014) Introduction. In: Coyer, M. J. and Shuttleton, D. 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, M. and Moore, A. M. (2018) The gut feelings of medical culture. In: Mathias, M. and Moore, A. 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, M. J. (2014) Phrenological controversy and the medical imagination: 'a modern Pythagorean' in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine. In: Coyer, M. J. and Shuttleton, D. E. (eds.) Scottish Medicine and Literary Culture, 1726-1832. Series: Clio Medica: Perspectives in Medical Humanities (94). Rodopi: Amsterdam. ISBN 9789042038912

Miller, G. and Mcfarlane, A. (Eds.) (2017) A Practical Guide to the Resurrected: 21 Short Stories of Science Fiction and Medicine. Freight Books. ISBN 9781911332503

Wieber, S. (2013) A beautiful corpse: Vienna's fascination with death. In: Blackshaw, G. (ed.) Facing the Modern: The Portrait in Vienna 1900. Yale University Press: New Haven, CT, pp. 173-203. ISBN 9781857095616

Krawczyk, M. , Wood, J. and Clark, D. (2018) Total pain: origins, current practice, and future directions. Omsorg: The Norwegian Journal of Palliative Care, 2018(2),

Dickson, S. (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, C. (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, A. (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, M. (2020) A disease-free world: the hygienic utopia in Jules Verne, Camille Flammarion and William Morris. In: Shuttleworth, S., Dixon, M. and Taylor-Brown, E. (eds.) Progress and Pathology: Medicine and Culture in the Nineteenth Century. Manchester University Press, pp. 127-152. ISBN 9781526133687

Coyer, M. (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, L. (2017) No Dominion. Series: Plague times trilogy, 3. John Murray: London. ISBN 9781848546578