12 February, 10.30-17.30

 

10.30: Brian Dillon and Mike Jay - Opening remarks
11.00: Dinah Birch - Seeking Sensation in Victorian Britain
11.40: Coffee break
12.05: Stuart Anderson - Legal Highs: The Victorian Pharmacy and Mind-altering Drugs
12.45: Julian North - Dreams and Nightmares: Drugs in Victorian Literature 
13.25: Lunch
14.25: Michael Neve - Varieties of Experience: Drugs and self experimentation in the late 19th century
15.05: Louise Foxcroft - Strange Yearnings: A history of addiction as a disease
15.45: Coffee break
16.10: Roundtable discussion
16.45: Brian Dillon - Concluding remarks
17.00: Drinks reception
18.00: Wellcome Collection closes

 

More about the sessions

 

Seeking sensation in Victorian Britain

We often think of the Victorians as an austere people, ready to condemn pleasure-seekers and rebels. In fact they were driven by a hunger for pleasure, excitement or escape, resulting in experimentation with drugs of many kinds. This was not simply a matter of individual experience or the development of new forms and issues in literature and art. It had wide implications for Britain’s place in the world, its imperial policy and expansion, and a shifting understanding of national identity. With Dinah Birch.

Legal Highs: Inside the Victorian pharmacy

In late Victorian times many mind-altering drugs were readily available from the local pharmacy. Opium was available in many different forms and was used for assorted conditions. The most popular was laudanum (opium tincture) but there was also paregoric (camphorated opium tincture) and Gee’s Linctus (opiate squill linctus), amongst others. Then there were proprietary medicines like nepenthe and Collis Browne’s Chlorodyne. The pharmacy also stocked items containing heroin (diamorphine) and Indian hemp (cannabis); some also sold alcohol and tobacco products. With Stuart Anderson.

Dreams and Nightmares: Drugs in Victorian literature

Opium and other drugs played a pivotal role in some of the most famous fiction of the Victorian period. This talk will look at drugs in the lives and works of writers including De Quincey, Charlotte Bronte, Wilkie Collins, Dickens, Conan Doyle, Wilde and Stevenson. It will ask how important drugs were to their work and why the drug experience was often linked by them with crime and detection, and with anxieties about class and racial identity.  With Julian North.

Varieties of Experience: Self experimentation in the late 19th century

From Havelock Ellis to Sigmund Freud, scientists of the 19th century were fascinated by drugs and saw self-experimentation as an essential part of scientific enquiry into their effects. This talk will present a hidden history of the exploration of the mind, before the age of medicalisation and criminalisation. By looking at the recorded experiences of a group of self-experimenting men of learning, we can enter an age before such activity was pathologised. With Michael Neve.

Strange Yearnings: A history of addiction as a disease

What does addiction mean to us now, what has it meant in the past, and how are these meanings connected? The concept of addiction has a long socio-cultural history but the field of knowledge that has developed around it is very recent. Is this behaviour natural or pathological? Or even morally reprehensible? This talk concentrates on perceptions of chronic opiate use in the nineteenth century and the development of the perception of addiction as a disease. With Louise Foxcroft.