Stuart Anderson has a degree in Pharmacy from the University of Manchester and an MSc in Organisational Behaviour and a PhD in Organisation Theory from the University of London. He originally practised as a pharmacist, eventually becoming Director of Pharmacy at St George's Hospital, London. In 1993 he switched to being a Lecturer in Pharmacy Practice at the School of Pharmacy, University of London, before moving to the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) in January 1995. Until recently he was Academic Director at the National Co-ordinating Centre for the NIHR Service Delivery and Organisation Research Programme (SDO). He was appointed as Associate Dean of Studies at the LSHTM in 2007.

Dinah Birch is Professor of English Literature at Liverpool University, and is the General Editor of the Oxford Companion to English Literature (2009). She has published and broadcast widely on Victorian literature and culture, particularly on the work of the critic John Ruskin. Her books include Our Victorian Culture (2008), and she has edited works by John Ruskin, George Eliot, and Anthony Trollope. Her edition of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford will appear in 2011.

Louise Foxcroft read History at the University of Cambridge. In 2007 she published 'The Making of Addiction: The "use and abuse" of opium in nineteenth-century Britain'. Her first book, 'Hot Flushes, Cold Science: A history of the modern menopause', ranked as Amazon's number one history of medicine title for some weeks. As a medical historian, she has specialised in medical perceptions of the human body and at the way these are related to present-day, personal human experience. An occasional supervisor at the University of Cambridge, she has also written for the 'London Review of Books', the 'Guardian', 'New Humanist', the 'Erotic Review', the 'Daily Mail' and 'The Times', and has been a guest on several BBC Radio programmes.

Michael Neve has been based at University College London and its Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine (and its predecessors) since 1977. He has published on early 19th-century provincial science in England, the history of psychiatry, ideas of degeneration in the late 19th-century biomedical and social sciences, and medicine and literature. He has been on the editorial board of the 'London Review of Books' for over two decades and has reviewed both for it and the 'Times Literary Supplement'.

Julian North is a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Leicester. She has published on the opium-eater as criminal in Victorian literature and on opium and the Romantic imagination. One of her major research interests is the writing of Thomas De Quincey, the 'English Opium-Eater'. She has published extensively on De Quincey and is one of the editors of his complete 'Works'. Her latest book is 'The Domestication of Genius: Biography and the Romantic Poet' (2009).

Mike Jay has written widely on the history of science and medicine and is a leading specialist in the study of drugs across history and cultures. He is the editor of 'Artificial Paradises' (1999), an anthology of drug literature, and author of the widely acclaimed 'Emperor of Dreams' (2000), a narrative history of drugs in the 19th century, and 'The Atmosphere of Heaven' (2009), on the discovery of nitrous oxide. His critical writing on drugs and their histories has appeared in the 'Guardian', the 'Telegraph' and the 'London Review of Books'. He co-curated our 'High Society' exhibition and has also worked on our Medical London series.

Facilitator:

Brian Dillon was born in Dublin in 1969. He is the author of 'Tormented Hope: Nine hypochondriac lives', which was shortlisted for the Wellcome Trust Book Prize. His first book, 'In the Dark Room', won the Irish Book Award for non-fiction. He is UK Editor of 'Cabinet', a quarterly magazine of art and culture based in New York, and writes regularly for such publications as the 'Guardian', the 'London Review of Books', the 'New Statesman', 'frieze', 'Artforum' and 'Tate etc.' His novella, 'Sanctuary', was published in 2010. He lives in Canterbury, where he is an AHRC Research Fellow at the University of Kent.