When you watch a period drama set in the nineteenth century, how often does a character stutter? Or have a speech impediment? Or not speak at all? In Dysfluent in Fiction: Vocal Disability & Nineteenth-Century Literature, Riley McGuire explores the “literary history of vocal disability in the nineteenth century” through romance novels, children’s literature, detective…
Author: Rachel Peacock
I am a PhD candidate in the Department of History at Queen's University. My research focuses on nearly 100 individuals who intruded on the privacy of (or "stalked") Queen Victoria and the British royal family throughout the nineteenth century. I consider the ways these intrusions and the media coverage they attracted contributed to broader debates about gender, madness, privacy, policing, and the public's relationship with the monarchy. You can follow my research on Instagram: @royalintruders.
“She was evidently insane”: Gender and Madness in Victorian Britain
How did Victorians understand and diagnose mental illness? If a person on trial in a nineteenth-century British courtroom was thought to be suffering from “madness,” the court did not necessarily ask a physician to provide an expert opinion or to diagnose the individual. As Joel Peter Eigen explains, doctors were not respected as expert witnesses…
Book Review: Inspired and Outraged by Alice Rothchild
“[T]he analyst who points us out from our classmates and announced (disapprovingly)/ You women are taking the place of a productive male…You are here because of your Unresolved Penis Envy” (pp 166-7). These are the attitudes which Dr. Alice Rothchild, obstetrician and gynecologist at Beth Israel Hospital, Associate Professor of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Biology…