Intersections in Medical and Environmental Humanities

Join us for an instalment of the Weather, Climate, and Health Research Theme's online talk series.

This paper will take a sensory approach to the consideration of the experience of weather and animals, including birds, in the early twentieth century British tuberculosis sanatorium. Sources will include the stories and sketches created by the Canadian artist Emily Carr from her time spent at East Anglia Sanatorium, and the oral histories collected by Ann Shaw and Carole Reeves of patients of Craig-y-nos children’s sanatorium, Wales.

About the speaker

Clare Hickman works at the intersection of environmental and medical history. Her research takes a historical approach to human-environment relationships in relation to ideas of health and wellbeing. She was Co-I on the AHRC funded ‘In All Our Footsteps: Tracking, Mapping and Experiencing Rights of Way in Post-War Britain’ (2021-2024), and on the large cross-disciplinary project funded by NERC, ‘Connected treescapes: a portfolio approach for delivering multiple public benefits from UK treescapes in the rural-urban continuum’ (2021-2024). Recent publications include '"Sick hands, thin and white, were always slipping offerings across my windowsill, offerings for the little birdlings": Multispecies Encounters within and around Modern Rural British Sanatoria' (2024) in Modernist Cultures and 'Whose right to roam? Contesting access to England’s countryside' (2023) in the Journal of Transport History.

The Zoom link will be circulated closer to the event.

Please note that this event is free to attend.

This talk is organised by the Institute for Medical Humanities' Weather, Climate, and Health Research Theme, co-led by: Jed Stevenson (Anthropology), Maximilian Hepach (Geography) and Angela Marques Filipe (Sociology).