Date: Tuesday, September 30th
Time: 8pm
Admission: $8 ( Tickets Here )

This talk will look at the diseases associated with wealth, power, emotional sensitivity and intellectual ability in the modern era. It will start by examining the glamour linked to conditions such as gout and nervousness in the eighteenth century, before considering Romantic maladies such as consumption. In the late nineteenth century, self-conscious decadents often gloried in their illnesses. Guy du Maupassant reacted to his VD diagnosis by writing “I’ve got the pox! at last! the real thing!… and I am proud of it, by thunder, and to hell with the bourgeoisie. Allelujah, I’ve got the pox, so I don’t have to worry about catching it any more.” The talk will end by looking at contemporary medical conditions that, despite the real suffering often involved, are sometimes regarded as having a touch of class, from anorexia to ADHD.

Dr James Kennaway is a historian at Newcastle University. He has previously worked at Oxford, Stanford and Vienna. His book “Bad Vibrations: The History of the Idea of Music as a Cause of Disease” was published in 2012. He is now working on a project about ‘Fashionable Diseases’.