Gjesteforelesning, Ruth Richardson, King’s College: The Making of Gray's Anatomy and the Bombay-Bergen leprosy connection

Forskergruppen Litteratur og vitenskap inviterer til gjesteforelesning med:

Ruth Richardson, King’s College, London:

The Making of Gray's Anatomy and the Bombay-Bergen leprosy connection

Gray's Anatomy is among the most famous medical textbooks in the world. It was written in the 1850s by a young surgeon, Henry Gray, and illustrated by a younger doctor, Henry Vandyke Carter. This talk tells the story of the textbook and of the two men who created it, and follows Carter to India in 1858, where he began a lifelong study of the diseases of the poor.

Carter made a special journey to Bergen in 1873, to visit Gerhard Armauer Hansen, and to witness the Norwegian system of dealing with leprosy. Carter - being a fellow microscopist - was immediately convinced when Hansen showed him the microorganism he had discovered. In recent times, Carter has been severely criticised in India for endeavouring to institute the Norwegian model of asylums there.

Ruth Richardson is a historian of medicine, writer and broadcaster and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. An independent scholar, she is also an Affiliated Scholar in the History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge, Visiting Senior Research Fellow at King's College, London, and an Honorary Professor at Hong Kong University.

Dr Richardson has made a number of documentaries on medical history for the BBC.

Among her publications are:

Death, Dissection & the Destitute was first published by Routledge and Penguin, then adopted by Chicago University Press in 2000.

The Making of Mr Gray's Anatomy (Oxford University Press, 2008) - won the Medical Journalists' Book Award in 2009, and was described by the Wall Street Journal as 'one of those rarities - history that reads like a novel'.

Her most recent book Dickens & the Workhouse (Oxford University Press 2012) was greeted with "hats off"! by Robert McCrum in The Observer.

Her current work is focused on Victorian microbiology.

Tid: Fredag 07.12.2012

Sted: Historisk kafé, Naturvitenskaplig Museum