Dear Blog,

So, the final LitSciMed event has come and gone. It was a great one too. Lots of interesting papers and discussions, some that really seemed appropriate for the conclusion of the whole programme. The students were as engaged and talkative as usual and whole thing was a pleasure. I’m quite sad that there will be no more…

I’ve done some totting up of figures and over the past year and a half we have had 65 students attend the training events, from 37 different institutions, and representing 11 disciplines (English was the biggest group, but we also met Historians (including Historians of Science and of Medicine), a Midwife, an Archaeologist, Sociologist, Philosopher, Art Historian, and Creative Writer). Four students completed the whole programme and many more attended a significant number of events. I’m waiting to hear the results of the evaluations but reading through them quickly it looked as though there were lots of good ideas raised for future activities. More on these soon but in the meantime, a Facebook page has been set up at: http://www.facebook.com/LitSciMed. Please do join and/or ‘like’ the page, as well as posting information and events that are relevant to the group.

One such event, which I went to last night, which may well be of interest to those who read this blog, is Telling Lives, a play performed as part of Manchester’s 24:7 Theatre Festival (http://www.247theatrefestival.co.uk/showtelling.html). The playwright Eric Norley found incredible (and incredibly sad) life stories of people incarcerated in Prestwich Asylum in the nineteenth century in the records that have survived of the asylum. These people were brought back to life by means of beautifully written dialogue and song. Actors carried the photographs taken of inmates when they arrived at the asylum and the whole thing was terribly poignant (I nearly cried early on during a scene where a father had to say goodbye to his daughter who was subject to uncontrollable fits). There was reference to the very dubious medical theories of the time too, in the form of a new warden who was confident that women’s madness was related to the uterus and thus systematically ‘measured’ them in ways that made the audience distinctly uncomfortable even though it was all hidden by a sheet. Overall, it was great, really well done I thought, and if you can get to see it, you should.

I’m off to Glasgow for the BARS conference on Thursday. There’s an impressive programme of speakers and it should be fun (www.glasgow.ac.uk/bars2011).

Best,

Sharon