Faustin Betbeder, ‘Prof. Darwin’, from The London Sketch-book, 18 Feb 1874.
- Illustrated lecture with Morbid Anatomy Museum Visiting Scholar in Residence Richard Barnett, Engagement Fellow at the Wellcome Trust
Date: Tuesday, April 22
Time: 8:00 PM
Admission: $8
Presented by Morbid Anatomy
In the early twenty-first century neuroscientists and psychologists are looking again at the relationship between animal and human minds. This is a line of inquiry with deep roots in Western science, and some remarkably eccentric predecessors. In Mind in the Lower Animals in Health and Disease, published in 1879, the Scottish mad-doctor William Lauder Lindsay abandoned his human lunatics and turned to the animal kingdom. Lindsay ranged across continents and centuries, pillaging writers from Pliny to Darwin and ushering his readers into a dark world of ape neurosis and snake psychosis, suicidal scorpions and deranged, Prufockian lemmings. In this talk, Morbid Anatomy Museum Visiting Scholar in Residence Richard Barnett will grab Lindsay’s work by its provocatively twitching tail, and use it to uncover the hidden history of animal minds in Victorian life science. Taking the dog for a walk will never be the same.
Dr Richard Barnett studied medicine in London before becoming a historian. He has taught the history of science, medicine and evolutionary theory at the universities of Cambridge and London, and now holds one of the first Wellcome Trust Engagement Fellowships. His first book, Medical London: City of Diseases, City of Cures, was published in 2008, and was a Book of the Week on BBC Radio 4, and his next book – The Sick Rose, on anatomy and art in an age of revolution – will be published by Thames & Hudson in the UK and DAP in the US in May. He received the 2006 Promis Prize for poetry, and has made many appearances on BBC television and radio. His writing has also appeared in the London Review of Books, the Lancet, Strange Attractor, and the Natural Death Handbook (fifth edition). You can find him online at sickcityproject.wordpress.com, and on Twitter @doctorbarnett.