There has
been a long relationship between television and medicine: some of the small
screen’s most popular shows, on both sides of the Atlantic, have been medical
in focus, from hospital-set dramas like ER to reality TV shows and docudramas
like One Born Every Minute. This fascination with doctors, hospitals and bodies
is also shared by period drama television, but scholarship has paid little
attention to this intersection/relationship. Recent period dramas including The
Knick, Mercy Street, and Charite, for example, use the hospital setting
familiar from older shows like Bramwell, to address larger themes about the
professionalization of medicine, medical innovations and failures, and the
gender politics that surround the profession. Dramas like Call the Midwife
document the progress of the NHS and female reproductive health while also
engaging in contemporary debates about contraception, abortion, and disability.
In addition, medical-driven narratives abound in almost every period drama on
our screens today: war-induced mental and physical trauma in Peaky Blinders;
Spanish ‘flu in The Village; gay conversion plotlines in A Place to Call Home;
bodily and facial disfigurement in Home Fires; medical experimentation and
monstrosity in Penny Dreadful and Frankenstein Chronicles; nursing as a vehicle
of female emancipation in The Crimson Field and Morocco: Love in Times of War;
and all of the above and many more in Downton Abbey, whose most famous
plotlines are medical in nature.
This edited
collection seeks to address this important area of period drama studies, and we
are looking for proposals for essays on any of the above issues, or which may
be interdisciplinary in approach and engage with the medical humanities,
interrogating relationships between medicine and history, class, gender or
race. Our collection aims to be international in scope, so submissions about
period dramas from/situated in any country are welcome.
Please send
a 500 word abstract and brief biography by Sept 15, 2018 to:
- Julie Anne Taddeo: taddeo@umd.edu
- James Leggott: james.leggott@northumbria.ac.uk
- Katherine Byrne: kbyrne@ulster.ac.uk
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