In ‘Mind in the Lower Animals in Health and Disease’, published in 1879, the Scottish psychiatrist William Lauder Lindsay abandoned his human patients and turned to madness in the animal kingdom. Lindsay ranged across continents and centuries, pillaging writers from Pliny to Darwin, and ushering his readers into a dark, destabilised world of simian neurosis and reptilian psychosis, suicidal scorpions and deranged, Prufockian lemmings. In this talk Richard Barnett will grab Lindsay’s work by its provocatively twitching tail, tracing its roots in European culture and uncovering the hidden history of animal madness in Victorian science.
Richard Barnett dropped out of medical school in London to become a historian. He has taught the history of science & medicine at UCL and
Cambridge, and is the author of Medical London: City of Diseases, City of Cures (Strange Attractor Press, 2008). He is currently writing the Dedalus Book of Gin.
6.30 for 7pm, Wednesday 3rd November
at The Little Shoppe of Horrors, 11 Mare St, London E8.
Tickets £6/£4 – Book here