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Perversion

What is a perversion? This talk starts by exploring psychiatric and sexological debates about perverted sexual desires from the late nineteenth century textbooks to diagnostic manuals in the twenty-first century. It looks at the role of law, morality, and medicine. Who has the power to decide what sexual acts are 'normal' or 'abnormal'? By what mechanisms do sexual practices move from one category to the other? How have people labelled 'perverse' effectively challenged their status in society?

Pleasure

Sex manuals can incite revolution. In the early 1970s a feminist collective released Our Bodies, Ourselves (1970) while 'free love' proponent Dr. Alex Comfort published The Joy of Sex (1972). Both manuals have been read and updated and republished many times. What do changes in the advice given in these and other manuals tell us about the way sexual mores and practices have shifted between the 1970s and the present? What factors contribute to changes in ideas about sexual pleasure?

Maths vs. Covid-19

Mathematics has been used as a tool to understand and control infectious disease for over a century, but Covid-19 brought along a whole epidemic of new challenges.

Trends in Health in the UK: The Implications for the NHS

What the NHS has provided and had to treat over its existence has changed much more radically than most people realise. Some of this change is rightly the domain of politics, but much is driven in response to changing health needs, improvements in medical science and priorities of society.

Myra Hindley: Rape-Murderers

Serial murderer Myra Hindley is often portrayed as an “evil icon”. Her crimes of sadistic murder against children continue to shock. There are few artistic sights so terrifying as the giant portrait of Hindley composed of the handprints of children.

Dickens's Public Readings: A Tale of Two Desks

This illustrated lecture marks 150 years since Dickens’s death by reflecting on the nature of his creative genius and his legacy.

Lymphoma, Leukaemia and Myeloma

Lymphoma, leukaemia and myeloma arise from different parts of the white blood cell system. Unlike solid tumours, they can be widely distributed in the body, and this means they need a different approach.

Dickens: The Last Decade

In the last ten years of his life Charles Dickens related to his adoring public in a number of different ways; as novelist, as journalist, as public speaker, and in public readings of his own work.

Food Oppression

Food-related conditions – cancer, heart disease, and strokes – are the leading causes of preventable deaths in the UK. Common wisdom is that health reflects personal choices and will power.

What Can We Do About Rising Obesity?

It is widely accepted that the rising prevalence of obesity is a major threat to current and future health of individuals, the public, and the NHS. Obesity comes from a complex interaction of personal choices, genetics, economics, the food industry, and the environment, among other things.

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