Dr. Claire McKechnie

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Dr. Claire McKechnie has been awarded an eight-month Postdoctoral Fellowship to work on her new project 'Cancer and the Victorian Literary Imagination'.

Using Susan Sontag’s pioneering essay Illness as Metaphor (1978) as a starting point, this study engages with the recent scholarship of critics such as Rita Charon, Arthur Frank, Paul Atkinson, and Arthur Kleinman in order to look afresh at narratives of sickness in the literary imagination during the nineteenth century.

Claire's project considers a number of nineteenth-century texts that examine the nature of cancer in both medical and literary contexts. Examining medical texts such as Campbell De Morgan’s The Origin of Cancer: Considered with Reference to the Treatment of the Disease (1872) alongside literary works such as Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) and George Douglas Brown's The House with the Green Shutters (1901), this study seeks to reveal the textual representations of cancer during a period of burgeoning interest and specialisation in the disease. From the bodily experience of illness to the significance of how to portray sickness on the printed page, Victorians explored what it meant to be human through their growing understanding of pain and suffering. The science of human nature was central to their perception of themselves and their maladies.

Claire also runs the Medical Humanities Research Network, hosted by IASH, and would be pleased to hear from anyone interested in joining the Network or getting involved in forthcoming events (more details on the IASH website).

Contact Details:
Email: Claire McKechnie
Tel: 0131 651 1162
Address:
Postdoctoral Suite
Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities
The University of Edinburgh
Hope Park Square
Edinburgh EH8 9NW