Dr Noelle Gallagher
Daiches-Manning Memorial Fellow in 18th-Century Scottish Studies, September - November 2023
Home Institution: University of Manchester
I am a Senior Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture at the University of Manchester. My research focuses on British literature and graphic art of the long eighteenth century, and I have a particular interest in the medical humanities. I am the author of two books. The first of these, Historical Literatures: Writing About the Past in England, 1660-1740 (Manchester University Press, 2012), demonstrated how English poets, diarists, polemicists, and memoirists used literary forms and techniques to depict historical phenomena. My second book, Itch, Clap, Pox: Venereal Disease in the Eighteenth-Century Imagination (Yale University Press, 2019), explored how eighteenth-century British literature and graphic art used venereal disease as a symbol through which to express anxieties about globalization, immigration, changing sexual practices, and a host of other issues. My other recent publications have covered eighteenth-century representations of the Bubonic plague, cancer, circumcision, sexual dysfunction, and scrofula. I am currently working on a book about gout in eighteenth-century literature and graphic art.
Project Title: ‘A Cogfu’ of Warm Parritch’: Oats and Scottishness in Eighteenth-Century Print Culture
My research at IASH focuses on the representation of oats and oatmeal in eighteenth-century literature and graphic art. I ask what the stereotype of the Scottish oat-eater—perhaps best encapsulated by Samuel Johnson’s famous dictionary definition of oats as “A grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people”—can tell us about medicine, politics, geography, literature, and aesthetics in Britain’s long eighteenth century. I argue that foods like porridge, oat whisky, and oatcakes had multiple, and sometimes contradictory, significations in this period, serving, on the one hand, as vehicles for the expression of anti-Scottish sentiment, and on the other, as symbols of Scottish national pride. Thus, while satirists like William Hogarth and Tobias Smollett used the “poor, unpalatable, and inflammatory diet” of the Scots as a means of vilifying their alleged poverty, uncouthness, or weakness, poets like Robert Burns and novelists like Walter Scott celebrated the “cogfu’ of Warm Parritch” as a symbol of Scottish resilience, strength, and self-discipline. Similarly, while some eighteenth-century medical practitioners believed that the Scottish overreliance on oats led to malnourishment, illness, and even caused skin disorders like the “Scotch itch,” others argued that it was the Scottish predilection for “plain foods” like porridge—as opposed to the “roast beef of old England”—that protected the Scottish from obesity, indigestion, and gout.
Like my prior work, this project aims to place medical discourses in conversation with literary and visual works, drawing on the resources of the University of Edinburgh libraries, the National Library of Scotland, the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, and the Royal College of Physicians. The resulting research will add to existing scholarship in Scottish studies and, hopefully, contribute to my third monograph in progress.