‘Structures of Medical Knowledge’
Conveners: Drs Erica Charters and Elise Smith

Week 7 – 25th November

Sophie Vasset, Université Paris Diderot-Paris 7

Queen Anne’s Seventeen Pregnancies and her Treatment for Barrenness

Sophie Vasset studied at the University of Orleans, and the research institute Anglophones Charles V – Paris 7 in double degree with the Russian (INALCO). She began her thesis under the direction of Frederick Ogée on medicine and fiction in Britain in the eighteenth century at the University of Marne-la-Vallée. She received a Fulbright scholarship to Los Angeles (UCLA) and a Lavoisier scholarship to Oxford French House.

At the University Paris-Diderot, she studies eighteenth-century British medicine and literature. She is currently working on narrative and health, medical polemics, and on the cultural history of infertility.

More specific areas of interest include: inoculation, pain, health and prevention, blood-letting, madness and eighteenth-century illness narratives (gout, stone, smallpox, syphilis, hypochondria, hysteria).

She is a member of the research project on early modern controversies, AGON, and of the board of administration of the French Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (SFEDS).

Selected Publications:

• Décrire, prescrire, guérir: médecine et fiction dans la Grande Bretagne du XVIIIe siècle, Collection de la République des Lettres, Montréal, QC, Presses de l’Université Laval, 2011. This book won the SAES/AFEA prize 2012.
• The Physics of Language in Roderick Random, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 2009.
• Medicine and Narration in the 18th century, SVEC 04: 2013, Oxford, Voltaire Foundation, 2013.

Queen Anne and William, Duke of Gloucester by studio of Sir Godfrey Kneller