Seminars are held on Mondays at 16:00 at the Maison Française d’Oxford in Norham Road.

Seminars in the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology

Cora Salkovskis (Birkbeck University of London)

“We cannot help laughing”: reflex, discomfort, and the comic in late-Victorian mental science

Laughter sits uneasily within the history of mental health and the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century British asylum; a space more commonly associated with pain and distress than humour and the comic. Finding, thinking about, and writing about laughter in this space and context raises important questions of methodology, meaning, ethics, and practice. How can laughter be found in asylum records or translated into text? Does laughter always neatly map onto emotion or humour, and when the doctor (or the historian) does find something funny, what does it mean to laugh?

Using the extraordinary (and newly discovered) transcribed interviews of patients in Richmond Asylum (Dublin) and contemporary medical and lay texts, this paper explores the curiosity and ambivalence with which the laughter of both doctors and patients was viewed and experienced in the physical and conceptual spaces of mental science. Laughter is explored as an expressive, disruptive, and creative phenomenon; a complex constellation of movements often ambiguously situated between reflex or automatic action, emotion, and social practice. This paper unpicks what role the familiarity and recognisability of embodied expression in how we relate to other human beings, asking why laughter is more uncomfortable or unexpected in some places than others.

Seminars are held on Mondays at 16:00 at the Maison Française d’Oxford in Norham Road.

Seminars in the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology

Dr Janelle Winters (University of Oxford)

A risky business: hydroxychloroquine, global health politics, and the bureaucratization of clinical trials

The clinical trials governance landscape has evolved dramatically since the 1980s. With the wide adoption of the International Conference on Harmonization’s Good Clinical Practices (ICH-GCP) internationally, private actors have arisen to help researchers meet the demands of such “document-based accountability” mechanisms. Contract research organizations, clinical trial database and validation companies, insurance brokers, and methodology consultants have proliferated in a growing global clinical trial marketplace, as they offer the promise of global recruitment and risk mitigation.

In February 2020, just weeks after the first publications on the COVID-19 virus, the Mahidol-Oxford’s Tropical Medicine Research Unit (MORU)’s team discussed re-purposing the widely used anti-malarial chloroquine/hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19. MORU researchers quickly received funding for a large, multi-country randomized controlled trial of chloroquine/hydroxychloroquine as a prophylaxis for COVID-19, the “COPCOV trial”, with results expected by the end of 2020. Yet, the trial quickly faced political fallout from “hydroxy hysteria” in the media and a fraudulent paper published in The Lancet; authorization hurdles related to ICH-GCP and other bureaucratic entanglements; and delays due to various actors’ risk aversion.

This talk draws on Dr. Winters’ ongoing postdoctoral research as the “COPCOV trial historian”. She focuses on a broad research question: What does the COPCOV experience illuminate about clinical trial political influence, “epistemic monopolies”, marketplaces, and global governance in the modern era?