Seminar - January 2020

Healthy in Body and Soul: Nineteenth-Century Medicine and Theology

Dr Lesa Scholl

To kick off the year for the Food Values Research Group seminar series in 2020, we are pleased to welcome Dr Lesa Scholl.

This paper will engage with the writings of key medical and theological figures of nineteenth-century Britain to examine the ways in which concepts of physical and spiritual health impacted understandings of social justice. Through critiquing ideas of excessive consumption and promoting a range of ideas of fasting, both the medical profession and the Church worked toward creating a concept of an interdependent community that resonated with economic thought, but maintained an emphasis on human compassion. Being aware of what one needs, while also thinking ethically about what others in the community need, was valued in both the Church's concept of loving one's neighbour as oneself, and the medical profession's concern regarding the burgeoning field of public health.

When: Tuesday 28th January, 12-1pm

Where: Ira Raymond Room, Barr Smith Library, North Terrace Campus, University of Adelaide (click here for campus map)

Lesa Scholl (PhD Birkbeck, UL) is Head of Kathleen Lumley College, the postgraduate college of the University of Adelaide. She is a research fellow of the Texas Hunger Initiative at Baylor University, and an honorary research fellow at the University of Exeter. Her current research engages with the dialogues between theological and medical discourses in nineteenth-century representations of fasting. Publications include Hunger, Poetry and the Oxford Movement (Bloomsbury 2020); Hunger Movements in Early Victorian Fiction (2016); and Translation, Authorship and the Victorian Professional Woman (2011). She was the editor of Medicine, Health and Being Human (2018), and co-editor of Place and Progress in the Works of Elizabeth Gaskell (2015).