Medical Publishers, Obscenity Law, and the Business of Sexual Knowledge in Victorian Britain. (360G-Wellcome-106548_Z_14_Z)

£129,751

This project will combine archival research with bibliographic, textual, and cultural analysis to chart the changing structures of Victorian medical publishing as it investigates how the period's emergent specialist medical publishers negotiated the precarious legal and cultural position of explicit medical books as borderline obscenity. I will uncover the strategies that four representative publishers used to protect their businesses from accusations of impropriety and even prosecution under ch anging obscenity laws, and assess the extent to which those strategies established certain kinds of medical books on sexual health as respectable works amid the nascent medical profession's struggle to establish its own social authority. Intersecting with the Wellcome Library's three-year initiative to digitise over 25,000 nineteenth-century medical books for free public access through the Internet Archive's Medical Heritage Library, this research will provide a fresh context for scholarly and p ublic engagement with such collections. It will shed new light on complex historical links between business history, cultural attempts to manage sexuality, and the development of the medical book, and build a foundation for new lines of enquiry in the medical humanities by outlining key structures of the Victorian medical publishing business.

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Grant Details

Amount Awarded 129751
Applicant Surname Bull
Approval Committee Medical Humanities Interview Committee
Award Date 2015-01-12T00:00:00+00:00
Financial Year 2014/15
Grant Programme: Title Research Fellowship in H&SS
Internal ID 106548/Z/14/Z
Lead Applicant Dr Sarah Bull
Partnership Value 129751
Planned Dates: End Date 2019-03-31T00:00:00+00:00
Planned Dates: Start Date 2015-05-01T00:00:00+00:00
Recipient Org: Country United Kingdom
Region East of England
Sponsor(s) Prof Jim Secord