David Stafford-Clark (1916-1999): portrait of a media psychiatrist. (360G-Wellcome-106650_Z_14_Z)

This project investigates the mass-media activities of the British psychiatrist David Stafford-Clark (1916-1999), who was a prominent exponent of popular psychiatry in the post-war period. By consulting Stafford-Clark archival papers at the Wellcome Library alongside published material, this project asks how Stafford-Clark exercised his medical authority through the mass-media (books, press, broadcasting) to pronounce on both psychiatric and wider cultural issues for a non-specialist audience du ring the period c.1950-c.1990. Three inter-related questions will be answered. 1) How did Stafford-Clark function as a specific intellectual popularising his area of expertise to a mass audience? 2) How did Stafford-Clark exploit his medical authority as a qualifying activity with which to comment as a public intellectual on wider cultural issues, particularly religion? 3) To what extent were Stafford Clark's mass-media activities co-determined by his self-identification as an unjustly negl ected literary author? The project will result in a substantial peer-reviewed article for a medical humanities/history journal, and will be accompanied by research presentations of work-in-progress.