Neil Vickers

Contact details
Room 206
Department of English
King's College London
Strand
London
WC2R 2LS

neil.vickers[at]kcl.ac.uk
+442078481541 (voice)
+442078482257 (fax)

I have three main areas of research:

(1) Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the medical culture of his time. I have written one book, Coleridge and the Doctors 1795-1806 (OUP, 2004) which examines Coleridge's participation in the medical culture of his time. The book's fundamental claim is that Coleridge's intellectual development cannot be understood independently of his medical endeavours. When Coleridge lost his health aged only 28 he believed his ailments were caused by a series of experiments he had recently 'on his own senses'. These experiments were embedded in a set of assumptions about the interaction of the body and mind which he believed could lead to advances in contemporary medical thought. The medical researches he undertook over the next ten or so years subtended his all of his endeavours, with powerful implications for the understanding of the relationship between physiology and cosmology and the specific character of imaginative and religious experience. Since then, I have published articles on Coleridge's knowledge of the German psychological tradition, especially that associated with Karl Philipp Moritz. Against the grain of much recent work in literary Romanticism, these aim to shed fresh light on the meaning of psychology in the Romantic period by considering the full range of medical ideas that were current then - not merely those that foreshadowed later developments.

2) I have a strong interest in the history of psychiatry and the history of British psychoanalysis and am a strong admirer of the psychoanalytic view of the mind. I am currently working on two psychoanalytical projects. The first deals with the early career of the Kleinian analyst Roger Money-Kyrle (1898-1980), specifically with his attempts to merge psychoanalysis, anthropology and eugenics into a single science. The second concerns the nature of the psychoanalytic case history. What makes some case histories 'classics'? How do they differ from other kinds of psychoanalytic case histories? And how do they differ from psychiatric case histories?

3) I am a member of KCL's Wellcome-funded Centre for Health Sciences and the Humanities. With Brian Hurwitz, I set up what we believe is the world's first MA in Literature and Medicine. Brian and I will take forward the research strand on Illness Narrative in the project. Over the last two decades there has been an explosion of interest in the literary possibilities of illness. According to Ann Hunsaker Hawkins (1993), illness narratives began to form a distinct publishing phenomenon in or about 1950. Extremely rare before 1900, over the last twenty years they have become almost commonplace. Previously recognisable as the sub-genre of the self-help book and the preserve of patients, they have since been joined by a series works in the late 1980s written by accomplished authors (who recounted experiences of illness as patients and as carers). John Updike's Self-Consciousness (1989) and William Styron's Darkness Visible (1990), a memoir of the author's struggles with depression, are notable examples. With the publication in 1993 of John Bayley's Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch (1993) illness narratives began to reach a much larger public, an effect significantly amplified by the Hollywood film, Iris. Over the same period, patient groups have used the internet to develop illness narratives and illness has become an integral part of the life imagined and lived out on Second Life. Our project will consider, among other things, the increasingly complex and rich contribution that illness narratives make to the public understanding of illness experience.