Thackray Insights: The Sick Sense

Taking place across our Autumn/Winter season, Thackray Insights invites you to delve deep into eye­ opening topics and explore the unheard stories of medicine.

Can you smell cancer? What does it taste like? What does it feel like? Travel back 300 years to learn how surgeons and physicians used the five senses to understand experiences of cancer. In a time when it was largely incurable, terminal cases were often recognised by patients’ large, foul-smelling ulcers. Dr Claire Turner explores how these accounts of ‘foetid tumours’ and ‘rotten bodies’ can teach us about the disease’s relationship with our sense of self.

The colour of hospitals impact both patients and staff, affecting mood and wellbeing, as well as recovery and rehabilitation. With the growing influence of germ theory, white walls became the standard for hospital design. Walls were no longer designed to hide dirt but to show dirt — or rather the absence thereof. However, we now associate these colours with the bleak and mundane. Dr Victoria Bates looks at the ways colour can help us understand our relationship with modern hospitals for the better.

About the Speakers

Dr Claire Turner is a historian of medicine and the senses. She is a Bridging Fellow in Medical Humanities at Durham University.

Dr Victoria Bates is an Associate Professor in Modern Medical History at the University of Bristol. She is the author of ‘Feeling Blue’ — the first book-length history of colour in modern hospitals.