Co-hosts Ian Sabroe and Dieter Declercq talk with Cathy, Jason and Phil about Personalised and public health: learning (and not learning) from the past. Our guests share a research interest around public health, personalised health, the politics of health, but have different disciplinary training. During the conversation, we tease out some of the similarities but also differences between past and present, and a humanities versus biomedical approach. We explore what can we learn from each other across disciplinary approaches, and from the past to inform approaches to population health today.

Cathy Shrank is Professor of Tudor and Renaissance Literature at the University of Sheffield. Her research ranges from the late fifteenth to the late seventeenth century, and moves between poetry, prose, and drama. It also includes less obviously “literary” forms of writing, such as medical or educational works. That range is exemplified by the monograph on dialogue that she is currently completing for Oxford University Press.

Jason Gill is Professor of Cardiometabolic Health at the University of Glasgow. His research focuses on the role of lifestyle-related factors (principally physical activity, diet and sleep) in the prevention and management of cardiometabolic diseases, and on ethnicity and health. This work encompasses epidemiology; biological mechanisms underpinning cardiometabolic disease risk; and development of realistic and sustainable lifestyle interventions. He also established the MSc in Sport and Exercise Science & Medicine at the University of Glasgow, has contributed to national clinical and physical activity guidelines, is an editor at several journals, and plays an active role in public engagement and communication of science.

Phil Withington is Professor of History at the University of Sheffield. A specialist in early modern history (1500-1800), he has a long-term interest in medical humanities in general and the history of intoxicants and addiction in particular. He is currently writing a book on England’s first psychoactive revolution and running a project on craft alcohol and urban environments.

Co-hosts Ian Sabroe and Dieter Declercq talk with Martina about appliedness and medical education, medical humanities and (the lack of) defined disciplinary identity, and how the medical humanities interact with multiple academic disciplines in research and teaching.

Martina King studied medicine, German literature and philosophy in Munich and qualified as paediatrician. After 15 years of clinical paediatrics and some years of teaching modern German literature, she turned to medical humanities: she lectured medical history in Glasgow and Bern, wrote her second book on the cultural and literary history of German bacteriology and became professor of medical humanities at Fribourg University in 2018. Her current research interests are medical spaces in modern literature and culture, and the medical discharge report as factual narrative genre.

Co-hosts Ian Sabroe and Dieter Declercq talk with Stella and Neil about Care. Key themes include: the place of self-care in contemporary writing and medical humanities; theories of care in the medical humanities and further afield; the relationship of care to narratives of illness and disability; care deficits and the long shadow that they cast in illness narratives.

Dr Stella Bolaki is Reader in American Literature and Medical Humanities in the School of Humanities and Co-Director of the Centre for Health and Medical Humanities at the University of Kent, UK. She is the author of Unsettling the Bildungsroman: Reading Contemporary Ethnic American Women’s Fiction (Brill/Rodopi, 2011) and of Illness as Many Narratives: Arts, Medicine and Culture (Edinburgh University Press, 2016). She has also co-edited Audre Lorde’s Transnational Legacies (University of Massachusetts Press, 2015) and has led “Artists’ Books and Medical Humanities”, an interdisciplinary project that examined how books, art and healthcare can be interrelated. Current research includes a practice-based project that uses creative methods inspired by the artist’s book to explore the experiences of mothers affected by historic and contemporary practices of child removal and adoption, and a new monograph on self-care in contemporary writing.

Prof Neil Vickers is professor of English literature and the health humanities at King’s College London. He’s currently on a senior research fellowship funded by the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust to write a history of the medical humanities from the early 1960s to the present day. He’s had two careers, one in epidemiology and public health and one in literature and he tried to bring them together in his work. He is the author of Coleridge and the Doctors (2004) and Being Ill : On Sickness, Care and Abandonment (2024).