Susanna Blamire, Medicine, and Romantic Women’s Poetry

This event took place on 28 April 2022 and was in collaboration with the University of Northumbria.
Romantic poet Susanna Blamire (1747-1794) was a prolific Cumbria-based writer who explored topics including healthcare, religion and travel in both verse and prose. Little of her body of work was published during her lifetime.
Over the last 25 years the Wordsworth Trust worked with Christopher Hugh Maycock, Blamire’s descendent and biographer (A Passionate Poet, Hypatia Press 2003; Selected Poems, Bookcase, 2008), to preserve her surviving manuscript works. Her writings not only reveal the hidden history of women’s medical work in the 18th century but form a starting point for exploring what good healthcare looks like in past, present and future.
In this event our speakers took an in-depth look at Blamire’s life and writing, and showcased manuscripts and objects from the Wordsworth Trust’s collection. They explored topics including the experience of illness and disability in the late 18th century, how women influenced healthcare while being barred from medical school, and how creativity can interact with wellbeing.
This event accompanied ‘(Re)Acting Romanticism: Disability and Women Writers’ at Wordsworth Grasmere, an exhibition that took place from April-May 2022.
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About the speakers
Clark Lawlor is Professor of Eighteenth-Century Literature at Northumbria University, with specific expertise in literature and the history of medicine. He has published widely on a wide variety of health-related subjects including the histories of conditions such as consumption (now known as pulmonary tuberculosis) and nervous disorder, which we now recognise, at least in part, as depression and other forms of mental illness. He leads and supports members of the project team whose research has brought Blamire’s work to light.
Dr Ashleigh Blackwood is Research Fellow on the Writing Doctors project and Lead for Northumbria University’s interdisciplinary ‘Medicine, Health and Wellbeing in the Humanities’ Research Group. Her research challenges traditional views of who, and what, was involved in developing discourses of healthcare and medicine during the long eighteenth century (1660-1832). Ashleigh works closely on historical women’s writing about medicine.
Laurence Sullivan is a PhD student at Northumbria University on the ‘Writing Doctors: Medical Representation and Personality, ca.1660-1832’. His research focuses on literary representations of women who practised domestic medicine and also explores the role played by medical self-help literature in society, including through examining how women could be empowered by being given the means to take ownership of their own health. The life and works of Susanna Blamire form a core part of his PhD thesis.
Harriet McKinley-Smith is a PhD student in English and French at Jesus College, Oxford. She is currently working on a Collaborative Doctoral Award titled ‘Relating Romantic Disabilities’ supervised by Oxford University and the Wordsworth Trust. Her research is funded by the Open-Oxford-Cambridge Doctoral Training Partnership, the Clarendon Fund and Jesus College, Oxford. Harriet’s thesis is focussed on the depiction of marginalised French characters in the works of the English author Mary Robinson. More generally, she is interested in female experiences of disability in the literature of the Romantic period. Her forthcoming exhibition in the Wordsworth Museum explores these ideas through the words of writers such as Susanna Blamire and Dorothy Wordsworth.
This conversation is hosted by Jeff Cowton, Principal Curator & Head of Learning at Wordsworth Grasmere.