The third man: Robert Dunn’s (1799-1877) contribution to aphasia research in mid 19th century England

Throughout his medical career, Robert Dunn (1799-1877) published a number of clinical cases with post-mortem reports involving acquired language disorders, the first noted in 1842. He developed a physiologically informed approach to psychological function during the 1850s along with a group of notable colleagues Benjamin Collins Brodie, Henry Holland, Thomas Laycock, John Daniel Morell, and Daniel Noble. He was also active in ethnographic research on human origins and racial diversity. As such, Dunn represents an interesting player in the developing fields of neurology, psychology, and anthropology in England in the latter part of the 19th century. These various strands converged at the meeting of the British Association of the Advancement of Science in 1868, where Dunn shared the program of lectures on the cutting edge topic of aphasia with Paul Broca (1824-1880) and John Hughlings Jackson (1835-1911). Dunn’s ideas developed over a longer time-frame than his younger colleagues and as such represent a unique blending of concepts from the earlier work of Franz Josef Gall (1758-1828) and Jean-Baptiste Bouillaud (1798-1881) to the perspectives on language organization in the brain developed after 1861

‘The Black Middle Class in nineteenth and early twentieth century Norfolk’

This article considers the under-researched subject of English people of African heritage who lived a prosperous and fulfi lled life in Norfolk during the 19th and early 20th centuries. In doing so, the article aims to provide additional data and analysis in respect of an issue to which Gretchen Gerzina and James Walvin have, rightly, drawn our attention; the relative paucity of our knowledge concerning the lives of Black and mixed-race people in 19th-century Britain.1 In respect of Norfolk I have suggested elsewhere already that the evidence of the history of Norfolk's Black and mixed race population shows how Norfolk had a long-standing Black population from at least the 16th century and that this population appears to have been integrated relatively well into the white majority population.2 The evidence produced here expands upon that interpretation by looking at the period after 1800 and also by looking at a specifi c group about which nothing has been written to date, those members of the county’s middle-class who had an African heritage

Belly-Rippers, Surgical Innovation and the Ovariotomy Controversy

This open access book looks at the dramatic history of ovariotomy, an operation to remove ovarian tumours first practiced in the early nineteenth century. Bold and daring, surgeons who performed it claimed to be initiating a new era of surgery by opening the abdomen. Ovariotomy soon occupied a complex position within medicine and society, as an operation which symbolised surgical progress, while also remaining at the boundaries of ethical acceptability. This book traces the operation’s innovation, from its roots in eighteenth-century pathology, through the denouncement of those who performed it as ‘belly-rippers’, to its rapid uptake in the 1880s, when ovariotomists were accused of over-operating. Throughout the century, the operation was never a hair’s breadth from controversy