Travels for Health in the Alps and Riviera: Literary and Medical Cultures
Presented by Professor Sally Shuttleworth
During the pandemic, we were all urged to isolate, to lock ourselves away and remain at home when ill. In the nineteenth century, by contrast, invalids were urged to travel, to find the best location to treat their illness. As a result, many invalids led peripatetic lives, moving from place to place, often to ‘English colonies’ which arose in European resorts. This talk focuses on the development of two such colonies, Menton, on the French Riviera, and Davos in the Swiss Alps, and the intertwined lives of invalids who took up residence.
According to James Henry Bennet, the ‘creator’ of Mentone as a health resort, the British should take their cue from the swallows, and travel south in the winter. Sufferers from consumption, clergyman’s throat, or general overwork and the pressures of modern life, followed his siren call. Yet by the 1880s Mentone was supplanted as the health destination of choice by the rise of Davos. Basking in the sun in a natural winter garden was to be replaced, one commentator grumbled, by the refrigeration of invalids. The talk will explore the medical, and cultural dimensions of these developments, and the lives of some of the more famous invalids who wintered in these resorts, from Robert Louis Stevenson and John Addington Symonds, to Aubrey Beardsley and Katherine Mansfield.
Date: Wednesday 30 July 2025
Time: 5.45pm for 6–7pm. Followed by a reception from 7pm–8pm.
Venue: The Terrace Room (Level 6), Sir Llew Edwards Building (14), UQ (view map)
RSVP: Friday 25 July 2025
Professor Sally Shuttleworth
Sally Shuttleworth is Senior Research Fellow at St Anne’s College, and the English Faculty, University of Oxford, where she was previously Head of the Humanities Division. Her research is on the interface between science, medicine and the humanities, particularly in the nineteenth century.
Her books include Charlotte Brontë and Victorian Psychology (1996) and The Mind of the Child: Child Development in Literature, Science and Medicine, 1840-1900 (2010). Between 2014-19 she ran two large research projects, Diseases of Modern Life: Nineteenth-Century Perspectives (ERC) and Constructing Scientific Communities: Citizen Science in the 19th and 21st Centuries (AHRC), the latter in partnership with the Natural History Museum, London, the Royal Society, and the Royal College of Surgeons of England.
Joint research works from these projects include Anxious Times: Medicine and Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2019); Sleep and Stress: Past and Present, a Special Issue of the Royal Society Journal, Interface Focus (2020); Progress and Pathology: Medicine and Culture in the Nineteenth Century (2020) and Science Periodicals in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Constructing Scientific Communities (2020). She has recently completed a book on travel for health, In Quest of a Cure: Literary and Medical Cultures of the Health Resort, which will be published in 2026 by Oxford University Press.
The S. W Brooks Visiting Fellowship was established in 1962 by a bequest to The University of Queensland by Arnold Edwin Brooks, who died in 1958, to be known in memory of his father Samuel Wood Brooks.