Bleak Health: with Nicholas Cambridge

Charles Dickens: A Brain on Fire! 🔥

Dominic is joined by Dr. Nicholas Cambridge who is an Honorary Research Fellow in Humanities at the University of Buckingham and a visiting scholar in Medical Humanities at Nova Scotia’s Dalhousie University.

After qualifying as an electrical engineer, Nicholas switched career to became a GP and as a medical student won the first ever History of Medicine Prize from the Royal Society Medicine. He then worked for 25 years as a family Doctor in Surrey (in the south of England), but that prize he won as a student nearly 50 years ago seems to have planted a seed that in retirement is now growing to fruition.
His new book, Bleak Health which gives a fascinating insight into the conditions that Dickens, his family and people in the 19th Century more widely, had to contend with. The primary sources in Bleak Health are Dickens’ own words where in his letters he confides to the people who are closest to him, about his mental, physical and emotional struggles throughout his life …

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Host: Dominic Gerrard
Series Artwork: Léna Gibert
Original Music: Dominic Gerrard
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