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Senses of Vibration: A History of the Pleasure and Pain of Sound

Spanning multiple disciplines (including physiology, medicine, physics, psychology, psychiatry, and geology), literary genres and periods (from the mid-eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries), this study of complex representations of vibration as a sensory and cultural phenomenon required:

•consulting a very wide range of primary sources from different fields, including long runs of nineteenth-century medical and spiritualist periodicals (for example, the Lancet, Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research), Dickens’s Household Words and All the Year Round, scientific lectures, religious tracts, private letters, Romantic poetry, science fiction.

•extensive periods of archival research at the Wellcome Institute and British library.