Travels for Health in the Alps and Riviera: Literary and Medical Cultures

Presented by Professor Sally Shuttleworth

About the S.W Brooks

The Samuel Wood 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.

About the lecture

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.

About the presenter

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.

Event details

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

RSVP: Friday 25 July 2025

Enquiries

engagement@hass.uq.edu.au

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2025 S.W Brooks Public Lecture

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