Elsa Richardson

I am a Senior Lecturer in the History of Medicine and Director of the  Centre for the Social History of Health and Healthcare (CSHHH).

Working at the intersection between the medical and cultural history, my research considers the relation of heterodox practices, beliefs and movements to mainstream society and culture, with particular focus on the interaction between medicine and the imagination, science and the supernatural, psychology and the occult.

My last book, Rumbles: A Curious History of the Gut (Wellcome/Profile Books, 2024) examined the cultural history of digestion and I have recently published articles on topics as various as vegetarian restaurants, bovine tuberculosis, the 'obesity epidemic' and the origins of immunology. 

I am currently writing a book, Everyday Revolutions, that examines the history of interwar radicals in London and how their efforts to transform the routines of daily life fed into a larger revolutionary project. 

My first monograph, published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2017, examined the place of extraordinary visionary experience in the Victorian scientific and popular imaginary. Specifically, it investigated the phenomenon of second sight, a species of foreknowledge associated with the Scottish Highlands and Islands and described how tales of this strange visionary ability came to impact on the formation of psychological theories, scientific methodologies and dominant cultural forms. Outside of these projects, I have also researched and published on women’s life writing, British modernism, performance and psychology, feminist consciousness-raising and psychoanalysis.

In addition to lecturing in the history of medicine at the University of Strathclyde and developing my own research, I also curate arts and science events for public institutions. 

Science and the supernatural, the history of psychiatiry and psychology, vegetarianism, utopian social movements, stress and the stomach, work and food, second-wave feminism and psychoanalysis.

I have experience teaching on the history of medicine and the history of psychiatry, and I have co-authored undergraduate courses on the history of the supernatural and the history of the modern self. At Strathclyde I teach on 'Madness and Society', convene second-year course, 'Disease and Society' and a fourth-year special subject 'From Ancient Passions to Modern Feelings: The History of Emotions'.