I graduated from the Australian National University with Honours in History and a University Medal in , before going on to complete graduate study at the University of Cambridge. During this time I also undertook some historical work with the BBC. My intellectual interests centre upon Britain, France and their colonial worlds from the eighteenth century. I am interested in politics and political thought, empire, consumption and culture amongst other things.

Much of my personal research is focused upon the social history of ideas. I am interested in the way in which ideas and discourses are taken up, adapted and used by individuals and groups in social situations. I also have a strong interest in historiography and in the uses of history in both the past and the present.


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Nature and History in the Political Thought of the French Revolution — This is a project examining conceptions of human nature, natural law and historical process during the era of the French Revolution. The Politics of Pleasure in the eighteenth century — This project analyses conceptions of pleasure, and of its role in human life, in the political and moral thought of Europe during the long eighteenth century. It examines the dynamics of that intellectual history against the backdrop of contemporary hopes and fears concerning the rise of commercial society, the division of the religious world and the instability of social order.

Thinking the Human in the Era of Enlightenment — This is a group project, run in collaboration with Dr Ned Curthoys and Dr Shino Konishi, to bring together innovative recent thought on the character and function of competing conceptions of human nature and needs during the Enlightenment in Europe and its colonial world. The project is associated with a conference in July , and a series of group publications to follow.

Studies in Culture and Society , An accumulation of PTEs coincided with her withdrawal from society and might have precipitated the change in behavior. During her 14th year, there were the deaths of four intimates in rapid succession, whose funerals she was forced to attend. Her mother had a similar illness that relatives feared was hereditary. Emily was her mother's primary caregiver for nearly three decades. In the late s, Dickinson began secluding herself from most social contact, refusing to come down-stairs even to meet close friends, no longer attending church, fleeing from the room or from the garden at the approach of outsiders, meeting visitors at the foot of the backstairs by moonlight alone, conducting conversations from behind an ajar door or screen, and permitting her doctor to examine her only by observing while seated in the next room as she walked by an open door.

At age 35, she began to recover, to become more interactive socially, and to write poems less morbid than the earlier ones for which she is remembered. She died at age 56, most likely of hypertension complicated by a massive stroke. Florence Nightingale, born into a family of Britain's social elite, was serious as a child, although frail, and yet remarkably independent. She was also deeply religious. Vigorously educated at home at a time when universities admitted only men and British society had little interest in equal education for women, Nightingale had the courage and conviction to challenge her society's strictures and take up the then-masculine vocation of nursing.

BURIED TREASURE IN YOUR NECK OF THE WOODS COOK COUNTY, ILLINOIS

In , in her middle thirties, she traveled to Skutari now Uskudar , Turkey, to care for British soldiers fighting the Russians in the Crimea. With a mere 38 nurses under her, she provided medical care to a seemingly endless stream of troops wracked by frostbite, gangrene, dysentery, and other diseases and crammed into 4 miles of beds not 18 inches apart. Her own quarters were cramped and infested with rodents and vermin. During January and February of her first winter, Nightingale saw 3, of the soldiers die, while she worked 20 hours per day much of the time and took the most-severe cases herself.


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  4. In May of the following year, she developed a near-fatal illness most likely brucellosis. Although she was urged to return to England, she remained with the Army during her convalescence and did not leave her post until the last soldier had left for home 21 months after her arrival. When she reached England, she appeared hardened and aged by illness and exhaustion. She complained of intermittent fever, anorexia, fatigue, insomnia, irritability, depression, sciatica, dyspnea, and palpitations, which for nearly three decades kept her confined to her room, scarcely ever off her sofa.

    Finally, in her sixties, these symptoms began to abate, and the cold, obsessed, and tyrannical workaholic she had been as an invalid gradually transformed into a gentle matron capable of something close to normal relationships with relatives and friends.

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    Because diagnostic data could not be obtained from the subjects themselves, we relied on information collected from source material and the opinions of experts regarding likely responses of these four historical figures to a standard PTSD assessment instrument. Biographical material on each of the subjects was reviewed by the authors to determine the presence of criterion A stressors. Details of PTEs for each of the four historical figures are presented in the case studies above.

    Given the lack of first-hand descriptions of personal responses to these PTEs, the presence or absence of criterion A2 responses to the events fear, helplessness, or horror could not be evaluated. To further assess the presence and severity of post-traumatic symptoms, persons with special knowledge of the biographical details for each of the four historical figures were contacted.


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    The respondent is asked to rate the extent to which the problem described in each item has bothered him or her during the past month. Scores of 50 for military samples and 44 for nonmilitary samples have been proposed as diagnostic of PTSD. The experts representing Alexander, Florence Nightingale, and Emily Dickinson all felt they were familiar enough with the lives of their historical subjects to hazard responses to the questions included in the PCL, although they indicated that the source material with which they were familiar did not always directly address the questions asked.

    Nightingale earned a PCL score of If the data obtained in this fashion are valid, then these scores, each of which is in the range of modern PTSD samples, in conjunction with the criterion A stressors reported in the case histories above, are indicative of a diagnosis of PTSD for each of the three historical subjects.

    The Captain Cook Society expert who was assisted by other society members in completing the PCL reported that the nature of available source documents related to Capt Cook i. The responses were as follows: Alexander, Cook, Dickinson, and Nightingale all exhibited striking changes in behavior in the aftermath of repeated PTEs of differing character. Were these changes precipitated by the PTEs and, if so, did they represent normal reactions to stressful events or more sinister pathological psychological reactions?

    Did these four subjects have PTSD? If not, what caused the profound changes in their behavior?

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    Although in many respects the constellation of symptoms seen in patients diagnosed with PTSD is distinctive, 5 some authorities question the validity of the disorder as a specific psychiatric diagnosis, pointing out that, after highly distressing events, virtually everyone is troubled with feelings of anxiety, loss of sleep, nightmares, and occasional flashbacks and that both the extent and duration of these symptoms correlate directly with the severity and duration of the stressful events.

    Moreover, we think that the symptoms were of a character and an intensity consistent with criteria currently used to define PTSD. Diagnosing PTSD in historical figures is considerably more challenging than diagnosing PTSD in living subjects, because the instruments currently used to establish the diagnosis cannot be administered in traditional fashion. Consequently, only the most florid historical cases of the disorder are likely to be diagnosed.

    Although in the present investigation we tried to circumvent this problem by having questionnaires completed by proxy for each of our subjects, the validity of data obtained in this manner, even from recognized experts, is uncertain. Moreover, historical records are only moderately helpful in establishing the diagnosis posthumously, because they rarely reveal subjects' inner feelings. Nevertheless, all four of these famous subjects exhibited many of the cardinal features of PTSD in the aftermath of repeated PTEs, such that, even in the absence of responses to standardized PTSD instruments reported by the subjects themselves, the findings point to PTSD as a likely cause of the striking changes in behavior.

    Other diagnoses are also possible, however, and must be considered, either as alternatives to PTSD or as possible comorbidities. For all four subjects, depression was a prominent feature of their post-traumatic psychological states and might well have been their principal disorder. In Alexander's case, because of his nearly constant inebriation for at least 7 months before he died, alcohol dependence rather than PTSD has to be considered as the principal diagnosis.

    It is also possible that, after more than a decade of fighting, scheming, and murdering in pursuit of absolute power, Alexander changed because he came to realize that absolute power demanded eternal vigilance. Dickinson had many of the classic symptoms of panic disorder with agoraphobia, complicated by the hormone-induced alterations in mood that sometimes accompany the onset of puberty in women.

    It is also possible that she had an anxiety disorder other than PTSD social anxiety disorder, for example that was largely unrelated to the PTEs that coincided with her retreat into seclusion. If Wisner et al. Perhaps this was the condition, rather than PTSD, that sent her to bed for the better part of three decades. Although it was also suggested that chronic brucellosis was responsible for her protracted invalidism, 11 the duration of the illness and its spontaneous resolution after creating physical and mental havoc for nearly 30 years renders this diagnosis unlikely.

    If these four famous individuals did all have PTSD, as our interpretation of the evidence suggests, then their illnesses covered a broad spectrum of the condition as currently defined , in terms of the variety of PTEs inducing the stress reaction, premorbid personalities, ethnocultural contexts in which reactions to PTEs find expression, and clinical manifestations, course, and consequences of the disorder.

    All four of these individuals were subjected to repeated severe PTEs over extended periods. For Alexander, there were the manifold stresses of war; for Cook, famine and other life-threatening traumas of nature; for Dickinson, repeated exposure to death of relatives and close friends, as a result of a disease she feared was hereditary ; and, for Nightingale, plague and compassion fatigue complicated not just by survivor guilt but also by guilt over complicity in perpetuating the pestilence that carried off so many of her patients.

    The diverse premorbid personalities and backgrounds of these four patients emphasize the breadth of the susceptible population, given exposure to PTEs of sufficient intensity and duration, as well as the influence of the sociocultural environment in which the disorder arises on its clinical expression. Alexander was a warrior king whose psychological reaction to an accumulation of PTEs was dictated and then judged by the warrior society over which he presided as supreme ruler.

    Of these four individuals, he was endowed with perhaps the greatest resilience, which for a time seemed to inure him to the adverse psychological effects of the PTEs of conquest. Eventually, however, even for him, there was a limit to the intensity and duration of PTEs that could be tolerated before he was broken psychologically.

    For Cook, the super-mariner, social pressure applied by a caste-conscious society, which was by nature suspicious of the accomplishments of self-made members of its lower classes, forced him to endure yet more PTEs when he was already psychologically disabled. Possibly as proposed by Janet 17 more than a century ago efforts to keep memories of the PTEs of his first two voyages at bay sapped him of psychological energy to such an extent that, during his third voyage of discovery, he was too exhausted mentally to perform the focused and creative activities required of him as naval commander.

    Dickinson benefitted from the continuous social support of her younger sister Lavinia, as well as that of a large circle of devoted friends. However, she was the least resilient and suffered her PTEs during an especially vulnerable period in her psychological development puberty.

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    Nightingale, although more resilient, answered to a less nurturing society, which in fact was not much different from Cook's. As a member of the upper class and a woman, she might have enjoyed a life insulated from the PTEs that sent her to bed for three decades. However, she rejected the traditional role of a socially elite woman to take up a role then performed exclusively by men of lower social station.