This week sees us turn our focus to the role of ‘subjects’ and subjectivity in the history of medicine, with a particular focus on mental health. How should we understand the psychological patient, loaded categories such as ‘madness’, and the binaries of the psycho-therapeutic encounter? What is the intersection between the historian of medical science and the actors of the past?

· Roger Smith, ‘Does the history of psychology have a subject?’, History of the Human Sciences, 1:2 (1988), pp. 147-177.

· Barbara Taylor, ‘The demise of the asylum in late-twentieth-century Britain: a personal history’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 21 (2011), pp. 193-215.

A light lunch will be provided.