Neil Vickers

Niel Vickers joined the department in 2005 as Lecturer in Literature and Medicine, having previously had a career in epidemiology and public health.  Following a BA at Trinity College Dublin, he went to Paris where he studied at the Ecole Normale Supérieure and the Université de Paris VII (Jussieu).  His MPhil and DPhil research - on Coleridge - was carried out at Balliol College, Oxford.  Previous posts in English include a stint as University Lecturer in Romanticism at Cambridge and Stipendiary Lecturer in English at Jesus College, Oxford.

He has written one book, Coleridge and the Doctors 1795-1806 (OUP, 2004) which examines Coleridge's participation in the medical culture of his time. The book's fundamental claim is that Coleridge's intellectual development cannot be understood independently of his medical endeavours.  When Coleridge lost his health aged only 28 he believed his ailments were caused by a series of experiments he had recently 'on his own senses'.  These experiments were embedded in a set of assumptions about the interaction of the body and mind which he believed could lead to advances in contemporary medical thought.  The medical researches he undertook over the next ten or so years subtended his all of his endeavours, with powerful implications for the understanding of the relationship between physiology and cosmology and the specific character of imaginative and religious experience.

Since then, He has published articles on Coleridge's knowledge of the German psychological tradition, especially that associated with Karl Philipp Moritz. Against the grain of much recent work in literary Romanticism, these aim to shed fresh light on the meaning of psychology in the Romantic period by considering the full range of medical ideas that were current then - not merely those that foreshadowed later developments.