Arya Ray discusses new directions emerging from the one-day international workshop ‘The Senses and Medical Humanities,’ held at Durham University in February 2026.
Introduction
Embodied and multimodal approaches to exploring histories of care and medicine catalyse a sensory turn within the critical medical humanities. This multisensory engagement can scaffold and often challenge the traditional reliance on textual archives, verbal communication, and largely unisensorial understandings of healthcare, illness, and affective experience.
The Senses and Medical Humanities Workshop, hosted at Durham University, served as a critical nexus for sensory studies and medical humanities in a format that was part conference, part workshop, and part networking event. The event was structured to explore resonances across temporal, disciplinary, and geographical boundaries, treating the sensory body not just as a primary source of medical evidence, but as a sensorium capable of relating its experience in modes the immediately ocular or textual cannot. Moving seamlessly across the “malodorous” streets of 19th-century Paris or the “digital soundscapes” of neurodevelopmental disability, the discussions used the senses to reframe medical authority, patient agency, and even the architecture of healthcare.
The significance of the sensory shift is realised within the fundamental conception that illness and care are entirely multisensory experiences and must therefore be understood and communicated through multisensorial approaches. This review discusses three core themes of the day, amongst the many that were touched upon.
Political Weaponisation/Commercialisation
The first panel of the workshop, featuring Will Tullett’s research on aromatherapy and Manon Raffard’s study of 19th-century disinfectants, highlighted how scent can be weaponised as a tool of medical legitimacy and social control. Tullett’s work explores the rediscovery of pre-modern smell culture, tracing its history from the sixteenth century to present discourses. He posits that the 18th and 19th centuries saw an “elite withdrawal” from the “common culture” of aromatics toward a certain degree of medical scepticism. Historically, Tullett said, distillation was the bedrock of healthcare, referring to Hieronymus Braunschweig’s The Vertuose Boke of Distyllary (1527), which viewed essential oils as deified “inestimable preservatives”.
However, these sensory literacies were dismissed as ‘folk’ practices. Tullett identifies a modern re-rationalisation of pre-modern ideas within the aromatherapy industry, drawing attention towards the dichotomy between ‘natural’ scents and the ‘synthetic’ reality of modern life. This urban contradiction is illustrated through a letter from Bill Boxhall to the Edinburgh Evening News: “Today aromatherapy is the smell of money from deodorant spray-cans, or organised sniffer at colossal charge” (1994). ‘Natural’ scents, such as those of flowers and fruits, and often intangible concepts such as ‘moonlight’ and ‘mirage’ are synthesised and advertised as ‘pure and healing’ breaks from synthetic smells. Such commercialisation of aromatherapy creates a false binary between synthetisation and healing, muddying the relationship between an individual and healing through aromatherapy.
Manon Raffard’s discussion of the 1884 cholera outbreak in France provides a grim mirror to this historical trajectory. Raffard posits ‘olfactory disgust’ as a socio-political tool of control. During the epidemic in the port city of Toulon and later Paris, the French state utilised phenol as a primary disinfectant. Raffard’s research highlights that phenol was an ineffective, “fake medical relief” used to perform hygiene. The state weaponised the olfactory sense to sell safety to a panicked public, masking the stench of death with a chemical odour that was soon recognised to symbolise authority.
The paradox, Raffard notes, was that while sanitarians shared Galenic beliefs about the environment causing disease, their “phenolization of Paris” was a double standard of hygienic subjugation. While the poor were subjected to intrusive fumigations, political leaders commuted freely without such requirements – conditions which were widely replicated during the Covid-19 pandemic in many countries. Satirical literary pieces from the time, such as those in Le Radical, complained: “We may perhaps escape the plague but die from phenol” (1884). Raffard concludes that in the presence of mass panic and the absence of clinical efficacy, the state uses the senses to dominate the public imagination.
Embodied Politics of Access
The day transitioned from the olfactory to the tactile, focusing on how environments can present therapeutic or political resources. Lena Ferriday’s research into wild swimming in modern Britain introduced the concept of the ‘blue space’. Feriday’s work ties modern blue social prescribing to the 1846 and 1878 Baths and Wash-Houses Acts, which sought to reduce social hierarchies to a “common standard of enjoyment of health” (1870). This democratisation was historically seen as a way to provide indigenous sea flora and restorative properties to the masses, moving beyond water’s purely healing properties toward a more holistic concept of wellbeing.
Ferriday’s focus on managing sensations is crucial to understanding the modern wild swimming movement, which now has over 200,000 members. R. Dudgeon’s critique of the Thames remains a cornerstone of this sensory history: he noted that the river was so polluted that “no one with all his senses entire—especially those of sight, smell, and taste—would venture to bathe in it” (1870). Yet, modern swimmers find a corporeal balance in the little peril of open water. This relational outcome of health suggests that wellbeing is a negotiation with multisensory encounters, including the seaweed, the mud, and the water’s temperature. Open water swimming doubly disturbs the social order because it poses both physical and moral risks, making the regulation of bodies more difficult for institutions that prefer closed, cool and delimited spaces.
This theme of the sensing body as a site of political negotiation was furthered by Lucy McCormick’s work on the International Woman Suffrage Alliance (IWSA). McCormick argues that the suffrage movement was sustained by an embodied feeling that was experienced rather than defined in words. In her presentation, she cites Carrie Chapman Catt’s report, which claims that internationalism is a “sentiment like love … to be felt” (1909). McCormick unveils the sensory language of activism, focusing on the “heart-beatings” and soundscapes of international congresses. For suffrage workers, the collective sound of a meeting – speakers such as Dr Anna Shaw, as well as environmental and temporal noise, constituted a sound rival to the sounds of war and state opposition. This sensory solidarity allowed women to abandon their bodies to the cause, finding a spirit felt in the handshakes and the rhythmic cadence of the speeches.
However, McCormick’s research prompts an incisive methodological question: if one is paying attention to sounds/senses in the room, how does one account for who is not in the room or who is silent? Both Ferriday and McCormick demonstrate that access (and the lack thereof) to health and political power are structurally haptic experiences; they require a body that can endure, sense, and rhythmically align with its environment, which can both counteract the fatigue of illness and struggle, but also further alienate marginalised bodies.
Representative Palimpsests
The evening moved towards addressing the limitations of traditional medical discourses and approaches and the resulting absence of representation, or misrepresentation, of marginalised bodily experiences. Daniel P. Jones’s work on Tourette Syndrome (TS) describes TS as a ‘Palimpsest’ – a layered sensory experience in which the internal urge or ‘pre-tic sensation’ is overwritten by the visible tic. Clinical accounts often prioritise the spectacle of the tic while ignoring the affective and rhythmic nature of the Tourettic sensorium. Jones particularly focuses on how digital material and social media platforms render certain experiences invisible while reinforcing dominant, redacted patterns of representation.
Jones’s creative practice, including performance work based on the dérive (drift) during an Artist’s Residency at Dance City, seeks to disprove the notion of chaos and unruliness associated with Tourettic bodyminds. By collecting affect from urban smells, tastes, and sounds, Jones uses his body to demonstrate that tics can be contextual and relational. His work suggests that suggestibility is not a ‘contagion’ to be feared but a method of sensorially engaging with technology and space. This ‘Tourettic Future’ moves away from homogenising the disabled body and toward acknowledging the internal rhythm that defines the lived experience of TS.
This representative crisis is mirrored in Claire Turner’s proposed project that challenges the long-standing historiographical redaction that cancer was purely a ‘woman’s disease.’ Her research seeks to uncover the sensorial emasculation of male cancer patients. the ‘sensorial emasculation’ of male cancer patients. Turner’s methodology involves ‘olfactory empathy technology’ – such as chemically manufactured scents reminiscent of spaces of illness and care, and research into 16th to 18th-century repositories. By making men visible in the narratives of disease, Turner’s proposed research fills a gap in the repositories of documentation where male pain was often hidden.
Finally, Harriet Barratt’s Hospital Senses Booklets come as a radical attempt to venture beyond textual narrative. Using co-produced mixed media – audio, textiles, and ‘smell maps’ of the hospital space, the booklets materialise sensory encounters with healthcare. Barratt’s work emphasises that while non-ocular senses are difficult to represent owing to their temporal and relational nature, they are essential for meaning-making in care settings. The booklets serve as a research provocation, encouraging participants to reflect on the embodied, non-verbal experience of the NHS. Jones, Turner, and Barratt argue that to accurately represent the body, it is necessary to supplement presently functional clinical tools with a multimodal, sensory-literate form of documentation.
Conclusion
The interdisciplinary and generative confluence of senses was hosted by Durham University’s Discovery Research Platform for Medical Humanities. The Platform’s Affective Experience Lab investigates the relationship between feeling, emotion and health. This workshop successfully highlighted that this is an emerging area of study by outlining a wide range of research. It also identified the underrepresentation of certain senses, such as gustation, and addressed the important question of why we should pay attention to the senses when discussing health and well-being.
Convened by Claire Turner, a Bridging Fellow at the Platform, this conference demonstrated that understandings of the body and health are most effective when the body’s full, complex inhabitation of its environment is taken into account.
The networking format was a primary methodology that enabled an interdisciplinary synthesis across centuries and geographies, raising more counter-questions than answers, which was the purpose of the event. Creatively facilitated discussions interspersing the panels paved the way for in-depth discussions that extended beyond the day and continue to create new spaces for future directions and research.
The review seems counterintuitive, as it describes a day at a conference focused on embodied and sensory experiences, yet struggles to recall sensory details, such as the smell of coffee or the pleasant exhaustion felt collectively at the end of the day. This suggests a need to develop new vocabulary for experiences that are inherently personal and often temporal. The conference represents an exciting opportunity to explore how these experiences can be felt, heard, seen, and smelled simultaneously. You can watch the presentation recordings below:
About the author
Arya Ray is a literary scholar, currently interested in exploring ghost stories, South Asian folklore, and representations of the body through interdisciplinary and decolonial approaches. He currently works at the Discovery Research Platform for Medical Humanities as an Assistant Manager and with the interdisciplinary research project about reading imaginations, ReaderBank.
References
Braunschweig, Hieronymus. 1527. The Vertuose Boke of Distyllary of the Waters of all Maner of Herbes. Translated by Laurence Andrewe.
Boxhall, Bill. 1994. “Letter to the Editor.” Edinburgh Evening News, April 15, 1994.
Catt, Carrie Chapman. 1909. The International Woman Suffrage Alliance: Report of Fifth Conference and First Quinquennial, London, England. S. Sidders and Son. The Women’s Library, London School of Economics, 396.11(063).
Derriaz, Joachim. 1884. [Untitled Article on Phenol]. Le Radical, July 7, 1884.
Dudgeon, Robert Ellis. 1870. The Swimming Baths of London. Henry Turner and Co.
Furuhjelm, Annie. 1914. “Our Alliance.” Jus Suffragii, May 1, 1914.
Harper, Ida Husted. 1919. “Death of Dr Anna Shaw.” Jus Suffragii, August 1, 1919.
Hospital Senses Research Collective. 2019. Hospital Senses Booklets (Thresholds, Waiting Spaces, Laundry, Wards, Corridors, Operating Theatre). Digital versions available at https://hospitalsenses.co.uk/.
Tisserand, Robert. 1977. The Art of Aromatherapy. Destiny Books.
