The ‘Fatboy’ from The Pickwick Papers

Dickens was a brilliant observer. The many details conveyed to create his characters was exactly what made him popular with the public but also indispensable to the scientific establishment. In this video hear the story of how these brilliant descriptions were used by the medical establishment to diagnose new conditions.

This video is the sixth in a series of six videos celebrating our special exhibition, Charles Dickens: Man of Science. The first video can be found here, the second can be found here, the third can be found here, the fourth can be found here and the fifth can be found here.

Dr Adelene Buckland is a senior lecturer in nineteenth-century literature at King's College, London. Her specialism is science and literature, and she is the author of numerous articles on the subject, including a chapter on geology in The Routledge Research Companion to Nineteenth-Century British Literature and Science (2017). She is the author of Novel Science: Fiction and the Invention of Nineteenth-Century Geology (Chicago: 2013) for which she was the winner of the 2012 Marc-Auguste-Pictet Prize in the History of Science.