Norah Schuster: Life and Times of a Pioneer Cytopathologist

Last Updated on 12/08/2025

Lecture title: Norah Schuster: Life and Times of a Pioneer Cytopathologist (Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Lecture)
Lecture speaker: Dr Tina Matthews

Norah Schuster was born in the late 19th century to a professor of physics at Manchester who enabled entrance to medical education at a time when female students were not welcome. As a student WW1 placed Norah into pathology laboratories in Manchester, and after qualification she followed her family to London and the greater availability of posts for women. Norah worked around South East England and published papers on general pathology and historical matters. She was a founder member of the Royal College of Pathologists in 1963 making a generous donation to start a library and later many significant books. She died in 1991 aged 99 years.

Lecture title: Oliver Sacks and the Hidden History of Neurodivergent Reading (MacDonald Lecture)
Lecture speaker: Prof Matthew Rubery

Oliver Sacks’s bestselling books played a pivotal role in raising public awareness of neurodiversity, especially around unconventional or stigmatized forms of reading. Building on the concept of metagnosis, or the belated recognition of a neurological condition, this lecture proposes that Sacks’s humane and compassionate case studies helped many individuals become aware of their own cognitive differences for the first time. Rather than pathologizing atypical cognition, Sacks’s narratives enabled readers to identify with neurodivergent experiences, reframing so-called ‘bad’ or ‘impaired’ reading as simply different. This talk ultimately endorses Sacks’s idea of ‘reading pluralism,’ advocating for a more inclusive understanding of reading that embraces the diverse ways in which people do it.