Khalid Ali, Screening Room editor, reports from the Postgraduate Medical Humanities Conference in Exeter.

Here he speaks to Laura Habbe, a PhD student at Trinity College Dublin. Her research focuses around the figure of the mad scientist, often taking the shape of a doctor, in popular fiction of the last two decades of the nineteenth century. She is interested in the question of how the mad scientist became firmly established as a stereotype in our culture and how this relates to questions of science communication and the public understanding of science.