Medical Historian, Senior Lecturer, Consultant Psychiatrist, Conference Speaker

Lisetta Lovett is a retired Consultant Psychiatrist who worked in the NHS for 30 years. Her first degree was at Queen Elizabeth College, London University in Mathematics and Physiology. She went on to study Medicine at Guy’s Hospital Medical School in London, which has since joined with King’s and St Thomas’ to become the GKT School of Medical Education. She took a year out from her medical studies to study for a Diploma in History of Medicine, run by the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries, which she obtained in 1979. In the same year she won the joint Guy’s /St Thomas History of Medicine prize. She medically qualified with an MBBS in 1982 and after a year in house-jobs in Bath and Newport applied for a training programme in psychiatry in South Wales. After passing her Membership exams for the Royal College of Psychiatry, she moved to take up a post as Lecturer at the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Liverpool in 1987 . Whilst there she co authored a book on medical ethics with David Seedhouse (Seedhouse D and Lovett L. 1991. Practical Medical Ethics. Chichester. J.Wiley) and together they created possibly the first medical ethics course for medical students in the UK; their teaching methods were published in two papers.

In 1991, she took up her first NHS Consultant post at St George’s Hospital Stafford. Whilst in this post she organized and ran a module on psychiatric clinical practice as part of a Masters program for nurses at Staffordshire University . In subsequent years she worked at Leighton Hospital Crewe before moving to a mental health trust in North Staffordshire. Soon after her arrival she obtained a part time post in addition to her NHS one as a Senior Lecturer in Medical Education at Keele Medical School. As such she was responsible for developing the undergraduate psychiatric curriculum, chaired a professional development and medical ethics committee, and participated in communication training. In order to help students understand how to take a psychiatric history she produced a dvd called Face To Face, consisting of interviews between senior consultant psychiatrists and ‘patients’ who were played by actors whom she had trained A few years later she introduced Medical Humanities into the undergraduate curriculum in the form of a project option for medical students to study a humanities subject with the aim of relating it to the experience of illness and medical practice. Students had a range of choices of subjects from exploring the architecture of therapeutic buildings to studying fiction or poetry that related to medicine . Many of the supervisors were academics from the Humanities School. At about this time she joined the British Association of Medical Humanities {AMH} and was elected a board member, which she continued for some years after her retirement. In 2017 she organised the AMH’s annual international conference, Critical Stories, which took place at Keele University. She has run workshops on the subject of Therapeutic buildings to General Practice trainees on a Masters course at Keele University

As a Consultant Psychiatrist she was active within the Royal College of Psychiatrists. She was an elected member of the General and Community Psychiatry Section for many years and was appointed as the College’s Regional Director for Public Education in the West Midlands. As such she organized media training for interested colleagues and produced a dvd on mental illness in children and adolescents designed for school teachers, which she presented at various local schools; this was funded by the Child and adolescent section of the RCPsych. Throughout her career she was an active researcher and published papers in psychiatry and in medical education. Her interests were eclectic. In her early years as a consultant she underwent personal analysis, attended a part time evening course in Group Analytical therapy in Manchester for two years, then a Family therapy course in Cardiff for one year , followed by courses that enabled her to become a Trainer in Family Behavioral Therapy (The Meriden Project) an evidence based therapy for families with a member diagnosed with psychosis. She balanced her psychotherapeutic interests through completing a Certificate in psychopharmacology from the British Association of PsychoPharmacology. In her later years as a consultant in North Staffordshire she was the consultant input to two teams in Early Intervention in Psychosis and set up a new service for adults with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, which she ran single handed.

On retiring she decided to come off the General Medical Council Register. Retirement allowed her to pursue a second career as a medical historian. Although begun before retirement, she completed a text book on History of Medicine with a social historian from Keele University, Professor Alannah Tomkins . The book was designed to furnish busy health tutors with historical perspectives on their specialty in order to enable them to introduce a historical view into their teaching (Lovett L and Tomkins A . 2013. Medical History Education for Health Tutors. Radcliffe publishing. London and New York).

Whilst on a volunteer psychiatric educational program for medical students at the medical school in Blantyre, Malawi , she came across Casanova’s Memoirs. To her surprise there was a wealth of detail about a wide range of medical matters that she discovered subsequently had not been particularly researched, except by one Italian author. During the next six to seven years she did the research. Casanova’s Guide to Medicine is the result. In order to understand the Italian book, she decided to properly learn Italian, a language she continues to study but will never master.