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Accurate radiotherapy delivery is required for curing cancer. Historical radiotherapy accuracy studies at Leeds (1983-1991) are discussed in context of when radiographers were not involved in practice design. The seminal research was unique in being led by a radiographer practitioner, and in prospectively studying the accuracy of different techniques within one department. The viability of alignment of treatment beams with marks painted on a patient's skin varied daily, and, using film I showed that the alignment of treatment on anatomy varied. I then led 6 sequential studies with collaborating oncologists. Unique outcomes were in identifying the origins of treatment inaccuracies, implementing and evidencing changes in multi-disciplinary practice, thus improving accuracy and reproducibility generally and achieving accuracy for the pelvis to within current norms. Innovations included: discontinuation of painted skin marks and developing whole-body patient positioning using lasers, tattoos, and standardised supports; unification of set-up conditions through planning and treatment; planning normal tissue margins round target tissue to allow for inaccuracies (1985); improved manual shielding methods, changed equipment usage, its quality assurance and design; influenced the development of portal imaging and image analysis. Consequences and current implications. The research, still cited internationally, contributed to clinical management of lymphoma, and critically underpins contemporary practice. It led to my becoming the first radiographer invited into multi-disciplinary collaborative work, to advise in the first multi-centre clinical trials to consider treatment delivery accuracy, contribute to books written from within other disciplines and inform guidelines for good practice so helping to improve practices, with recent publications. I thus led my profession into research activity. Later work included development of a national staffing formula for radiotherapy Centres, and contributing to the evidence-base for improved National radiotherapy resourcing. I recently researched and developed a textbook (second edition) on quality in treatment delivery.

The thesis examines the representation of the body in the work of the eighteenth-century French libertine novelist Claude Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon, known as Crébillon fils. In addition to its close concern with a specific historical period and genre, it is located within the broader context of recent theoretical work on corporeal representation, an area that has been dubbed ‘body criticism’. Methodologically, close textual analysis converges with a study of the historically-situated scientific and philosophical discourses of medicine, rhetoric and the visual arts that Crébillon integrated into his novels. The study engages with and troubles the traditional (‘Wattian’) view of the evolution of the eighteenth-century novel as fundamentally concerned with the psychological emergence of the bourgeois subject. Despite the underlying sexual stakes of the libertine novel, many critics have assumed that physical description is a minor aspect of the genre, preferring instead to focus on an author’s creation of abstract ‘mental’ qualities. The thesis contends that bodily depiction is a significant site for the expression and diffusion of social and philosophical debates: a position that has characterised more recent historiography. While there is indeed little direct description of characters’ physical features in Crébillon’s works, an underlying preoccupation with corporeality can be discovered in his texts through an analysis of displaced instances of bodily representation such as those found in iconographical supplements, rhetorical figures of speech or references to medical and physiological theories. The three major areas investigated by the thesis are those of prose description and portraiture, sentiment and emotion, and visual or pictorial depiction. Within each of these areas, the intellectual and historical context surrounding representations of the body is surveyed, eludicating literary usage through a study of its sources in discourses conventionally judged ‘exterior’ to fiction. The thesis employs a revised methodology for the study of eighteenth-century prose fiction that is sensitive to the permeability of the boundaries between genres and permits an exploration of the interpenetration between fiction and non-fiction that structured early Enlightenment conceptions of identity. It advances an increasing awareness that Crébillon was not merely a frivolous pornographer, but a writer who reflected and even shaped the philosophical debates of his day.