Contact: vquirke@brookes.ac.uk +44 (0)1865 483706
Our work reflects the recent shift in emphasis from the history of medicine to a more interdisciplinary focus, involving research in Social Sciences and Life Sciences as well as within History, Philosophy, and Culture.
We are interested in medical experimentation, biomedical research and forensic medicine, public health and hygiene, welfare and governance, mental health and healing, as well as eugenics and biopolitics up to the present day. We also study ideas about race, sexuality, and gender in Europe, Britain and America.
Our researchers have a wide geographical and chronological spread of expertise: from child welfare and epidemics in early modern England and Renaissance Italy to disease and illness in contemporary culture; from traditional healing to modern pharmaceuticals (including interactions between western and indigenous medicine in South Africa); from public health in 19th-century Britain to experiments in Nazi Germany; from western psychiatry to psychiatry in colonial and postcolonial Asia. Our outreach and public engagement activities ensure that our findings are disseminated widely.
Recent projects include a study of subjects’ narratives of medical experimentation between the 1940s and 2001, funded by a five year Wellcome Trust Programme Grant, Disputed Bodies , launched in January 2012, and completed in 2017.