News

Radio Interview with Luc Racaut

Newcastle University's Luc Racaut has been interviewed for 'Wikiradio', a web-based radio station produced by l'Université Européenne de Bretagne.  Wikiradio is a platform for the discussion of British research, offering programmes, interviews, public lectures and music.  Luc's interview discusses his research into the representation of the body during the wars of religion, and is available to listen (in French) on the UEB radio website.

Pybus Seminar Podcasts

The Northern Centre for the History of Medicine (Newcastle) is delighted to announce the new arrival of The Pybus Podcast Collection on our website.  The collection is an archive of audio recordings taken from the Pybus Seminar Series, a programme of public seminars sponsored by the Northern Centre for the History of Medicine, Newcastle University and supported by the Wellcome Trust. The distinguished speakers represent a wide range of research areas within the History of Medicine. 

To listen to the recordings, please visit the Pybus Podcast Collection page.

Centre members contribute to Channel 4's Time Team

Newcastle University's Jonathan Andrews and Jeremy Boulton have been invited to contribute to Channel 4’s Time Team Programme, hosted by Tony Robinson, on the excavations of the old Bethlem churchyard and the wider history of Bethlem, lunacy and death.  The programme will be broadcast in Spring 2012.

Details of the excavations can be found at the links below:

www.thehistoryblog.com
www.crossrail.co.uk
www.archaeology.co.uk

PhD Student Wins Prestigious Funding

Graham Butler, PhD candidate in History at Newcastle University, has made a successful application to the Economic History Society for a conference grant of £500 - prestigious funding.

The grant is to fund the conference Graham has organised (jointly with Dr Samantha Williams, Cambridge University) entitled ‘Death and Disease in the Community, 1400-2010’ to be held at Centre for English Local History, University of Leicester, Marc Fitch Historical Institute, 5 Salisbury Road Leicester, LE1 7QR on Saturday 12th November 2011.

Details of the conference can be viewed at the Local Population Studies Society website.

Further information regarding the Economic History Society is available on their website.

Iain M. Lonie PhD Completion Award Winners Announced

The Newcastle branch of the Northern Centre for the History of Medicine is delighted to announce that three of their PhD students are to receive grants from the Iain M. Lonie PhD Completion Award. The prize has been jointly awarded to Graham Butler, Natalie Hawkes and Brianne Preston, whose excellent applications were considered by the committee to be of equal merit.

Iain M. Lonie was a scholar who helped to put Newcastle on the map of Medical History in the 1970s. The award consists of £3,000, funded by the Northern Centre for the History of Medicine (Newcastle Branch), and is open to currently unfunded Newcastle University PhD students. The award is aimed at assisting the completion of the candidate's PhD research within four years.

Many congratulations to Brianne, Natalie and Graham for their success.

Behind the Dentist - 9000 years of dental history in 40mins

Dr. R. Iain Macleod, member of the Northern Centre for the History of Medicine, presented his inaugural lecture as President of the NE Odontological Society in September.  Entitled Behind the Dentist - 9000 years of dental history in 40mins, Dr. Macleod described the aim of the lecture as to remind dentists of their historical origins from the first interventive work carried out on teeth in the Indus Valley Civilization, 9000 years ago, through its development in the west, until it became recognised and regulated as a profession in the 19th Century. 

PhD Student Wins AHRC Studentship

The Newcastle branch of the Northern Centre for the History of Medicine is delighted to congratulate Fiona Howarth for successfully securing an AHRC studentship.  Fiona completed her Masters in the History of Medicine at Newcastle University in 2011 and will continue her research there with her PhD Towards an Intellectual Biography of Ludwig Edelstein, supervised by Dr. Thomas Rütten and Dr. Rowland Smith.

Jeremy Boulton Wins Large ESRC Award

The Centre is delighted to congratulate Professor Jeremy Boulton (Newcastle University), who has won a large ESRC award for research on: The origins of the modern demographic regime: infant mortality by social status in Georgian London, a collaborative project with Romola Davenport (Cambridge). 

The research project, which will run for 22 months from July 2011, addresses two key questions in population history: how were cities transformed from demographic sinks into self-sustaining populations; and when and why did class differences in mortality emerge?

While it is now the norm that urban dwellers and higher income groups enjoy higher life expectancies than their rural or poorer counterparts, this was not the case in historical populations. In England these phenomena emerged in the late eighteenth century, and coincided with rapid population growth and urbanization. Indeed such rapid population growth would not have been possible in a period of rapid urbanization without a fundamental transformation of the urban demographic regime, but our understanding of this process remains extremely limited.

The project uses a novel source of evidence, the baptism fee books of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, to generate improved estimates of infant mortality in London c.1750-1825, and the first estimates of infant mortality rates by social status for this period.

More information about the project is available on the Pauper Lives Project website.

Prize-Winning Dr. Phil. (to be shortly)

Double congratulations to Michelle Gamble a) for having successfully passed her viva on 26 May 2011 with ‘minor corrections’ and b) for having won the Norman McCord Prize for her paper delivered at the School's PG forum on 23 May 2011. Michelle's prize-winning paper was entitled 'Bones, People and Populations: A Palaeopathological Case Study from Chalcolithic Cyprus'; her PhD largely funded by a Northern Centre for the History of Medicine studentship is entitled 'Health and Disease in Chalcolithic Cyprus: A problem-oriented palaeopathological study of the human remains'. It has been supervised by Dr Kirsi Lorentz (Cyprus) and Dr Chris Fowler (Newcastle).

Michelle's achievements facilitated by an MA in the History of Medicine at Newcastle University go to show the wide remit of medical history at Newcastle ranging from prehistorical to present day times and integrating bioarchaeology with medical history, medical humanities and medical ethics.

Newcastle MA Student Wins Poster Prize

Newcastle University MA student Eleanor Hackney was awarded the Keith Wrightson Prize for Best Poster for her design on 'Change and Continuity in the Treatment of Headache in English Domestic Medicine Literature, 1770-1880'.  Eleanor's poster can be seen here as a PDF (336KB).  Many congratulations from the Centre team. 

Eleanor's poster was part of the Newcastle University conference on 'Networks and Scales: Relating the Global and the Local'.  Papers were delivered by Newcastle Postgraduates in all subject areas in the School of Historical Studies, with Postgraduates also travelling from Southampton, London and Edinburgh to take part.

University Research Centre Status Reapproved

We are pleased to announce that the status of The Northern Centre for the History of Medicine as a University Research Centre has been reapproved by Senate for three years from 1st August 2011 to 31st July 2014.

Life and Limb: The Toll of the American Civil War online exhibition

Professor of American History at Newcastle University, Susan-Mary Grant has recently contributed an education module to the U.S. National Library of Medicine exhibit, ‘Life and Limb: The Toll of the Civil War.’

The educational module, entitled ‘Reconstructing States and Soldier: Disability and the American Civil War,’ provides students and instructors the opportunity to develop discussion of the issues raised in the exhibition Life and Limb: The Toll of the Civil War by exploring the ways in which hitherto separate fields of scholarship, on disability studies, on the Civil War, military, medical, literary, social and political, can be brought together to expand our understanding of both the immediate and longer-term impact of wounding in that conflict.

Newcastle PhD student reviews exciting exhibition on disability history

Re-Framing Disability: Portraits from the Royal College of Physicians
14 February to 8 July 2011, Royal College of Physicians
28 July to 29 September 2011, Shape Deane House Studios London
www.rcplondon.ac.uk/re-framing-disability

Disability history is a growing field, and increasingly gains attention from the media, general public, and the academic community alike. It is one of the few fields that has immediate resonance with almost everyone who has ever felt isolated by their appearance or by health problems. It is also helping to demonstrate the inheritance and adaption of ideas about the health, identity, and the cultural visibility of disabled people from past societies. Following on from the influential ‘Buried in the Footnotes: The Representation of Disabled People in Museum and Gallery Collections’ project (2002-3), the Royal College of Physicians and Shape, the Disability-Led Arts organisation (http://www.shapearts.org.uk), have put together an innovated, and fully accessible exhibition to look at these issues.

Newcastle PhD student Caroline Nielsen has kindly prepared an exhibtion overview Re-Framing Disability (PDF: 70KB), giving more information about the exhibition.

Newcastle Graduate publishes paper

Ellen Tullo, formerly an intercalating medical student on the History of Medicine MA at Newcastle University, has published her paper 'Trepanation and Roman medicine: a comparison of osteoarchaeological remains, material culture and written texts' in Journal of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, 40(2), 2010, pp. 165–71.

Dr Tullo currently holds a clinical fellowship in geriatrics and is an Honorary Clinical Research Associate at Newcastle's Institute for Ageing and Health.

PhD student elected as a trustee of the Roger Schofield LPSS Research Fund

British Academy Grant awarded to Dr Sehrawat

Dr Samiksha Sehrawat was awarded a British Academy Small Research Grant to work on the ‘History of Women’s Hospitals in Colonial India, c.1885-1920’.

Dr Sehrawat will be conducting research in London, Edinburgh, Belfast and India. She will explore the twentieth century history of the Dufferin Fund, the Association of Medical Women in India and the foundation of the Women’s Medical Service in India.

Newcastle graduate publishes her MA assignments

Ellen Tullo, the first winner of the Pybus prize for outstanding performance in the History of Medicine MA programme at Newcastle University in 2006, has successfully transformed some of her assignments into publications.

An abridged version of her dissertation was published under the title 'Plague of Icy Breath. Cholera and the Gateshead Community 1831-1832' in Gesnerus 67 (2010) 6-29; and an essay on lycanthropy in John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi appeared in Medical Humanities 36 (2010) 19-22 under the title 'Duke Ferdinand; patient or possessed? The reflection of contemporary medical discourse in John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi'.

Many congratulations from the Centre!

Ellen was an intercalating medical student and is now a holder of a clinical fellowship in geriatrics and an Honorary Clinical Research Associate at Newcastle's Institute for Ageing and Health.

History of Medicine arrives on Facebook

Newcastle graduate Estelle Clements has developed a Facebook group for History of Medicine students past and present.  Updated regularly with news about seminars and events as well as interesting articles, the group is a great way of keeping up to date with the Centre's activities. 

Log-in to your Facebook account to take a look at the History of Medicine Group Page:

http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/home.php?sk=group_166061286759729

Conference Announced for 2011

The 2011 Conference 'Contagionism and Contagious Diseases in Medicine and Literature between 1880 and 1933' is scheduled for Thursday 25 August to Saturday 27 August 2011, in Newcastle.

The conference has been organised by Dr Thomas Rütten of the Northern Centre for the History of Medicine, Newcastle University and Dr. phil Dr. med. Martina King of Institut für Deutsche Philologie, Ludwig-Maximilians University, Munich.

For further information, please visit our conference page.

History of Medicine Masters Programmes Workshop

The Newcastle branch of the Northern Centre for the History of Medicine had the pleasure of hosting the History of Medicine MA programmes workshop in December 2010. The workshop is a bi-annual event, bringing together the History of Medicine MA students from both the University of Durham and Newcastle University.

We were delighted to share part of our proceedings with the Chancellor of Newcastle University and the former Chief Medical Officer for England (1998-2010) Sir Liam Donaldson. It was an honour to welcome such a distinguished guest.

For more information about this event, please download the 2010 programme (PDF: 101 KB), which also includes a collection of thoughts in response to the proceedings, composed by Dr Thomas Rütten.

Pybus Prize Winner Announced

The Northern Centre for the History of Medicine takes great pleasure in congratulating Carmel Beadle as the winner of Newcastle University’s Pybus Prize for Outstanding Achievement on the MA History of Medicine Programme 2009 – 2010. 

Carmel impressed and inspired academics and fellow students throughout the MA course, producing an excellent dissertation on 'Advertising the Private Mad-trade in Victorian England', supervised by Dr Jonathan Andrews.

Academics, PhD students and office staff joined together with former and current MA students for the prize announcement at Newcastle University’s History of Medicine reception, in November 2010.  All three students shortlisted for the prize achieved a distinction; many congratulations to them all.

A new Director at the Northern Centre for the History of Medicine, Newcastle

The Northern Centre for the History of Medicine is pleased to announce the appointment of Dr. Thomas Rütten as Director of the centre’s Newcastle branch.

Dr Rütten is a distinguished member of the centre’s team; Reader in the History of Medicine at Newcastle University and co-PI for the Wellcome Trust Strategic Award, jointly held between colleagues from Newcastle and Durham Universities within the Northern Centre for the History of Medicine.

Many thanks go to Professor Jeremy Boulton for his excellent leadership during an interim directorship of the centre.