, the BAME Action Group and the Working Group on the History of Race and Eugenics are pleased to invite you to a book launch: Historicizing Race by Marius Turda and Maria Sophie Quine (Bloomsbury, 2018). Co-author Marius Turda will introduce t

History of Medicine #24: Suitable for Parenthood: The Eugenics of Reproductive Health in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain

Dec 11th, 2012 45m 54s

In this seminar Gayle Davis shifts the conceptual framework from characterizations of pregnant women and motherhood more widely to those of women whose pregnancy aspirations required medical assistance, and the degree to which their desire for

History of Medicine #23: Spinsters and Lesbians as Spiritual Mothers of the British Race

Nov 27th, 2012 37m 3s

In this seminar Florence Binard explores the dichotomy of ‘eugenic feminists’ in contrast to ‘feminist eugenics’ by focusing primarily on authors of the former group that understood themselves as both feminists as well as eugenicists. Binard cr

History of Medicine #22: Send in the Clones? Naomi Mitchison (née Haldane)’s Musing on Reproduction, Breeding, Feminism, Socialism and Eugenics from the 1920s to the 1970s

Nov 13th, 2012 42m 57s

In this seminar Lesley Hall investigates the relationship between feminism and eugenics through the fascinating lens of Naomi Mitchison’s fiction. JBS Haldane’s sister, and very much situated at the centre of the eugenic and literary movements

History of Medicine #21: Women, the Family and Eugenics in Nazi Germany

Oct 30th, 2012 54m 56s

This seminar offers a particularly insightful, and far ranging investigation of German eugenics before the Nazi rise to power and in its aftermath, focusing on the regime’s various policies to promote professed ‘valuable’ offspring on the one h

History of Medicine #20: Eugenics and Maternalism during the Century of Woman: Trends in Eastern Europe

Oct 16th, 2012 40m 3s

In the larger context of arguing for recasting the twentieth century as ‘the century of woman’, this seminar seeks to highlight the role eugenics played in relationship to maternalism as an example of women’s integration in state making and mod

History of Medicine #19: Eugeni-fascist Vitalism, Racial Prepotency, and Maternal Health in Interwar Italy

Oct 2nd, 2012 51m 21s

This seminar addresses the main theme of the lecture series on eugenics and maternal and child health by exploring the issue of ‘maternalism’ within the framework of the feminist and marxist historiography which gave rise to this field of enqui

History of Medicine #18: Making experts in the periphery: Toxicology in nineteenth-century Spain

Apr 24th, 2012 45m 4s

This seminar’s main objective is to provide an overview of Spanish toxicology in the nineteenth-century and analyzes aspects such as the formation of a community of Spanish toxicologists and the changes produced in toxicology as a discipline. T

History of Medicine #17: Place Identity and Healthy Cities

Apr 17th, 2012 1h

In this Seminar, Georgia Buttina Watson offers a range of remarkable insights into how urban planning and regeneration can dramatically affect not only the local population‘s sense of self, a geographic and collective identity, but also the wid

History of Medicine #16: A History of Morphological Evolution: From Darwin to Lewis and beyond

Mar 27th, 2012 56m 1s

This seminar offers a fascinating and wideranging discussion of the history of morphological evolution conceptually a nd empirically, with a marked emphasis on scientific methodologies and the extent to which genetic manipulation can alter the

History of Medicine #15: International or global?: The pharmaceutical industry 1950–2010

Feb 7th, 2012 51m 42s

This seminar examines the development of the pharmaceutical industry in the second half of the twentieth century, with a particular focus on the USA and Europe, the main centres of the large corporations and their largest markets. It analyses t

History of Medicine #14: From Deficiency to Difficulty: Three historical phases of constructing learning disability since 1913

Feb 7th, 2012 39m 31s

This seminar on ‘From Deficiency to Difficulty’ captures an historical journey made by people with learning difficulties from the objects to potential subjects of the construction of their social identities. The seminar discusses three historic

History of Medicine #13: Medical Experiments

Nov 16th, 2011 44m 8s

In this seminar Paul Weindling, Director of Brookes’ Centre for Health, Medicine and Society, discusses the ever-changing and evolving roles of historians of medicine as seen through the prism of his work on medical research and experimentation

History of Medicine #12: Karl Sudhoff

Nov 14th, 2011 45m 13s

In this seminar Claudia Stein, Director of the Centre for the History of Medicine at the University of Warwick, offers her fascinating insights into the life and work of Karl Sudhoff and his lasting import on the establishment of the history of

History of Medicine #11: The Doctor by Luke Fildes (1891)

Nov 4th, 2011 48m 31s

The Doctor by Luke Fildes, first exhibited over a century ago, is a popular masterpiece and an icon of medical art. The artist was inspired by the devoted care of a doctor who looked after his young son during a fatal illness some years before.

History of Medicine #10: The Rise of the Global Health Consultant: Brian Abel Smith (1926-1996)

Oct 20th, 2011 41m 32s

For more than forty years, Brian Abel-Smith, a health economist and political adviser, was closely involved with the development of health and social welfare policies worldwide. From his seminal research with Claude Guillebaud on the cost of th

History of Medicine #9: A Case Study in Mid Twentieth-Century “Charitable” Psychiatry

Jul 1st, 2011 47m 23s

From the beginning of the eighteenth century a pattern of different forms of institutional provision for mentally disordered people emerged in England, which included workhouses, private madhouses, the voluntary mental hospitals, and then from

History of Medicine #8: Child Welfare and Mental Hygiene in Greece (1910-1940)

Jun 30th, 2011 41m 31s

This seminar focuses on Greek child welfare institutions and initiatives in from the early 20thcentury unto 1940, exploring the combination of eugenics and ‘puericulture’ that emerged, as well the social hygienic measures adopted by Greek gover

History of Medicine #7: Cleanliness is next to Godliness: The Problem of Plague in Early Modern Venice

Jun 27th, 2011 43m 47s

Early modern Venice was economically wealthy, politically powerful and socially cosmopolitan; one sixteenth-century contemporary described the city as a hotel for the people’s of the world. Like many ports with a high turnover of people and whe

History of Medicine #6: Safety first! Individuals, Voluntary Organisations, and the British State in Twentieth-Century Accident Prevention

Jun 24th, 2011 38m 2s

Today safety education seems to be everywhere – just think of the annual Christmas anti-drink/driving campaign, using TV and radio adverts, posters, newspaper messages and more. Where did this idea of using the media to try to persuade people t

History of Medicine #5: 'The Itch': The Strange Story of Skin Disease and Prejudice in the Eighteenth Century

Jun 23rd, 2011 41m 44s

Kevin Siena is Associate Professor at Trent University, Canada, and held an Oxford Brookes International Research Fellowship in 2011. Kevin’s research focuses on early modern British history with special interests in medical history, sex and di

History of Medicine #4: The Experimental Subject's Experience in Non-therapeutic Clinical Studies

Dec 1st, 2010 47m 9s

Brian Balmer and Norma Morris present their research on (women) volunteers’ experience of participating in experimental medical research, in this case the testing of a novel breast imaging technology likely to have potential for the diagnosis o

History of Medicine #3: Between experimental evidence, statistical trial and preventive care the changing tides of BCG evaluation with human beings, 1921-1980

Nov 16th, 2010 1h 6m

In this seminar, Christian Bonah explores the protracted and often contentious history of the BCG vaccine against Tuberculosis, questioning the various approaches to therapeutic evaluation and human experimentation with the vaccine throughout t

History of Medicine #2: Controlled Trials Before Randomization

Oct 19th, 2010 50m 37s

Comparisons are key to all fair tests of the effects of treatments. Sometimes patients experience responses to treatments which compare dramatically with past experiences and the natural history of health problems. In these circumstances, confi

History of Medicine #1: The Open Air School Movement in the first half of the Twentieth Century: A "non-evidenced based" experiment in social health

Oct 5th, 2010 47m 48s

The Open Air School Movement was a major public health initiative created within the Western World in the first half of the 20th century. Open air nursery and primary schools were introduced in the first decade of the century throughout Europe