Centre for Health, Medicine and Society: Past and Present

Oxford Brookes’ Department for History, Philosophy and Religion is home to one of the leading centres for the study of the history of medicine in the UK – the ‘Centre for Health, Medicine and Society: Past and Present’.

Established in 1999, the Centre has enjoyed support from the University over the years, as well as funding through a series of Wellcome Trust awards, including our currently held Strategic Award. This five year award focuses on themes surrounding 'Health Care in Public and Private', and funds our seminar series as well as conferences, outreach activities and MA bursaries.

Building upon the world-leading research conducted by the Centre’s staff, we are equally committed to delivering a series of cutting-edge taught modules within the department. Undergraduate modules can be combined to form a ‘pathway’ in the history of medicine, and we similarly offer a MA course for those progressing to graduate studies.

Centre Staff and Research Priorities

With twelve members of staff, the Centre boasts a wide range of research specialisms spanning anatomy to welfare and including, amongst others, anthropology, eugenics, medical experimentation, paediatrics, psychology, pharmacology, as well as colonial and indigenous medical systems and markets.

• Dr Tom Crook – History of public health, statistics and administrative ethics, especially as these relate to the formation of the modern liberal state
• Professor Anne Digby – British social history from the eighteenth century to the present; social history of medicine and the history of African medicine
• Professor Waltraud Ernst – History of western science, psychiatry and medicine; inter-relationship between modern medicine and indigenous healing from the eighteenth to the twentieth century
• Dr Elizabeth Hurren – The history of anatomy and the body from antiquity to the late-twentieth century, as well as that of poverty and welfare
• Dr Alysa Levene – Child health and welfare, history of poverty, illegitimacy and the family in early modern England
• Dr Timothy J McHugh – History of early modern France; French medicine and rural peasants
• Dr Glen O’Hara – Modern economic and social history since the First World War, with particular regard to British governments' policies in those policy areas
• Dr Viviane Quirke – History of science, technology and medicine in Britain, France and the US in the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with a special focus on the pharmaceutical industry
• Dr Jane Stevens Crawshaw – The social, medical and physical history of early modern Venice
• Dr Marius Turda – History of eugenics, anthropology, racism and biopolitics from around 1800 to 1945, with a particular emphasis on Central and Southeastern Europe
• Dr Katherine Watson – History of crime in Britain; Western forensic medicine and science in the post-medieval period
• Professor Paul Weindling – History of eugenics; public health organization; twentieth century disease patterns