Department

Philosophy, Law and History

Biography

I have taught and researched in the History of Science and of Medicine at the Universities of Manchester and Glasgow, and at the Wellcome Centre for the History of Medicine at University College, London. Working within the School of Health Science and within a multi-disciplined Department with a focus on interdisciplinarity founded on a shared commitment to the clinical relevance of the Medical Humanities, my teaching and research activities are now orientated around the goals and agendas of the Medical Humanities. In my teaching (at UG and PG level) I underline and develop its key underlying ethos: that medical knowledge is an art as well as a science; social and cultural as well as technical and intellectual. I encourage students to explore the ways in which medical knowledge and practice is constructed and contingent and co-produced in a symbiotic relationship with social and cultural change. My research (included in the 2007 RAE) reinforces this ethos: I study the social and cultural, as well as the technical and intellectual, developments of medical knowledge, practice and provision, and stress their mutual interdependence.

My research interests are in the development of medical knowledge, provision and practice in 20th century Britain.

Selected Publications

'Teamwork, Clinical Research and the Development of Scientific Medicines in Interwar Britain: The "Glasgow School" Revisited' (Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Volume 81, Number 3, Fall 2007, pp. 569-593)

‘Health Service Sepoys7: A review of the role of South Asian Doctors in the United Kingdom's National Health Service, c. 1944-80', Institucio Mila 1 Fontanals,  Barcelona, History of Science Working Papers No. l (2004): 1-18 (with Sanjoy Bhattacharya).

‘Food for Thought?: the relations between the Royal Society food committees and government, 1915-19', Annals of Science, 59, (2002): 263-98.

‘Hector's House: Sir Hector Hetherington and the Academicization of Glasgow Medicine before the NHS’, Medical History, 2001, 45: 207-42.

Recent Spoken Papers

'Integrating the Personal, the Professional and the Political in the Historiography of the Emergency Medical Service in Wales, c. 1937-48’, at 'The importance of medical history: Trans-national and cross-cultural perspectives on a multi- faceted discipline' University of Mumbai, 15th, 16th and 17th November (conference sponsored by the Wellcome Trust and South Indian Educational Society)

‘High Explosives and the Hospital System: the WW2 Emergency Hospital Service in Wales - A 'Welsh Effect' in Healthcare Provision and the Origins of the National Health Service? at the European Association for the History of Medicine and Health/ Society for the Social History of Medicine Annual Conference, Environment, Health and History, 12-15 September 2007, Brunei Gallery. School of Oriental and Asian Studies, University of London,

'The Empire Strikes Back?: South Asian Doctors in the NHS, c. 1944-80', invited speaker, Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland Symposium on Medical Migration, Belfast. Paper title: Medical Migration Conference at Ulster University on 2 May, 2007.

'Get Back to Where you Once Belonged: Uses and Abuses of South Asian Medical Practitioners in the NHS, c. 1944-80' Wellcome Trust Travelling Knowledge: Global Knowledge Exchanges in the History of Medicine conference at the Wellcome Trust Centre of the History of Medicine at University College, London. 21-23 June 2007