Research Profile

2008 - 2012 PhD History 'Visualising Venereal Disease in London', University of Warwick (Wellcome Trust funded)

Nov/Dec 2011 Predoctoral Research Fellow, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin

2007 - 2008 MA Social History of Medicine, University of Warwick (Wellcome Trust funded)

2004 - 2007 BA (Hons) History (1st Class), University of Warwick

Picturing the Pox: A (Very) Brief History

Current Research Interests

I am fascinated by the visual culture of medicine. The enormous amount of trust we place in twenty-first century visualization technologies such as X-ray, MRI, and ultrasound scans, the widespread use of photographic atlases and computer-generated models in the teaching of medical practitioners, and even the public’s abounding interest in exhibitions of plastinated human bodies suggests an inherent ‘visuality’ to modern medicine. What interests me is identifying how images, models, and preserved remains came to possess such centrality in our understanding of our bodies, health and disease.

My other driving interest is the history of infectious diseases, particularly the construction of medical knowledge about diseases. However rather than just studying the changing ideas about disease, I seek to uncover the people, practices, and places that interacted to create new knowledge.

I am currently in the early stages of devising a project that will marry these two interests - on the history of pathological images in the nineteenth century. As medical thinking moved away from a preoccupation with humoural balance and toward a conception of diseases as separate entities with visible, physical locations in bodily tissues, images of disease symptoms began to emerge as vital in the creation and dissemination of medical thinking.

Doctoral Thesis

Visualising Venereal Disease in London c.1780–1860

My PhD thesis explores the role of visual representation in the changing understandings of venereal disease from the later eighteenth century to the mid nineteenth. This was a period in which the identities of infectious diseases were undergoing profound changes. During much of the early modern period sickness was conceptualised as the result of humoural misalignment in the individual body, a view that came to change over the course of the eighteenth century. Through the practice of pathological anatomy – the linking of the morbid appearance of the internal body with external signs of disease – conditions such as venereal disease were given physical identities within the flesh. Simultaneously, visual representations of the body that had once depicted only healthy anatomical structure began to show diseased and decayed flesh. I argue that such visual representations, whether in the form of atlas illustrations, patient portraits, or pedagogical aids such as wax models, played a vital part in creating and disseminating new thinking about venereal disease.

Focusing on London, this project examines the place of visual representations in the classification of the disease, medical teaching and practice, and wider social responses to venereal disease within several different spaces in London’s medical marketplace, such as public museums, private schools, hospitals and university medical departments. I utilise a wide range of visual and material sources, from illustrations in medical books to watercolour portraits to pathological preparations. A selection of these sources can be viewed in the gallery below.

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