Contact Information   Office: Rm 3.38, third floor, Faculty of Arts Building (FAB) Email: Hilary.Marland@warwick.ac.uk

News Items:

 Listen to Hilary Marland on BBC 4 in Our Time 'Bedlam'

I am now retired from the university but continue to research and write. Currently I'm working on my latest book on maternal mental illness in modern Britain. I am Principal Investigator on a Wellcome Trust funded project 'The Last Taboo of Motherhood: Postnatal Mental Disorders in Twentieth-Century BritainLink opens in a new window' (2021-25), which explores changing diagnoses, treatment and attitudes towards maternal mental illness across the twentieth century, including increased interest in postnatal depression after the 1960s. Together with my two postdoctoral colleagues, Fabiola Creed and Kelly Couzens, we have developed a website (link above), which provides more information about our project and a series of what we hope are interesting blogs! The project team also created three audio pieces, which toured various arts venues across the country, responding to our research with Fuel TheatreLink opens in a new window. The audio pieces can also be accessed on our website.

Between 2014 and 2021, I was Principal Investigator on another Wellcome funded project, 'Prisoners, Medical Care and Entitlement to Health in England and Ireland, 1850-2000'. My own interests lie particularly with the impact of prisons on mental health, women's health in prison and prison diet, and my book with Catherine Cox, Disorder Contained: Mental Breakdown and the Modern Prison in England and Ireland, 1840-1900Link opens in a new window, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2022. Work on the project resulted in numerous public engagement activities, including the production of a new theatre piece 'Disorder Contained', a theatre of testimony production on motherhood in prison, a week showcasing our project at Tate Modern (Tate Exchange), and several residencies in prisons, working with theatre companies specialising in producing work in criminal justice settings.

My research has also focused on other aspects of the social and cultural history of medicine and health, particularly in modern Britain. I have published on nineteenth-century medical practice, childbirth and midwifery, curing with water, women and medicine, girls' health, infant and maternal welfare, neurasthenia, child health, and medicine and the household. I have a long term interest in women and mental illness, particularly the relationship between reproduction and mental disorder, which resulted in my book Dangerous Motherhood: Insanity and Childbirth in Victorian Britain in 2004. In 2013 I published Health and Girlhood in Britain, 1874-1920, which explored the intersection of ideas about health, medicine and adolescence with the practice of health in schools, the workplace, and sport and recreation, particularly through the medium of advice literature. An earlier project with Catherine Cox explored Irish migration and mental illness between the Great Famine and Irish Independence, which resulted in a series of articles and a co-edited volume. Other public outreach projects included work with Talking Birds theatre on 'The Trade in Lunacy', performed in June 2013, and a second piece 'A Malady of Migration' was produced in Coventry and Dublin in summer 2014.

I am former editor of the journal Social History of Medicine. In 1999 I established the Centre for the History of Medicine (CHM) at Warwick and served as its Director until 2008; during this period the CHM won two prestigious Strategic Awards from the Wellcome Trust. I took over as Director of the CHM once again 2015-17 and in 2018-19.

Undergraduate Modules Taught

• HI156 Medicine, Disease and Society in Britain, 1750-1950
• HI278 From Cradle to Grave: Health, Medicine and Lifecycle in Modern Britain
• HI383 Madness and Society from Bedlam to the Present

Postgraduate Modules Taught

• HI907 Themes and Methods in Medical History (team taught)
• HI903 Dangerous Bodies: Women and Modern Medicine 1830-1950
• HI974 Migration, Health and Ethnicity in Modern History

Publications

Books

• Catherine Cox and Hilary Marland, Disorder Contained: Mental Breakdown and the Modern Prison in England and Ireland,1840-1900Link opens in a new window (Cambridge University Press, 2022, republished in paperback 2024).
• Health and Girlhood in Britain, 1874-1920 (Houndmills: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2013).
• Dangerous Motherhood: Insanity and Childbirth in Victorian Britain (Houndmills: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2004).
• Medicine and Society in Wakefield and Huddersfield 1780-1870 (Cambridge University Press, 1987, republished in paperback 2008).
• 'Mother and Child were Saved'. The Memoirs (1693-1740) of the Frisian Midwife Catharina Schrader (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 1987).

For a more detailed list of publications, please go to my publication page. Recent publications include.

• (With Catherine Cox), '"The god of criminals is their belly": Diet, Prisoner Health, and Prison Medical Officers in Mid-Nineteenth-Century English and Irish Prisons', Medical History, published open access 8 April 2024.
• '"Drowned in a Sea of Inhumanity": Natural Childbirth, Postnatal Depression and the National Childbirth Trust, 1956-80sLink opens in a new windowLink opens in a new window', Social History of Medicine (published open access 31 October 2023), 37 (2024), 69-92.
• (With Fabiola Creed),'Improving Maternity Care through Women's Voices: The Women's Health Strategy Continues a Long Process of AdvocacyLink opens in a new windowLink opens in a new window', History & Policy, 15 Feb. 2023